Note: some (not all) of the bugs mentioned in this review have since been addressed, I took a while writing this.

REMATCH gives a different angle on the world’s beautiful game, and it creates a mostly fun competitive sports experience. Yet, it’s Sloclap’s least intriguing game by a wide margin, most incomplete release, and possibly worst polished to boot. And to be clear, this is not praise of the level of polish in Absolver or Sifu, both of which were buggy and had all kinds of frustrating errors even deep into their life. But at the very least these games felt more finished upon release, and also were just genuinely more innovative and enthralling, even though there are aspects of both of these present.

The different angle I’m talking about isn’t the angle of a shot rebounding off the backwall and toward a fellow striker, although that is a very interesting angle available in REMATCH that you can’t get in normal soccer. No, the angle I’m referring to is the way the ball controls at the feet. Having a “push ball” button, and a less magnetic possession than typical for a soccer game makes controlling it feel very interesting. Shooting essentially functions as deeper passing, and although I feel weighting passes properly is too difficult (I often can’t get the perfect weighting when having to decide between tap, hold tap, tap + push button, shoot trigger, shoot hold trigger… etc.), I love the fact this means that skill expression is very deep. Beyond this, there are a variety of techniques which aren’t formally incorporated into the game so to speak (they don’t have a specified input in the menus and they aren’t taught in a tutorial), but which do exist and they let you style up and express yourself (a great example is the “ippy slide”). Sloclap have stated

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Sloclap, July 2025:

…and Rematch is not just a football game – in a way it’s a samurai game.

And they are absolutely right. This type of tech is the secret sauce of a game like Melee, and what makes playing it feel so satisfying.

Unfortunately, there is a semi-common occurring bug where your character will never take possession so to speak, and so it’s impossible to know sometimes whether you just suck or the game is failing you. And the bugs go way beyond this.

There are bugs with animations, the goal replay is headache inducing, and alt+tabbing causes a tearing effect near the top of the screen. Control options will display on your screen for seemingly no reason, (showing control options for things that don’t even exist in the game, mind you!) which is ironic, because there currently exists no way to remap your controls in-game (note: this now exists in limited form). It would’ve been unthinkable to me that this was even possible prior to release by the way.

There’s no way to report teammates who purposefully score own-goals. There’s no way to “avoid” teammates who are consistently creating a negative play experience, and there’s no multi-queue option, which stinks for quickmatch play already being separated into 3 forms.

These are all annoying things but what I find the most frustrating is the very nature of the game’s construction. I’ve said this before in other reviews, and I also specifically outlined my concerns in the Steam Discussions here, but in short, team-based competitive sports games need to incentivize passing (or team play more generally) not only by its contribution to winning, but by directly providing benefits to the altruistic player. Unfortunately, in the quite sluggish post-launch response by the devs, little has been mentioned about this, even though it would benefit the game greatly.

Even after dropping 60+ hours, reaching Masters rank, and finishing all the achievements (the last one is bugged, I have completed a “post to post” assist countless times), I’m still enjoying this game… but I am left with the feeling that not only is REMATCH missing something in its core, but it is a game which shouldn’t have been released yet!

The season pass having phases that unlock large amounts of time apart, the poor customization options (I think the level of granularity is good, but the options themselves are a bit… ugly. (I think evidence of this is when more players do their best to make ugly ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ characters instead of cool ones, which they do.)), and the arbitrary color restrictions (when team colors are local) are very weird.

Unfortunately, this is a very tentative recommend from me, even though I’d love to recommend this glowingly. I anticipate getting back around to Sifu (never finished) and Absolver (never 100%’d, and I’d like to) some day to discuss my thoughts further.

7/10