REMATCH is A Work Of Art
They don't call it the beautiful game for nothing.
In spite of its flaws, Rematch is a perfect game.
Developed by Sloclap, the French studio known for the award winning Sifu—an incredibly well directed1 and tight action brawler—Rematch is a game that couldn’t have been made by anyone else. Like Sifu, the art in Rematch is absolutely breathtaking with arenas and environments that feel vibrant and alive, and characters that are stunningly rendered with painterly texture and detail, all while preserving the visual clarity that a sports game would demand.
Getting to create a custom character with a toolbox so lovingly art directed is a treat. The animation is exciting and evocative, letting you move like a master with simple intention and timing. The soundtrack is a thrilling, dynamically mixed symphony driven by percussion that elevates every game. It’s utopian co-ed indoor soccer in a one way VR mirror box so you play away games in space in a stadium of shouting fans.
Nowhere is the production value more evident than in the game’s prologue, which follows a hotshot local footballer’s journey from being a big fish in a tiny pond to an actual contender. In less than five minutes, the game tutorializes nearly all of its controls, illustrates the importance of teamwork to success, and tells a compelling story about what it means to take the sport seriously, all without any dialogue2. It has the only narrative cutscenes in the entire game, and they are absolutely gorgeous. It’s a tour de force, and I dare you to find a studio doing this caliber of work at all, let alone at this budget, for a live service multiplayer only sports game.
The other half of this perfect storm is a sports game built like an action game. Online only, over the shoulder third-person football action, to be precise. No omniscient perspective, no switching between players as the ball moves up the pitch, no NPCs playing positions before you wrestle control over them. Every player is a human being, every connected pass a result of incredible coordination and accuracy, and every single step a deliberate choice that can make or break a team’s defense.
Rematch absolutely demands that you develop your soccer IQ. You will learn how the game is played, and more importantly, why it’s played that way. In a player versus player environment every error can be ruthlessly punishing, and thanks to some immaculate gameplay design that wouldn’t be out of place in a fighting game, there is no solution that will win every game. Every player has to account for so many factors for every single moment, delicately balancing two stamina meters, spacing, charging passes, aiming shots, choosing between dribbles and tackles and jumps and rainbow flicks in order to beat a real human being doing the exact same every second things that they can.
Smartly, Sloclap has distilled football to its minimum viable multiplayer experience here, removing play stoppages, fouls, and any annoying rules that might take the wind out of your sails as a complete amateur. Teams are made up of up to five players each. Players swap starting positions after every point so no one person is handed the responsibility of being the goalkeeper for too long. Play runs for 6 minutes, unless one team gets a four point lead, or goes on indefinitely for a nail-biting overtime. Every decision was made to make the game as exciting as possible, as consistently as possible, and it works.
After all of that praise, imagine if the game had launched as a live service multiplayer only game for $30—not even for free as is apparently the standard—with a bug where there was a chance a player would start a match without the ability to touch the ball. Or with anti-cheat middleware that caused a percentage of computers to bluescreen every time the game launched if they had the wrong CPU3. Or without the cross-platform multiplayer that they had planned on delivering at launch. Any one of these things could sink a game on their own before you could even pull up the Steam player charts. Some of these issues still plague the game as of writing. The fact that Rematch has survived all of them is a testament to its quality; it simply outshines anything that might dampen the experience. I said earlier that Rematch was a perfect game, and I’ve done so without a shred of hyperbole.
Despite the game’s excellence, some things outside of the “core gameplay” are lacking. Every player gets to design their own personal kit with regulation gear or the hottest streetwear, including the home and away color schemes. Everyone on your team is shown to you in the colors you’ve chosen at the beginning of every match, and Rematch automatically picks a color scheme by the other team’s captain that contrasts with yours so they stand out. It serves both player expression and accessibility, except its a flawed implementation.
The colors you’re allowed to choose that count as contrasting *enough* can be limited, so more often than not the opposing team is given a default option of the first color on the palette, which is a fairly bright, pastel pink in all three of the color slots, and sometimes that pink isn’t really easily discernable from an orange in the wrong lighting. An easy fix would be to use a premade palette if the opponent hasn’t made one that fits the bill, but the game doesn’t do that, at least not yet.
Rematch’s excellent tutorial in the prologue is juxtaposed against practice drills that still have worthless AI and in-development assets. The goalkeeper drill has 3 motionless bots shoot predictable shots on goal for a minute in a way that no way trains you for dealing with another human being. The slick, diegetic targets of the prologue are replaced with giant red balls that appear out of the ground in the passing drill, and the “Hoops” drill doesn’t have the hoops in it that you’re supposed to be passing the ball into. In fact, alongside a barely functional shop, battle pass, and customization menu, the practice drills are by far the most work in progress part of the game. It is nakedly unfinished.
I played both of Rematch’s betas, and I was heartened at how the game became more polished from the first to the second, and a little alarmed at how the game hadn’t from the second to its release. And I’m as surprised as you are when I tell you, I could not care less. None of its issues matter at all. I couldn’t have waited another day to start playing Rematch after getting that first taste. I have put over a hundred hours into the game, and I’m vibrating every moment I’m not playing it. I’m so hungry to play Rematch, I started this review after the second straight day of getting home after work and playing for more than 6 straight hours. I opened it twice since I’ve started writing and now its 2 am.
Sloclap has done the impossible, producing a live service multiplayer game with enough players to keep matchmaking queues short on essentially their first try. The monetization is very generous, I’ve got an overabundance of free currency that lets me buy almost any cosmetics I want4, and the battle pass isn’t full of meaningless filler and it doesn’t hide its coolest cosmetics behind a paywall. The game infinitely rewards your dedication, and respects your time.
Sloclap has made great games before, maybe even a masterpiece, but Rematch is already in the pantheon of the greatest games of all time. The perfect blend of simulation and abstraction, of beautiful art and intricate mechanics that justifies the medium, and one that hopefully sustains itself so that many get the privilege of playing it.
What do I mean by well directed? Sifu is astoundingly cohesive and arresting visually in its cutscene direction, environment art, character art, and animation. Its writing is compelling, but also takes up the least amount of space possible to setup the game, which used its mechanics to communicate its metaphor.
Economically, it only reuses the in-game barks used to communicate without a microphone between your team. Their inclusion doesn’t stick out at all.
My brother literally rolled back to Windows 10 to be able to circumvent Easy Anti-Cheat bluescreening his computer whenever he opened Rematch.
The sponsored Puma tie-in kit is 10 dollars worth of “quants,” and that’s non-negotiable.