By Will Borger
When I was a kid, I played a lot of soccer (I would like to apologize to everyone else in the world; I am, regrettably, American). I was on a team, and we were good. Make the local paper good, mind; we weren’t going to go pro or anything, but I have very good memories of those years. I fell off of soccer eventually (something I deeply regret), but I never lost that love of the game. There’s something about the energy of it, the joy. The thwack of the ball, the feeling of outmaneuvering a defender for the perfect chance, the pass slipped beautifully between another guy’s legends, reading the shot as a goalie and making the save. Bodies moving through space and time, and a ball connecting them. The beauty of soccer is you can play it anywhere; I once saw a guy covered in sweat dribbling a ball down a street in the Bronx. Give somebody a soccer ball, and you’ve given them a world. You don’t need anything else. But it’s best with a team.
And if you’d like to get the most out of Rematch, I hope you have one. Sure, you can play Rematch solo, running through its solid prologue, a fun diversion that quickly tells the story of a nameless soccer player’s progression and doubles as a tutorial, play the few challenges available to you, and just fool around with the ball in freeplay. Otherwise, you have to go online.
Rematch offers 3v3, 4v4, and 5v5 matches, as well as ranked play in 5v5 once you hit level 5. That’s it. There are no other modes beyond the stuff I’ve already mentioned. If you want to play Rematch by yourself, your options are pretty limited. That might seem like a gamebreaker, but here’s the thing: Rematch plays stupidly well.
Rematch feels like soccer if soccer was designed as an arcade game. There are no fouls or penalties or cards. There’s no referee. There’s just your team, their team, and the field. Oh, and the giant semi-transparent cube enclosing the whole thing, of course, which allows you to do things like set matches underwater or in a forest. That’s rad. The cube is probably Rematch’s greatest trick. Since you can bounce the ball off the cube’s walls, you can do some absolutely ridiculous stuff like setting up the perfect shot by shooting the ball at the area just above the goal to fake out the goalie and then fire the rebound into the net when he bites. Of course, you can also set your teammates up this way, too, if you’re feeling generous.
Other than that, Rematch feels exactly like you’d want a soccer game to feel. You can dribble to fake out opponents, sprint to get ahead, pass the ball on the ground or lob it in the air, push it for an extra boost of speed (and to fake out defenders), head it or do a rainbow flick. If you don’t have the ball, it’s incredibly easy to call for a pass and a handy-dandy blue line will show you where the person calling for it is. If you’re on defense, you can assume a defensive stance, which allows you to move while keeping your eyes on the ball, dash, and tackle. As a goalie, you can dive and tackle. There are no set positions in Rematch. Goalies on both teams rotate once a new goal is scored, but anyone can play the position by simply being near the goal, assuming another goalie isn’t already there. If you get tired of it? Just leave the goal area. But you might want to be sure someone is there to take over for you first.
It’s hard to overstate how good Rematch feels to play, whether you have the ball or not. It’s incredibly responsive, and you’ll almost always know why something happened. If there’s one weird thing to it, it’s that the left analog stick (I reviewed Rematch on PC but played with a controller, because c’mon) controls both your player and what you do with the ball. That means if you want to lob a pass to a teammate to your left, you have to push the analog stick in that direction when you attempt the pass. If you want to push the ball in a direction, you push the analog stick in that direction as you press the button to push, regardless of which way you’re facing. You can even curve your shots by using the stick as you’re shooting to find the weak spot in a goalie’s defense. It feels incredible once you learn it; it just takes a second to master.
Rematch feels amazing when you’re winning; when you make the great pass to set up the game-tying goal, when you hit the overtime winner by bending it just so, when you land a tackle or intercept the ball, when you make the perfect save. When you make a mistake, like going too far out of your goal to chase a ball and leaving your net wide open for a score, you’ll feel it. And when you’re playing a team that just straight up outclasses you? You’ll know it very quickly. There are no skills to unlock or upgrades to earn in Rematch. It’s just you and your team against your opponents. The better one wins, and the other one goes back into matchmaking with a chip on their shoulder. This is old-school game design; you’re not playing to get stuff that makes you better. You’re playing because you love it.
