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The 5-on-5 football game REMATCH takes aim at Rocket League and we played the title extensively ahead of its open beta this weekend.
Last weekend, media was able to play the upcoming football game REMATCH, which will be released on June 19th for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S (also included in PC Game Pass and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate). With a little luck, you’ll get to kick the ball yourself this weekend, as the beta will open up to the general public. You can sign up for it on the official website.
The beta offered a total of four different modes: friendlies, ranked matches, training and workshops. While we managed to learn the basics in training, we put our skills to the test in workshops. These are challenges in which we were asked to dribble in a slalom or test our shot accuracy. Online multiplayer is the heart and soul of REMATCH, which will also work cross-platform in the full version. The party system already worked quite well, with the exception that we couldn’t limit voice chat to our group, though we were only able to turn it on and off globally – these days everyone uses Discord or an alternative anyway. In the beta, we were able to compete against each other in 4v4 and 5v5 matches. A match lasts six minutes and the goalie is determined by the game after each kickoff. There is no referee, so there are no fouls, offside, out-of-bounds, free kicks, penalties and corners. Even though the arenas aren’t very constrained, the pitch is bordered by walls from which the ball bounces, which is great for passing or rebound volleys.
We control our player from the third-person perspective and are able to look around freely. At the touch of a button, we can also activate camera support, which allows us to keep an eye on the ball at all times. However, unlike in its obvious competitor Rocket League, we can still move the camera in that mode, which takes some getting used to. If the opposing team has possession of the ball, we can use a tackle, slide tackle, sprint (including a slowly recharging super boost), mark opponents and as soon as we enter our own penalty area and there’s no team mate behind us, we automatically put on gloves and become the goalkeeper. Then we can no longer tackle, which can be fatal, especially in one-on-one confrontations with strikers, but instead jump into every direction. The jumping behavior is a bit odd, as it feels somewhat clumsy and inaccurate. This quickly leads to a lot of embarrassing goals and doesn’t exactly make you want to go on and have a goalie career. With a little getting used to it, it works reasonably well, but you don’t seem to have 100% control.
Quick reactions are also key when you’re in the offensive. Once you have the ball, you can dribble, perform tricks, pass and shoot. However, as soon as you start sprinting, the ball tends to bounce away. Therefore, most players use the relatively easy-to-perform tricks to maintain possession. After all, at the leisurely regular pace, you are left vulnerable against enemy sliding tackles, which you can be timed relatively precisely. Passing and crossing require a high degree of precision and this is where teamplay is key. Once you’ve finally made it to the opponent’s goal, you have many options at your disposal: fire it into the top corner, chip it over the keeper or pass to a team mate. The latter, just like once you go public in EA Sports FC or eFootball, happens extremely rarely. If you manage to time a cross with a skillful shot from the nonexistent corner flag, your mate can also unleash a volley – also as a bicycle or scissor kick. Each goal sets a replay in motion, which is quite short and can be stopped if enough players vote for it to be skipped – regardless of whether it’s a spectacular goal or an embarrassing own goal, which is credited to the last player on the attacking team who touched the ball. Unlike Rocket League, we weren’t able to save goal replays or replays of the entire match in the beta. If the score is tied after six minutes, the “golden goal” rule applies—the next team to score wins, with no time limit. So, if no goal is scored for ten minutes, the clock continues to tick upwards.
While matches on the European servers were relatively lag-free, the situation on the US servers was, as expected, quite different. We didn’t find an option to select a server region in the pre-release version—this feature absolutely must be included in the final game. Furthermore, matchmaking repeatedly crashed after a match was completed. However, the subsequent matchmaking was always pretty short. At the start of the game, we can pick between home/away/captain’s jerseys, which we designed ourselves in the menu. We didn’t see which jerseys the other team would be wearing, which made for difficult orange versus red duels. We can decorate and set the colors of our jerseys as we wish and we are also able also customize our character relatively freely, although there should be a larger selection of hairstyles and faces. Two in-game currencies can be used in the store to purchase cosmetics uch as hats or shirts. We don’t know if you’ll be able to pay real money in exchange for these currencies in the full version. In the preview version, the store was limited exclusively to cosmetic items, and players didn’t have varying stats or skills. Unlike Rocket League, where cars have different stats based on their specific build (similar to Mario Kart), every player is equal in REMATCH. We missed the customizable goal explosions, we’ve come to love in Rocket League.
REMATCH uses a cel-shaded graphic style that’s mostly appealing without looking particularly spectacular or sacrificing performance. The back drop of our stadium changes regularly, ranging from a metropolitan stadium, over a desert setting to a jungle in which monkeys are running wild. However, if the ball is at the edge of the field, we can see the graphic layer behind it, which looks a bit odd.
Final thoughts
REMATCH is a decent 5-on-5 football game with a relatively low entry barrier and plenty of potential long-term motivation to both improve your skills at the ball and to perform better with your team. However, in matchmaking with random players, there’s usually little sense of teamplay and the matches become a duel of egos. However, if the effectiveness of certain tricks was to be reduced, even the most egoistic players would be forced to pass the ball from time to time, as it regularly happens in Rocket League. REMATCH offers many customization options in terms of character design and jerseys, even if the store was still somewhat empty with only a handful of rather bland items. Similar to its competitor from Psyonix, REMATCH should benefit from being released on a subscription service, in this case Xbox Game Pass, which will hopefully ensure a stable player base. The target price of the Standard Edition of €24.99 is not disproportionately high, but with such a large selection of free-to-play titles that we have these days, it will be difficult to ensure getting into a new match online frequently, especially after REMATCH has potentially left Game Pass. We’re curious how well REMATCH will do during its open beta weekend and once it’s available day one on Game Pass.
Kepler Interactive provided us with beta access of REMATCH on PC.
