Rematch: Football Has Never Been So Much Fun

I love sport videogames. I love the competitiveness of them, the fact you can play as your favourite teams and most importantly the thrill when you pull of a cheeky bit of skill. Lately I have been playing a lot of the old school Everybodys Golf and EA FC25 with friends but now I feel like these will be quickly replaced by one of the most fun and entertaining sports games I have played in a long time, Rematch. 

When Sloclap was saying they were working on a new game, none of us could of ever imagined it would be a sports game. Their previous work being Absolver (a pvp martial arts game) and the incredibly good Sifu (story driven, rogue like, martial arts game) it almost came as a Will slaps Chris jaw dropping moment when we got the first trailer for Rematch, but it is actually quite Genius. Martial Arts is obviously a sport and the movements and controls they managed to perfect in Sifu is not far off from the movements and controls of a football game when it comes to fluidness and styling. When you look at the likes of Ronaldihno and Messi, it almost has that martial art style movement with how they play with the ball. Thanks to this they managed to brilliantly combine the two together to creat a completely unique style in the sport gaming scene and also creating a game I am completely addicted to.

Pass On, Pass Off young Grasshopper

In rematch you have to option to play in 3v3, 4v4, or 5v5 online matches (currently their is no offline mode). You play in a small 5 as side style pitch that is enclosed by a glass dome very much like Rocket League so the ball is always in play until it is in the back of a net (hopefully not yours). This means you can and will often use the walls by kicking the ball off them when passing it to a teammate or doing my favourite thing in creating a volley by shooting it agaisnt the wall above the goal to make the goalie dive and then follow it up with a scissor kick into the back of the net.... man I love doing that. This does reflect nicely about what the rules are in Rematch, well their are none. No offside, no illegal tackles, no penalties or anything, just none stop football for five minutes. It's so great.....until you are the goalie.

Each time a goal is scored the squad positions are rotated so that someone different is in goal each time so you will nearly always have a go in goal during every game. Now when you are playing on the pitch your controls are a basic mixture of using the buttons, triggers and joycons to skill through oponnents, pass and shoot which are very easy to learn but extremely difficult to master. Quite often you will accidentally run pass the ball, pass in the completely wrong direction or miss an open goal. This is because unlike other sports games their is no control assistance so whereever you are looking or wherever you move your joycon is exactly where the ball will go. As a goalie though you only have the Y button to dive and the left joystick to choose the direction of the dive. Sounds a lot simplier but when players are doing crazy wall combos above your goal it can be nearly impossible to figure out when is the right time to jump for the ball. Normally this leads to you diving in the completely wrong direction and the opposing player having an open goal to just nudge the ball in, leaving you red faced and vowing your revenge.

Players can change position on the fly though. If you have an extremely good goalie on your team that you want to keep in goal you can just run out of the goal box and the other player runs in and they will recieve the goalie gloves automatically turning them into the goalie. I really like this as it doesn't really ever pin someone down to any position. I have even had it during some games where the goalies will run out and we will all attack together with no goalie in a true high risk, high rewards move. Yes it normally means an easy goal for the other team but when it works it feels really great.

The game has an extremely high skill level very much like fighting games. When I had my first game I kept losing the ball and kicking it in every direction but slowly you start learning more and more and then when you reach a certain point when you feel like you have the basic controls down it opens to door of what crazy moves you can actually do with them. That is when the game is unbelivably fun as you end up doing mad wall and skill combos with your teammates to score some insane goals. Saying that though sometimes your teammates are more of an annoyance than pleasure.

There is no I in TEAM

When an online game is mostly about skill then naturally that means a lot of ego is involved. You will nearly always be paired up with someone who doesnt see this as a team game but instead as a single player game and a small audience to watch their excellence. Quickly follows is them absolutely spamming the buttone to call for the ball every two seconds and then trying to take on the whole team before quickly getting beaten and failing to run back to help defend. Now you would think after five times of this happening in a single game they would have learnt their lessons but no they will continue to do this until the match ends. I understand totally that Rematch is about flair and ego but it is also about playing as a team and doing that cheeky pass or rebound when it guarentees an attack or goal. Yet most players seems to ignore this even though it is literally the point of the very quick story tutorial at the start. 

Some people do get extremely salty as well and will sometimes refuse to play or even run the ball into their own net. I played one game where we scored and was 1-0 up and the whole other team just dissapeared meaning we had no one to play agaisnt and just kept booting the ball into the net. Yes it meant a very easy win but it really wasn't fun. Actualy you will nearly always have at least one player leave a match which I find strange as their is a mercy rule that means if you are beating the opponents by 4 goals then the game automatically ends, you also get punished for leaving a match mid game but I am unsure what the punishment is since I havent done it myself.

From Roundhouse Kick to Scissor Kick

Overall though that is a playerbase problem, not a game one. In my opinion the game itself is one of the best sports games I have ever played and definetly my favourite football game. It is fast, exciting, and unpredictable everytime. It almost reminds me of the old Overwatch 1 days when it first came out and everyone was just having a blast trying to figure it out (man they really were the good old days now...). The game is a non stop joy to play and a quick five minute session will quickly come to a full evening of gaming. Sloclap have said that this only the start for Rematch and it will grow an evolve throughout it's lifetime, with over 3 millions players I believe them and am excited to see what they will offer. Personally I would love some sort of ranking mode and a story mode as well. We saw how good they are at writing story with Sifu and got some fun hints at it during the tutorial leaving me wanting more. For now though what Sloclap has given us is an absolute blast of a football game that provides that old school aracde feeling of whooping someones ass in style.

Before I finish this off I just have one last thing to quickly say. Please please please Sloclap make a rugby game. I am a massive Rugby fan (even more than football) but sadly the last good rugby game was the 2011 rugby world cup game...... we are desperate for a new one. So Sloclap I will literally do whatever it takes if it means we get a rugby game in the next few years. Lets trade them

 slide tackles to diving ones.