Sifu and Absolver developers Sloclap have announced Rematch, a 5v5 multiplayer football game with a gentle dusting of science fiction, out in summer 2025. If, like me, you really enjoyed the French developers’ previous martial art sims, you might, like me, find this news deflating. Football? We already have that at home. It’s like a martial art, but all you get to kick is some… ball.
I’m not sure I’ll ever entirely swallow my disappointment, but credit where it’s due, Rematch does look like both an enjoyable game and a quietly disruptive one. It’s also struck a chord with me inasmuch as it’s a new way into the culture of a sport which I have pretty mixed feelings about.
The first things to know about Rematch are that it’s third-person and you only control one character at once, including when you don’t have the ball. This separates the game straightforwardly from your top-down FIFAs and Pro Evos, in which you leap between the bodies of players, handing off control to the AI.
When not in possession of the ball, you’ll move around the pitch, position yourself to receive passes, mark opponents and communicate with your buddies using voice chat or a message wheel – be part of a football team, in short. Collaboration over individual flair is very much the Rematch ethos, with Sloclap co-founder Pierre Tarno commenting during a hands-off presentation that “it can be more satisfying to serve the perfect assist, than to actually score yourself”. I’ll let you daredevil centre-forwards be the judge of that claim.
It might not be a kung fu fighter, but Rematch looks like the work of people who know kung fu. While there’s a choice of body types, the players are all majestic athletes, dancing around the ball and performing moves such as bicycle kicks that would put me in the hospital for good. The game cleaves from the same vein of stylisation as Sifu, with graphic novel-esque character models that sort of glow from within, but have believable proportions and heft.
The controls – inasmuch as I could get a sense of them from Tarno’s theatrical hand gestures over webcam – are simple, with the same button used for different things in different contexts. There are, however, a few more specialised mechanics for defenders, who sort of auto-intercept shots in certain conditions, and goalies, who can lunge and dive for the ball but also, push forward into the role of midfielder where necessary.
Sloclap are particularly proud of the game’s volley actions, aka kicking the ball before it lands, both for how they up the tempo and for how they make passing feel more exciting and encourage you to “share the ball”, in Tarno’s youth-pastorly phrase.
They’re also feeling pretty good about the game’s online functionality – there’s no single player, that I can see – which draws upon everything they’ve learned with the PvP-oriented Absolver. Rematch will have dedicated servers, together with support for private games and custom lobbies, where players can organise tournaments and tweak the rules. It’s a live service game, but in a less contrived way than, say, Destiny’s habit of reigniting the war for our solar system. Rematch borrows “the vocabulary of real football seasons”, as Tarno went on, with new modes, environments and cosmetics arriving in time.
You’re likely wondering when we’re going to dig into the sci-fi stuff. Before we do, permit me some navel-gazing about my experience of football, which I kind of despise, but also feel like I grossly misunderstand. Football, for me, has historically been the game bullies play. As a child, I associated it with kids getting in my face for not being macho enough (I played grass hockey instead, which – as I would menacingly point out to people – meant that I could walk around school armed with a big stick). As an adult I associate it with grown men acting like bellowing toddlers in the street. And at home: there’s a sorry correlation between England losing a match and domestic violence. As the UK’s “national sport”, football has an inescapable association with jingoism, and as a billion-pound industry, it’s as prone to corruption and morally compromised partnerships as billion-pound industries tend to be.
If you’re thinking I sound like a drive-by killjoy ignoramus, guilty as charged. While I think there are solid reasons for my ambivalence, I’ve never really understood football. One thing I haven’t understood is how it fits into Britain’s noxious class system. I’m “terminally middle class”, as Alice Bee (RPS in peace) once mercilessly summarised, whereas UK football has a strong working class culture, and in hindsight, I think some of my apathy as a young teenager was simple snobbery. As I’ve got older, I’ve also come to appreciate the value of football as a source of community, given that football is relatively easy to grasp and play. In particular, I’ve been thinking lately about how useful it can be for isolated people, including disabled people who might need a hand with their fitness.
With all that in mind, the thing that really intrigues me about Rematch is that it engages directly with the Beautiful Game as a social force, a way of bringing people together and organising their worlds. It’s trying to “distill” the best of the pastime, and if the success of that project remains to be seen, the project is worth discussing.
This is where the sci-fi stuff comes in: Rematch is set in the near-future, a near-future that is more “more sustainable and fair”, where renewable technologies are ubiquitous. The stadiums are animated holographic boxes, similar in appearance to Rocket League’s domed pitches, which beam forth the match score together with handsome images of the world beyond: windmills turning against immaculate skies, flickering coral reefs, silvery cities and painterly sunsets that wouldn’t look out of place in Absolver. On a more practical level, the walled stadium format means that the ball never goes out of play, which makes for faster games with fewer breaks.
It’s all very ‘hopepunk’, and risks being smug and shallow, a post-historical paradise in which all the Bad Stuff has been politely erased. It’s also not intended as complex social commentary: as Tarno put it when I asked whether Remake takes any kind of stance on the present-day football biz, “we kind of sidestep this – we do our own thing”.
The optimism isn’t just scenery, however: it’s felt at the level of the pitch. There are no fouls in Rematch, and therefore no referees, the implication being that people have sort of outgrown that nonsense. There are mixed-gender teams, as well. And there is little trace, for the moment, of football as an industry: no real-world licenses and no star players trading for eye-watering transfer prices, though Sloclap don’t rule out commercial partnerships down the road that “align with the themes and values of this game”.
“It’s not about how many fans you have, or money, stuff like that,” Tarno went on. “I think that in this near-future where values have evolved towards something more positive and collaborative, it’s more about the team than it is the star players. Everybody is important. And that translates to the game mechanics, because you’re always rotating on the field dynamically, as the situation evolves, and so it’s not like there’s a star striker, or whatever.
“Even in terms of scoring, we don’t want to over-index on a player who scored more,” he said. “Because scoring is really the result of all the team effort behind you, and you’re just the last step in a chain of successful challenges.” The game’s title, Tarno noted, deprioritises the idea of victory, because it suggests that you’ve already lost a match.
All this merits a dollop of cynicism, again. You could argue that you don’t need to jump forward several decades into the Wakandan tomorrow to grasp the community function of a friendly five-a-side. The holodeck stadium premise is easy on the eyes, but it’s rather solipsistic, perhaps a little dystopian: do the players ever get to leave the box? Are the crowds more than wallpaper? But even if Rematch proves shallow or even sinister, I think it deserves attention for thinking about football as a site for worldbuilding, a portal to various futures. I’m keen to give it a try and see if it helps me lay certain demons to rest. That said – Absolver follow-up whenever you’re ready, Sloclap.
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