I’m not sure anybody expected Sloclap, the studio behind 2022’s Sifu, to follow up their martial arts action hit with sports. And yet here we are with Rematch, the newest live service soccer game. (A brief aside for the overseas readers; “Soccer” is the word we use to talk about “Football” here, lest we Americans confuse it for the game where a bunch of guys run around with a ball cradled in their hands until the only one who’s allowed to kick shows up.)

While Rematch had a decent kickoff, the base is starting to dwindle. In two months, the game has gone from an average of 90,000 regular players on Steam to 10,000. While this doesn't include the console population, it's still indicative of a significant falling off. I can think of quite a few reasons this is happening, but to get into why we’ll need to break down what makes Rematch stand out from the annual EA Sports FIFA experience.

A Personal Touch

In order to make eleven players on a field manageable, most soccer games in the past forever years allow the player to hop control to whoever is closest to the ball. Unlike this ever-present hotswap method, Rematch keeps team sizes small — and more importantly, individualized. Everyone controls exactly one character on the field at all times.

This lets Sloclap lean into their greatest strength — tight, refined mechanics. Rematch hones in on ball control as the key element, encouraging players to master rainbow arcs and bicycle kicks just as much as standard passing and positioning. Even a pass requires more manual control than the average FIFA game; while a quick press flings the ball in the close vicinity of a teammate, there’s additional precision and even lob options to make interceptions harder. Just observing how a player moves the ball around the field quickly conveys their average skill level in a way no other soccer game has achieved yet.

Dropped in the Deep End

The obvious issue here is the same one every fighting game faces; a high skill ceiling means new players suffer until they gain enough experience to be competitive. It feels very, very bad to start Rematch and feel like dead weight, especially on small teams where poor skills stand out. When there's only three people on a team, it becomes quite easy to identify the weak link. When the game had frequent newcomers on launch, it was probably quite easy to end up on a team full of newbies. But now the honeymoon period is over, and only the people invested in mastery remain. The odds you will be in a game with other new arrivals is virtually nonexistent.

This makes onboarding new players gently impossible; they’re either willing to take L after L for hours until they learn, or they’re already pounding out a Steam refund request.

New Patches, New Problems

Rematch has had at least one major patch so far, but this patch has not addressed some of the biggest issues holding the game back. Perhaps most amusingly, the first patch normalized run speed so players would stop doing empty headers across the field for a marginal speed boost. It was like watching a bunch of dolphins play Water Polo.

This patch also, rather unfortunately, introduced a new rare bug where sometimes a player simply can’t keep possession of the ball. In the fifty-and-some-odd games of Rematch I’ve played this has happened once, but in a competitive, skill-based game, it can’t happen even once. Even worse, occasionally a goalkeeper’s forward lunge fails to catch a ball, no matter how spot on you are. The ball even teleports into your hand as if caught, and then suddenly propels into the net as if you never had it. A new player only needs a handful of those experiences to bench Rematch forever. These issues are set to be fixed in an upcoming second patch this weekend, and while this will address reliability and better netcode on ball handling, it still doesn't address the underlying issues with matchmaking and player onboarding.

Crossplay is in the works for patch three which ought to help new players find each other, but I’m concerned about Rematch's future all the same. Arguably, it might've been better to delay launch until crossplay was ready. Audience retention is key to a competitive online game. Once the player count dips low enough it takes more than a few minutes to find a match, people may stop launching it all together.

Unsolicited Ideas from the Waterboy

In the interest of productivity, I’ve thought about what could address these problems. Emergency patches for ball handling not working as intended would be a good first start, but that only addresses gameplay issues. Getting people to stick around at all is another hurdle.

The next major patch set to drop Monday promises significant improvements to matchmaking to better pair up players of similar skill levels. While this helps, I think there’s still a missing step. Right now, Rematch’s tutorial introduces you to each technique, but doesn’t do a great job of demonstrating when and why to employ them organically. Recognizing when these situations arrive in a real match and executing them in a timely fashion is much, much harder than pulling them off in a series of isolated challenges.

The tutorial already weaves new players through a small narrative as you go from hopeful prospect to newly signed star. Instead of dumping players into the main menu upon finishing this tutorial, I propose it would be more beneficial to drop new players into a match against AI bots. While this match also gives players a safer, pressure-free environment to test out their fancy moves before letting down real teammates, it also serves a hidden dual function; placement. How well the player does here determines their starting position, getting players into similarly comfortable teams faster.

The tutorial ends with a montage of your character going pro, but this marks when it’s time for the first match against real opponents.

An Unexpected Pivot

Let me employ a trademark tangent and tell you all about a seemingly unrelated game called Onrush.

Onrush is a racing game by Codemasters from 2018. While everyone else was busy making racing games, the Onrush team made the dumbest, most arcadey car game ever. It featured power ups, combat mechanics (somehow), and non-traditional modes like King of the Hill or Deathmatch, all of which somehow worked perfectly in a racing game. You might be wondering why you haven’t heard of Onrush until now, and the answer is simple — no one showed up to play it. Despite a strong presentation, Onrush went to the great junkyard in the sky. The servers went down in 2022 and aside from YouTube clips and a few lingering screenshots, it's now lost to the world.

Rematch needs defenders, now more than ever. While it certainly has problems, these issues are relatively minor in the grand scheme of what Sloclap has already accomplished. We have seen the same soccer game again and again for thirty years, but finally, we have something novel. A mix between Rocket League, Sifu, and Soccer, with grand potential to be a thrilling competitive event. In a perfect world I’d love to see Rematch someday emulate the UEFA format; three different leagues, promotions and demotions at the end of each season. The works.

We never get to that world if Rematch fades away. Right now, this has the potential to be the greatest soccer game ever made. I’m placing my trust in Sloclap to prove it, and also you, to help keep it alive until the day comes.

(Rematch is now available on Steam, PS5, and Xbox for $29.99. It's also available on Xbox Game Pass. Given how Gundam Evolution panned out, we’re about to also find out if these articles in defense of new games save the day, or I’ve just become a herald of doom.)