Rematch is a football game. When you think of a football game, you probably imagine an isometric view, like watching a match on TV, where you manage the entire team as an omniscient strategist. Rematch is not that.
You control a single footballer. This isn’t a completely original idea. There are plenty of games like this that feel like school projects made on a shoestring budget, but they are, quite frankly, all pretty low quality. Rematch is a game in this genre made by a major studio. You might know Sloclap, the developers behind Sifu, the acrobatic martial arts game. In fact, the visual aesthetics of the two games are very similar. Whether Rematch is a quality game is debatable, but it is fun. At least, we had fun playing it.
The core idea of the game is great, but everything is just so broken. This game needed at least another six months in development. It’s plagued with bugs. Balls getting stuck in the ground, goalkeepers carrying the ball out of the penalty box, games crashing after a goal, servers dying every other match… the list is endless.
When the game first came out, we played it relentlessly. But with every passing hour, the flaws became more and more apparent. In the beginning, while the novelty was still fresh, the bugs weren’t as obvious. You’d fail to steal the ball and think, “I must have done something wrong.” But once you learn the game, you realize there’s a dumpster fire of a codebase running in the background, and that’s the real reason for all the nonsense.
Every part of the game is broken. It’s obvious this game isn’t finished. I don’t know if they ran out of money during development or what, but the game is in a disastrous state. We’ve seen a lot of broken games at launch recently, but this is different. This game is simply incomplete.
There isn’t even a text chat. You can’t type to your teammates or your opponents. There’s voice chat to talk to your team, but there’s no push-to-talk. Your mic is either always on or always off. So some guy joins the lobby, and it sounds like a helicopter is taking off in his background.
Long before launch, they promised crossplay. But forget crossplay between consoles; you can’t even play between Steam and PC Game Pass. Just a few days before release, after people had already pre-ordered, they announced they couldn’t get crossplay ready in time and that it would come in a future update.
Right now, the only reason this game is being played is the sheer fun of playing football as an individual. In our friend group, everyone lives in a different part of the country. So how are we supposed to get together for a kickabout? Well, this game gives you that opportunity. It doesn’t do anything else right. And in my opinion, it’s not worth the price. The game launched at $30 USD.
If you’re going to buy it, get it with your friends. This game is not meant to be played solo. In fact, if possible, don’t even queue up without a full squad. The game has three modes: 3v3, 4v4, and 5v5. For example, if you’re a party of three, avoid queuing for 4v4. You’re likely to get a random idiot on your team who completely ruins the experience.
Rematch could become a great game in the future if its shortcomings are addressed and development continues. For now, however, it’s an experience that’s fun for the first few hours but quickly turns into torture. And it’s not just torture for you; it’s torture for your PC. There’s nothing in the game that looks graphically demanding, but the moment you launch it, your PC’s fans start spinning like helicopter rotors. It makes you wonder if it’s secretly mining Bitcoin in the background; the system resource consumption is absurd.
Sometimes the game freezes when you score a goal, and after a while, it just crashes. Tackling and dribbling are a complete crapshoot. The controls, especially with a keyboard and mouse, feel awkward and clunky. So you launch the game, invite your friends, and try to get into a match. You probably won’t get in on the first try. Every time we tried to play a competitive match, it took us 3-4 attempts to finally get in. Someone always disconnects as the match is starting, and the game is cancelled. Speaking of cancelling, it just reminded me. Let’s say you’re searching for a match, and your friend suddenly says, “Cancel the search, I’ll be back in 2 minutes.” You can’t cancel the search. There is a cancel button, but I’ve yet to see it actually work. The game doesn’t even have its own reporting system. When you click the report button, it just opens the other player’s Steam profile. What is Steam supposed to do about that?
If this game had launched in Early Access, I could have given it an 8 out of 10 for its promise. As it stands now, it barely scrapes a 6 out of 10.
You can watch this review in video format below.