Having made its name with martial arts-based action games Absolver and Sifu, few might have expected Sloclap's next game would be Rematch, an online five-a-side soccer game. After all, while the beautiful game is a beloved pastime and global phenomenon, its representation in video games has long been dominated by the EA FC series (formerly known as FIFA), to the extent that it becomes difficult to consider an alternative.
But Rematch has one very key difference that I learned during my visit to the studio's Paris office. Where many soccer sims have you in control of a whole team, changing to players closest to where the ball is, Rematch can be better described as a "soccer-player sim" where, in its third-person perspective, the camera is down at pitch level behind your player for the duration of the six-minute match. That also meant that for this hands-on, I was playing with other journalists as my teammates, just like a real game of soccer.
Rematch is a cooperative game that encourages you to work together.
In explaining the concept, creative director Pierre Tarno speaks of Rematch less in terms of soccer but rather with reference to other genres, such as a third-person action game or even a third-person shooter, since shooting the ball also involves aiming a crosshair with the right stick and squeezing the right trigger. Yet while it's set 40 years in a much more optimistic future, where AR technology can transform the "cages" you play into different environments--from stadiums to rainforests, underwater, or even outer space--the gameplay remains fundamentally real soccer rather than soccer with over-the-top abilities you might expect from Mario Strikers.
Matches nonetheless take away certain rules that prevent the pace from ever letting up. For instance, there's no offsides, no fouls, and since the ball bounces off the walls of the cage, no throw-ins or corner kicks. While Tarno does show me an early concept trailer where the team had prototyped the ability for players to wall-run along the cage, this one instance of performing impossible feats was ultimately jettisoned.
"It strayed too far from a credible football fantasy that we were aiming for," he explains. "Football is a simple game and Rematch is a simple game--it's that choreography of bodies and movements which also creates a link with our previous games, which were more about combat. But fundamentally, Rematch is a game of observation and positioning; it's about being at the right time and in the right dynamic."
Despite being a simple game, Rematch allows you to pull off complex plays.
What that meant while playing a match was that I was not only in complete control of my player in terms of where they could move around the pitch, but also being responsible for their positioning in receiving or intercepting the ball. Getting the ball was arguably the trickiest part to master in Rematch. That's because there isn't a pass button--a player either performs a ground kick or a shot that is manually aimed. Their teammate can call for the ball, which draws a line so that the player in possession can tell if they're open, but it all comes down to skill in kicking the ball accurately and the other player being in the right position to receive it.
An even trickier ability to pull off, but one that looks great when you succeed, are volley actions, which can be executed when a diamond appears around an incoming ball. These require precise positioning and super-responsive reactions, but allow you to instantly pass or shoot the ball as soon as it comes to you. It's also contextual based on the height of the ball, so it could result in a header, but in the best-case scenario, a bicycle kick aimed for the corner of the goal.
It's fair to say that, only after dabbling with the tutorials before being split up into 4v4 matches, we spent most of our hands-on simply trying to keep possession of the ball rather than pulling off any legendary feats. The difficulty of keeping possession is deliberate in its design, in part to foster team play so that no one will want to hog the ball when it's so easy to get tackled.
Teammates rotate positions, giving everyone a chance to play offense and defense.
There are nonetheless useful skills for keeping possession, such as tapping A to "push" the ball away from you, on par with a through-ball, so that you're technically not in possession and therefore not vulnerable to a tackle, or you can perform a more showboating rainbow flick over an enemy player. A sprint boost, or "efforts," is also possible, although this extra gauge takes a while to build back up, so you won't get far if you're attempting to make a dash from your goal to the opposing team's by yourself.
Ultimately, Tarno stresses the importance of team play and passing the ball. Successful passes also earn players points along with other actions like intercepts, which total up at the end of a match to determine the team's MVP. "We want players to feel that joy of playing football with friends, which is a really fun and collective experience that's about putting your team first, and how it can be more satisfying and rewarding to serve the perfect assist than to actually score yourself," he explains.
That sense of team spirit felt even more true in the second half of our hands-on, when we were joined by dev team members so that it becomes an actual five-a-side game, incidentally also increasing the size of the pitch (at launch, there will be three different pitch sizes for 3v3s, 4v4s, and 5v5s, the latter only marginally smaller than the standard 115-by-74 yards of a real soccer pitch). That is to say that even someone who knows the ins and outs of the game over the past few years of development cannot single-handedly carry the team--they are only as strong as the team playing together.
