A Rematch Button May Come To Rematch One Day, But Probably Not Until Season 3

Rematch has been a welcome surprise from developer Sloclap, which repurposed the acrobatic movement and target tracking of martial-arts-inspired fighters Absolver and Sifu to make a cooperative third-person soccer “shooter” game. Rematch is currently in the midst of the first season of its live-service run, which implemented tons of bug fixes and the long-requested Ranked 3v3 mode. One of the most requested features still remains absent, however. Since the game launched, players have clamored for Rematch to have a “rematch” button so that teams can try to get revenge on an opponent. And while the feature isn’t coming this season (and may not ever happen), Sloclap is aware of the desire, and it’s working on it.

“I’m not in any way going to commit to it, but [a rematch button] was originally planned for Season 2 and now it’s more likely planned for Season 3,” Rematch creative director Pierre Tarno told me. “The first thing is to work on a ‘team up’ button. I want to be able to say, ‘Those were cool teammates. I enjoyed playing with those guys. There was not any Blue Lock fan roleplaying as a Neo Egoist.’ Being able to say to those guys that you want to team up and be a group together is what we’re working on first.”

The team is still working on adjustments to the moment-to-moment of gameplay as well. Tarno spoke to how tricky fine-tuning Rematch’s mechanics are because every change is immediately evident to all players: a problem not evident in most live-service games.

“Every interaction [in Rematch] has the potential to determine the actual outcome of the game, and you [need to] factor in the fact that everybody’s always watching,” Tarno said. “Because contrary to other games, you’ve got 10 players on a flat field looking at the same point all the time.”

Tarno compared this to games like Overwatch 2 or Apex Legends where each interaction during a match is largely unseen. If you’re in a firefight and think an aspect of it is unfair, your issue is largely private to you. These games have huge maps with tall walls and enclosed spaces, dividing every aspect of every match into several separate interactions. But in Rematch, anything that happens to one player in a match is seen by every other player in the match. Small tweaks to how a mechanic works become immediately apparent.

“If your tackle seems to go through but doesn’t, and you’re like, ‘I am sure that this tackle should have gone through,’ [and] all other players can see that it should have,” Tarno said. “And that puts a very, very high bar [on] our execution.”

This is partially why Season 1 doesn’t take any huge swings to how Rematch works mechanically, but larger changes are coming as Sloclap grows accustomed to what players want from the game.

“Of course, we want to take into account players’ habits and what they’ve gotten used to, but if we feel that something is needed and that needs a strong evolution, we’ll take that step,” Tarno said. “An example is something that is [being] planned for [but] probably [isn’t coming until] like March: volley contacts. That’s how we resolve situations where two people are going for volley action on the same ball.”

In Rematch, a volley action is a reaction you can take when the ball is approaching you through the air and is just entering your reach. These include actions like a header, back-heel pass, and Rematch’s most acrobatic kicks. They’re a major part of the game, but seemingly, at the moment, there is no concrete ruling in place as to which player gets priority if two or more players are attempting a volley action simultaneously.

“Patch 5, which is [out now], will already refine the [volley action] system by adding priorities to the one who is closer to the ball’s trajectory,” Tarno said. “But that’s not sufficient. It’s a necessary change for now–it will probably improve fairness in a lot of situations–but it also probably amplifies what the high-level players call the missile meta, which is having a main tactic of [delivering] a long cross to the penalty area and hoping that your attacker will get the priority on the ball and probably a shot on the goal.”

To avoid making the missile meta the go-to tactic and ensure players are further encouraged to adapt and evolve and develop new strategies, the Sloclap team wants to further iterate on the volley system in future patches, putting priority on certain actions and player placement that go beyond who is closest to the ball. A version of this sort of already exists in Rematch–the goalkeeper’s lunges and dives have priority over all other actions, grabbing and picking up the ball no matter its speed or angle if the goalkeeper positions themselves correctly.

Following Patch 5, Rematch is scheduled to get one more major update for Season 1: a brand-new mode. “The two core, most popular game modes today are Ranked 5v5 and 3v3, but I think very engaged players also want a–I don’t like the word, but–palette cleansing. Something that makes them go, ‘I’m going to jump in something else, refresh, and have a different approach [for the next match]. The new mode’s challenges are a bit different.”

He continued: “I think it’s a welcome change. I appreciate [how it will] toy at the heart of the game, which is your character and how you manipulate them and how they interact with the ball. And without spoiling too much, the vision behind [the new mode] is reinforcing team play and passing the ball within the team. And, hopefully, it will improve your passes and improve your vision, like, ‘Where are my teammates? Where should I pass to them?’ and hopefully this will translate to the main game and incentivize players to pass more.”

After the release of that new mode, the Sloclap team will be totally focused on Season 2 and everything scheduled to come to the game in 2026. A lot of the changes coming are inspired by Rocket League, the game often used in comparison with Rematch.

“We’ve actually started designing new callouts,” Tarno told me. “There’s the voice recording stuff, so it won’t be coming until like Season 2, but we’re probably going to orient ourselves towards a kind of communication system similar to Rocket League.”

Currently, in Rematch, there are only four callouts: Good Job, We Got This, Sorry, and Thank You. Rocket League has dozens of callouts and you can program which 16 you want to use at a time, allowing you to react to a lot more of the match than what you can do in Rematch. I’ve wanted Rematch to blatantly copy this aspect of Rocket League since day one, if for no other reason than to have an option of saying “Nice Pass” to a teammate who perfectly sets me up for the goal I just made. I can’t say Good Job. I–and so many other Rematch players–use Good Job to sarcastically condemn people who mess up. And Sloclap knows this is what the community uses Good Job for. Their team members use it in the exact same way.

“I think we’ll probably introduce negative stuff in [the new callouts], like being able to say You Should Have Passed or stuff like that,” Tarno said. “Because if you don’t do that, players will continue to use what should be positive options from the existing comms in a passive-aggressive way.”

Also like Rocket League, Rematch will be getting leaver penalties and a forfeit-match option in the future. “I think there will be multiple patches for that,” Tarno said. “The first one, which we’ll introduce quite soon, is a leaver penalty in terms of if you leave during the game, you’re not allowed to matchmake for X number of minutes, which hopefully stops players [from just leaving] when they’re losing 2-0, and there’s still four minutes on the clock and you can 100% still come back. And then, probably also as Rocket League does it, introducing a forfeit option. If you’re losing 3-0 and there’s one minute left on the clock, maybe you could collectively say, ‘Okay guys, let’s call it quits.’ But that’s a little further down the line.”

Rematch is available for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC.