Rematch review

There’s a lot going on in a 5v5 game of virtual football, but the thing I have to keep reminding myself to do is breathe. It’s easy to forget when you’re playing goalie a minute-and-a-half into overtime and three opponents are trading the ball in front of your net as they gear up for shot, but you’ll need a lungful of air so you can rejoice or curse in a way the neighbors can hear when you make or don’t make the big save. I’ve rarely thought of a sports game as immersive, but here I can practically feel the sonic boom of the crowd, the ball rocketing past a sliding tackle, and the turf whizzing by as I kick it up.

That’s because Rematch—aka Rocket League with feet instead of wheels—is as intense an arcade sports game as I’ve played in a long time, nailing that tightrope walk between depth and immediacy I associate with sports game greats like Super Mega Baseball and Daytona USA. It’s an arcadey, stylized take on soccer that trims fat like foul play and penalty cards to home in on the core of dribbling, shooting, passing, and intercepts.

The standout feature is that, unlike genre goliath FIFA (now EA Sports FC), each player controls a single team member in third person, dynamically trading roles like goalkeeper and striker as they move around the pitch.

Developer Sloclap had already proved it could build a skill-expressive, weighty brawler with Sifu and Absolver, but despite the absence of fist fights, the studio’s take on the biggest sport in the world doesn’t feel like a left turn. Instead, it feels like a culmination of those games’ successes.

Sure, you’re pushing a ball around, curving shots past a goalie, and lobbing overhead passes instead of kicking any teeth in, but every win in Rematch is a hard-fought wellspring of adrenaline on par with any blockbuster beat ’em up.

Making the dream work

You’re not the main character. Competitive games tend to offer a decent trick of the light, though: Going 20-0 as a safelane carry in Dota or obliterating half the lobby in Fortnite will stoke even the merest of smoldering egos. Rematch stamps out such flights of fancy beneath a fresh pair of cleats.

Shots will rarely go in the goal without some misdirection, ball hogs are always vulnerable to coordinated steals, and any one-sided stomps are called off with a swift mercy rule. It’s a PvP game, sure, but I like to think of it as a contest of co-op; a stack of excellent, selfish players will rarely beat out a competent, organized team. Whenever I put a point on the board, it was a rush—but I could never take sole credit.

In the heat of a game, this means constantly surveying the field for open teammates to lob a pass at and open opponents to mark or tackle. There’s a smorgasbord of context-sensitive inputs to mind at any given moment; with the ball, you can send a grounded pass in any direction, lob it just the same, rainbow flick the ball over your own head, push it past defenders, lightly tap it over their heads, assume a defensive stance to dash from side to side, and so on.

There’s a similar menu of choices when playing goalie or roaming without the ball: Do I go for a quick steal or the slower, more powerful sliding tackle? Each teammate in earshot calling for a pass multiplies your options tenfold. What results is a delicious hotbed of head games where intuition is just as critical as aim and execution. A lot of games promise action that’s “easy to learn, hard to master,” but Rematch has the goods.

Sure, you can take a blind shot past the goalie and hope they don’t react in time… or you could bound the ball off the back wall, square it to the nearest teammate, or lightly tap the ball to delay your shot just enough to trip up the defense.

It didn’t take long to get a firm handle on Rematch’s controls—there’s no simulation aspect to wrangle and no player attributes to complicate things—but after spending about a week with it, it feels as though the tactics and mind games are rich enough to last hundreds of hours. Maybe there’s a reason people are so taken with the real-life version of this.

A Messi situation

Rematch’s action is tight as I could have hoped for, but the overall package could use some building out and spit shining.

There’s nothing to do outside of competitive multiplayer and solo practice, and given the game’s acute emphasis on teamplay, the solo queue experience might frustrate anyone hoping to channel a football obsession in a more relaxed setting. Tournaments or some sort of relaxed mode would go a long way, and those things are apparently coming soon.

There’s also no way to instantly requeue with a matchmade team—to rematch, in other words—which prematurely ends those moments where you feel remarkably in tune with new teammates.

The bigger issues could be chalked up to launch woes, but it still bears mentioning that bugs and server desync are all over this game, at least for now. While the most pressing issues have been dealt with (like a bug that caused the ball to turn into an immobile stone), I still find that sliding tackles occasionally sail through me or my target harmlessly, and that a goalie might catch the ball only for it to teleport into the net moments later. These problems are uncommon enough that I don’t consider them a grave blemish, but they can still undercut the integrity of everything at crucial, match-defining moments.

The overall presentation is fantastic, though. I love the way the skybox shuffles between stadiums and space stations, the thrill of weaving through a watertight defense, and the vindicating flood of ‘Good job!’ and ‘We got this!’ pings that follow a well-aimed goal.

There’s a timeless quality about Rematch. Where other sports videogames tailor their lineups to the latest rosters, laboriously recreate the broadcast spectacle, and plaster their boxes with licensed likenesses, Rematch is more enamored with the strategies and skillsets that make football tick than with football as a fixture of pop culture.

Its love of the sport is infectious, with a nearly pick-up-and-play setup that could suck anyone into a ‘one more game’ loop, whether or not they care about UEFA politics or Man United’s latest transfer news. It’s hard to imagine not getting swept up in the hype, whether you watch the World Cup religiously or have never seen a game.