You can customize your character in Rematch.
Having run a number of private tests with players who usually play competitive games like Call of Duty and EA FC, the results have been encouraging too. "By the second, third games, when they're in solo queues with randoms, they're passing the ball, they're not dribbling around everyone and trying to be the hero," Tarno says. "I think it's also because many players have played five-a-side, enjoy football, and know that nobody in football actually dribbles the ball everywhere."
To help dispel any gym class flashbacks of being picked last and stuck in goal, not only do players rotate positions after every goal, but the keeper is actually an attractive role to take in Rematch. Although the idea is that everything comes down to personal skill rather than individual player stats, keepers have some exceptions that allow them to become sweepers, essentially moving beyond the penalty area as an extra defender. They also benefit from having infinite efforts, so they can dash all the way back to their goal when necessary. When I was a keeper at one point, there was also a moment when an opposing player crossed the ball into the penalty box but it appeared as if the ball's position snapped into my hands, suggesting Sloclap is also preventing keepers from having a case of butter fingers, while other players still need to be precisely positioned to receive or intercept the ball.
What ultimately convinced me that Rematch is going to be special came in our penultimate match when a last-minute equalizer took us into overtime. There are no draws or penalty shoot-outs: just a single overtime match decided by golden goal rules, and it lasts as long as it takes. Our overtime lasted more than twice as long as a normal match length of six minutes, and by the end I realized I was sweating more profusely than I think I ever had in a competitive game, as if I had just been on the pitch for real, running back and forth, yelling at my teammates for the ball or to take the shot.
In Rematch, you aim and kick the ball with controls that emulate firing a gun in shooters.
It's exactly the kind of pressure that Sloclap wants players to feel when playing Rematch. Of course, the studio will also be under pressure when it's released as a paid online title. Arguably, its competition isn't really EA's franchise, which has become predominantly about Ultimate Team, but numerous online free-to-play team multiplayer games. As someone who has Rocket League and Overwatch 2 in his regular rotation, Tarno is only too conscious of the competition out there, but he also asserts, "Even if players say, 'An online game should be free-to-play or it's [dead on arrival],' I don't think that's true. If a game is original, solid, and very reasonably priced, players will get it." Take it from me, the sweat was worth it.
Rematch launches on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S on June 19. An open beta is running April 18-19.
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But Rematch has one very key difference that I learned during my visit to the studio's Paris office. Where many soccer sims have you in control of a whole team, changing to players closest to where the ball is, Rematch can be better described as a "soccer-player sim" where, in its third-person perspective, the camera is down at pitch level behind your player for the duration of the six-minute match. That also meant that for this hands-on, I was playing with other journalists as my teammates, just like a real game of soccer.
Rematch is a cooperative game that encourages you to work together.
In explaining the concept, creative director Pierre Tarno speaks of Rematch less in terms of soccer but rather with reference to other genres, such as a third-person action game or even a third-person shooter, since shooting the ball also involves aiming a crosshair with the right stick and squeezing the right trigger. Yet while it's set 40 years in a much more optimistic future, where AR technology can transform the "cages" you play into different environments--from stadiums to rainforests, underwater, or even outer space--the gameplay remains fundamentally real soccer rather than soccer with over-the-top abilities you might expect from Mario Strikers.
Matches nonetheless take away certain rules that prevent the pace from ever letting up. For instance, there's no offsides, no fouls, and since the ball bounces off the walls of the cage, no throw-ins or corner kicks. While Tarno does show me an early concept trailer where the team had prototyped the ability for players to wall-run along the cage, this one instance of performing impossible feats was ultimately jettisoned.
"It strayed too far from a credible football fantasy that we were aiming for," he explains. "Football is a simple game and Rematch is a simple game--it's that choreography of bodies and movements which also creates a link with our previous games, which were more about combat. But fundamentally, Rematch is a game of observation and positioning; it's about being at the right time and in the right dynamic."
Despite being a simple game, Rematch allows you to pull off complex plays.
What that meant while playing a match was that I was not only in complete control of my player in terms of where they could move around the pitch, but also being responsible for their positioning in receiving or intercepting the ball. Getting the ball was arguably the trickiest part to master in Rematch. That's because there isn't a pass button--a player either performs a ground kick or a shot that is manually aimed. Their teammate can call for the ball, which draws a line so that the player in possession can tell if they're open, but it all comes down to skill in kicking the ball accurately and the other player being in the right position to receive it.
