Rematch review – Rocket League without the cars

There’s finally an alternative to EA Sports FC, with Sloclap’s 5v5 street football game offering less serious and more arcade style action.

Away from the ever-growing realism (and correspondingly rapacious commercialism) of EA Sports FC, there’s clearly a desire among gamers for a more arcade style football gaming experience. That’s lead to the venerable Sensible Soccer being reinvented as Sociable Soccer and now Sloclap – previously known for the beat ‘em-up Sifu – has taken to the pitch with a clever and imaginative offering entitled Rematch.

Rematch is basically what you would get if you stripped out the single-player options from EA Sports FC’s Be A Pro mode and turned it into a standalone, online-only game. Or, if you prefer, it’s Rocket League, except with footballers instead of cars. It lets you control just one player on a football pitch surrounded by glass walls, which the ball bounces off, in six minute matches which can be contested by two teams of three, four, or five players.

It’s online-only, with no local multiplayer and no way to play on your own except in practice and free play. Similarly to Sifu, it has a pretty distinctive and quite complex control system; shot direction, for example, is determined by the right stick (with the left stick controlling aftertouch), yet you set the direction of passes and lobs with the left stick.

In Rematch, there are quite a few skills to master, among them dribbling tricks, nailing the timing of button stabs to intercept balls passing nearby (the ball acquires a diamond-shaped highlight to indicate when that’s possible), timing and directing your dives if you’re in goal, and even lobbing passes over incoming players – which requires a modifier rather than a single button press.

Perhaps the easiest skill to perform in the game is a lunging tackle, which indicates the complexity of the rest of the control system; although once you dive in for one of those, it takes your player a while to get back to their feet. At least you don’t have to worry about being sent off for taking out the opposition, though: there are no referees or fouls in Rematch and a street or cage football vibe very much prevails.

That’s telegraphed by the cartoon style visuals, which by default are pastel-ish but are often more luridly coloured and reminiscent of Fortnite or Overwatch. Which is something of a giveaway, since Rematch is obviously an attempt to make the next big online team game, as opposed to anything resembling a traditional arcade style football game. The whole football aspect can be viewed as something of a Trojan horse, similar to how Rocket League never really acknowledges it’s actually just football with cars.

When you play it, Rematch very much feels like a wheel-less version of Rocket League. In that context, Rematch’s unusual control system works brilliantly. It’s easy enough to learn but definitely hard to master and when you do get to grips with it, and make it into the big leagues, you’ll find entire matches hinging on perfectly executed moves, made at precisely the right moment, which is classic esports fodder.

In terms of achieving that mastery, Rematch – despite being about as minimal as it’s possible to be in terms of game modes and general structure – gives you all that you need. There’s a basic tutorial, called the Prologue, plus other tutorials that focus more closely on honing specific skills and putting them all together.

Then it lets you jump into quick matches; it’s wise to start with the 3v3 ones, which are frenetic, unstructured and can be navigated with a mastery of the basics. Whoever is nearest to your goal, for example, becomes the keeper, but in 3v3, a lot of goals tend to be scored from way out, with whoever was in goal having gone for a jaunt upfield. Jumping up to 4v4 requires a bit more teamwork and discipline.

In all modes, every time a goal is scored Rematch puts you in another position on the pitch from the kick-off, which you can adhere to or ignore. Although if you abandon goalkeeping duties and concede cheaply, you might receive some opprobrium as by default, Rematch keeps its players’ microphones live. Thankfully, you can respond to in-game events by picking from a small number of text phrases – mostly encouraging, although ‘Sorry’ is also included.

The 5v5 mode feels like it will become the default for gamers who are serious about playing Rematch. It’s the most structured and rewards discipline and positional sense more than the 3v3 and 4v4 modes. Matchmaking, at least in the early stages of the game, feels pretty impressive; we did occasionally encounter the odd player with better skills than us, but not to an annoying degree.

Sensibly, Rematch forces you to work through quick matches in order to reach level 5 status, before letting you loose in its pre-season. That stratification should help enormously with matchmaking. Beyond the global league, you can set up one-off custom matches with a bunch of friends (generating a code allowing other invitees to join) and that’s about it. Structurally, it’s early days for Rematch, which will undoubtedly add features as it becomes more established, and a call for feedback from players when you boot it up emphasises that.

As with its rival online games, Rematch contains a vast array of cosmetic items and skins which can be purchased using real money (somewhat expensively, in our opinion, especially given that it’s not a free game), although as you progress you do slowly earn currency with which to buy them. That will probably annoy some, but it’s an inevitability in a modern game of this nature.

Patches already appear to have fixed some stability problems, that were reported in the game’s early stages, at least for the PC version. It seems the PC is the lead platform at this stage, with no console cross-play at the moment – although hopefully it’ll be added later.

Rematch is a fun, thoroughly playable and cleverly constructed online team game, that has a great chance of becoming an esports staple. However, it currently feels very much half-finished, so it will be fascinating to see how quickly Sloclap can convert its potential into something that becomes a pillar of the gaming world. Just don’t be fooled into believing that it’s the future of arcade football games: it’s a Rocket League competitor dressed in a football kit.

Formats: PC (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5
Price: £20.99
Publisher: Sloclap
Developer: Sloclap
Release Date: 19th June 2025
Age Rating: 3

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