Rematch is easy to understand, but it’s incredibly hard to master, and I felt like I was learning something every match I played. Like the sport it’s based on, it’s about positioning, stamping management (you can’t sprint or do tricks without it), and communicating with your team. A good team will absolutely roll a bad one, but a mediocre team that coordinates will probably beat a team of good players who never pass the ball. At first, I wasn’t a great shooter; my skills were based around being an above-average goalie and passing the ball and positioning myself well, setting up my teammates for success. But when shooting finally clicked, I ended the first game I ever scored in with four goals. We didn’t win that one, but we won the one right after it, and I’ve scored a goal in every game since. Patience is the key, and sometimes the right answer is to do nothing and let someone else make a mistake. Once you learn that, the mental aspect of the game becomes pretty incredible.
Even if you’re losing, though, matches are fast. Each one only takes 6 minutes, unless you go into overtime, and there is a Mercy Rule: if a team ever goes up by four goals, the match simply ends. So even if you’re with a bad team, you won’t have to suffer long. Unless you’re matched with a bad team again.
Here’s the thing about soccer: everyone thinks they’re a forward. Everybody thinks they’ve got the slickest moves, that they’re going to put that ball through the defender’s legs, and every time they shoot, they’re going to score. They don’t need to pass it to the guy who’s in perfect position; they’re going to beat that goalie on sheer dog.
Thing is, few people are ever that good in real life, and fewer still are that good in Rematch. Even an excellent shooter will need help against a team playing good defense. If Rematch has an obvious weakness, it’s that you have to play it with other people. I got called a slur in the first game I ever played for making a minor mistake that didn’t even end up costing us a goal. And no, I’m not kidding.
On the one hand, that brought me back to the Golden Age of Xbox Live; on the other, it sucks that that was literally the first thing another Rematch player ever said to me. If you’re queuing with randoms, it’s a crapshoot. Sometimes you’ll get great players who are really supportive. Other times you’ll get guys who suck, but are at least nice. And then you’ll get dudes of all skill levels ready to dredge up slurs that people haven’t heard since the 1800s. Rematch lets you mute other players (and yourself) with the push of a button, and most people communicate through the in-game emotes (you will never feel worse than when your team spams the “Thanks!” and “Good job!” emotes after you make a play decision and concede a goal), but it sucks that we’re still dealing with this crap in the Year of Our Lord 2025. Even worse, if you find a group you like in Quick Play, there’s no way to… rematch with your teammates. That’s especially unfortunate in a game called Rematch. I swear, you can’t write some of this stuff.
But even that kind of stuff really didn’t bring Rematch down too much. It’s just too damn fun to play. I even love playing goalie, and actively seek the position out sometimes. If there’s one bummer to playing the position, it’s that you have limited control over your diving saves (you can be right and still concede a goal because you jumped over the ball, and there’s no real way around that), which is a little weird given how much control you have as a shooter. Even with that caveat, however, playing goalie rules. Is it stressful? Hell yeah. Does it rule when you play so well that the other team can’t score? Absolutely. No matter what you’re doing in Rematch, it feels awesome, and it’s really easy to get sucked into the “just one more match” loop that ends with you going to bed at 4 AM. There are some bugs here: desyncs, goalies being unable to pick up the ball, landing a tackle on someone only to go right through them, that kind of stuff. But they’re so minor (and often funny enough) that I didn’t mind much.
Outside of the core game, there isn’t much to do here aside from customize your player’s looks and equipment. Rematch is an absolutely beautiful game, and the characters look like they stepped out of a very detailed, stylized watercolor painting, so I’m happy there’s so much here. I’m not a big character customization guy, but I do appreciate all the options. want to make a normal-looking soccer player? You can do that. want to make something out of the most horrific clown nightmare you’ve ever had? Go for it. Not every bit of customization has a ton of options yet (there are only four emotes to choose from after scoring a goal, for instance), but what’s here is good.
Like every game in the modern era, Rematch has a Battle Pass and a shop where you can spend real money to get fake video game things. There is, of course, plenty of free stuff, and nothing seems overly predatory yet, but seeing this stuff in absolutely everything is exhausting. Rematch’s gameplay may invoke the glory days of arcade-style games, but there’s nothing old school about this monetization; nothing escapes from capitalism unscathed.
I wish Rematch had more modes, and I’d kick a soccer ball at somebody’s head for some bots and crossplay, which is bafflingly absent, though all that and more is allegedly coming down the line. I can’t deny that when I’m playing Rematch, I’m having a blast, and when I’m not, I’m thinking about playing Rematch, even if that means risking the solo queue. Sloclap is onto something here, and I even found myself sneaking a couple matches when I got stuck writing this review. That’s a hell of an accomplishment. Now all I need to do is find a regular team. Anybody looking to kick a ball around?
This review is based was based on a PC code provided by the publisher. Rematch is currently available on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.