An even trickier ability to pull off, but one that looks great when you succeed, are volley actions, which can be executed when a diamond appears around an incoming ball. These require precise positioning and super-responsive reactions, but allow you to instantly pass or shoot the ball as soon as it comes to you. It's also contextual based on the height of the ball, so it could result in a header, but in the best-case scenario, a bicycle kick aimed for the corner of the goal.
It's fair to say that, only after dabbling with the tutorials before being split up into 4v4 matches, we spent most of our hands-on simply trying to keep possession of the ball rather than pulling off any legendary feats. The difficulty of keeping possession is deliberate in its design, in part to foster team play so that no one will want to hog the ball when it's so easy to get tackled.
Teammates rotate positions, giving everyone a chance to play offense and defense.
There are nonetheless useful skills for keeping possession, such as tapping A to "push" the ball away from you, on par with a through-ball, so that you're technically not in possession and therefore not vulnerable to a tackle, or you can perform a more showboating rainbow flick over an enemy player. A sprint boost, or "efforts," is also possible, although this extra gauge takes a while to build back up, so you won't get far if you're attempting to make a dash from your goal to the opposing team's by yourself.
Ultimately, Tarno stresses the importance of team play and passing the ball. Successful passes also earn players points along with other actions like intercepts, which total up at the end of a match to determine the team's MVP. "We want players to feel that joy of playing football with friends, which is a really fun and collective experience that's about putting your team first, and how it can be more satisfying and rewarding to serve the perfect assist than to actually score yourself," he explains.
That sense of team spirit felt even more true in the second half of our hands-on, when we were joined by dev team members so that it becomes an actual five-a-side game, incidentally also increasing the size of the pitch (at launch, there will be three different pitch sizes for 3v3s, 4v4s, and 5v5s, the latter only marginally smaller than the standard 115-by-74 yards of a real soccer pitch). That is to say that even someone who knows the ins and outs of the game over the past few years of development cannot single-handedly carry the team--they are only as strong as the team playing together.
You can customize your character in Rematch.
Having run a number of private tests with players who usually play competitive games like Call of Duty and EA FC, the results have been encouraging too. "By the second, third games, when they're in solo queues with randoms, they're passing the ball, they're not dribbling around everyone and trying to be the hero," Tarno says. "I think it's also because many players have played five-a-side, enjoy football, and know that nobody in football actually dribbles the ball everywhere."
To help dispel any gym class flashbacks of being picked last and stuck in goal, not only do players rotate positions after every goal, but the keeper is actually an attractive role to take in Rematch. Although the idea is that everything comes down to personal skill rather than individual player stats, keepers have some exceptions that allow them to become sweepers, essentially moving beyond the penalty area as an extra defender. They also benefit from having infinite efforts, so they can dash all the way back to their goal when necessary. When I was a keeper at one point, there was also a moment when an opposing player crossed the ball into the penalty box but it appeared as if the ball's position snapped into my hands, suggesting Sloclap is also preventing keepers from having a case of butter fingers, while other players still need to be precisely positioned to receive or intercept the ball.
What ultimately convinced me that Rematch is going to be special came in our penultimate match when a last-minute equalizer took us into overtime. There are no draws or penalty shoot-outs: just a single overtime match decided by golden goal rules, and it lasts as long as it takes. Our overtime lasted more than twice as long as a normal match length of six minutes, and by the end I realized I was sweating more profusely than I think I ever had in a competitive game, as if I had just been on the pitch for real, running back and forth, yelling at my teammates for the ball or to take the shot.
In Rematch, you aim and kick the ball with controls that emulate firing a gun in shooters.
It's exactly the kind of pressure that Sloclap wants players to feel when playing Rematch. Of course, the studio will also be under pressure when it's released as a paid online title. Arguably, its competition isn't really EA's franchise, which has become predominantly about Ultimate Team, but numerous online free-to-play team multiplayer games. As someone who has Rocket League and Overwatch 2 in his regular rotation, Tarno is only too conscious of the competition out there, but he also asserts, "Even if players say, 'An online game should be free-to-play or it's [dead on arrival],' I don't think that's true. If a game is original, solid, and very reasonably priced, players will get it." Take it from me, the sweat was worth it.
Rematch launches on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S on June 19. An open beta is running April 18-19.
Source