Small-squad soccer game Rematch has blown up—no, really, it’s huge—over the last month since it released.
Fascinatingly, developer Sloclap was also responsible for Sifu, the time-bending 2022 kung fu game. In a recent Reddit post updating Rematch’s now quite large community on its development, Sloclap addressed its opinion about the relationship between the two as fighting games of a sort.
“Sifu was not just a kung-fu game, and Rematch is not just a football game—in a way it’s a samurai game. Interactions between players are swift, decisive, and can turn the tide of events in an instant. As such, for the game to feel fair, and be fun, our execution must be flawless—and we’re not quite there yet,” said Sloclap.
It’s particularly cool to see Sloclap publicly say that they’re approaching both games with the same fighting game fervor: It’s about tweaking gameplay balance to build an interesting, dynamic competitive experience. That means not just the recent netcode and accessibility improvements, but also refinements to core gameplay mechanics like goalkeepers, tackles, and volleys that Sloclap says will be addressed “in a few weeks.”
The statement came just a few days before this week’s patch, which lets you remap your gamepad, if you play with one, and Sloclap says that it’s a pretty basic version but that they’ll have a fancier one in the future. They’ve also added a colorblind mode for menus and interface, with basic filters for the three main kinds of colorblindness and a promise to also expand that feature in the future.
Rematch’s own developers didn’t really even get the game’s samurai soccer matchups until they started having in-house tournaments. And now that it’s out, players are also coming up with new tech way faster than Sloclap thought they would.
“A few kinks aside, Rematch is pitch perfect,” said reviewer Justin Wagner in the PC Gamer review of Rematch.
“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,” he said.