Sloclap has successfully captured what kicking a ball around with friends as a kid felt like, making it a perfect companion piece to Despelote.
It’s no secret I don’t vibe with football (or soccer, whatever you want to call it) much despite it being Spain’s biggest national pastime, especially when teams like the Real Madrid or Barcelona are on TV. It just doesn’t run in the family. That didn’t save me from having to kick footballs around with friends during warm summer evenings, and Sloclap’s Rematch has really nailed that feeling of “sure, one more game” even when you’re no sports fanatic.
For the record, I’ve also traditionally ignored the massive football game series from EA and Konami. Maybe I dipped my toes into a bit of Mario Strikers with friends, but I just can’t pretend to care about a bunch of people running after a ball and scoring goals for a way-too-long amount of time. So, what makes Rematch so special and engaging? In my case, the first thing that comes to mind is its brevity. Whether you win or lose, it’s the sort of perfect competitive online video game which demands very little from players. You can just pick it up for like 15 minutes, have a couple of matches, and feel super accomplished… or utterly crushed.
The fact it also doesn’t care about football’s more complex aspects and regular ruleset at all is also a plus. Fouls? Not a thing. Corner kicks? Don’t care. Hell, the ball can’t even leave the field. Instead, you can kick it on purpose against the futuristic energy walls to throw the entire enemy team off and demolish them with a well-executed overhead kick. It doesn’t take much to pull such moves off either. Here’s a small field. Here are equally tiny teams. Here’s the ball. Go score as many times as you can. No long tutorial needed.
Much like FPS video games which take the genre’s core tenets and distill everything that makes them appealing into a quick blast of uncomplicated fun, Rematch posits the radical idea of making football as accessible as it can be, but without a gimmick like RC cars which tricks gamers into thinking they’re playing something other than football. It’s not “football for dummies” either. The entry barrier might be low, but as in every player-versus-player which actually has juice, the skill ceiling is high. Better work on those tricks and more flowery moves if you want to reach the higher ranks. You’ll be okay if you just want to shoot the shit with friends or randos though.
Rematch’s unexpectedly effective and lightweight formula takes me back to the early 2000s, back when I was a wee lad who spent a lot of time swimming after school but very little in competitive sports. When the weekend came, however, I was “forced” by friends into street football matches with no definite field of play or time limits. What about rules? Everyone seemed to make them up on the spot, which, as you’d imagine, resulted in many heated arguments. Kids are like that. Since I knew jack shit about the real thing beyond maybe watching the rare match where the national Spanish team was about to win something big, I just sat back and waited, wishing I was playing Warcraft 3 at home instead. It sounds a bit familiar because the narrative-oriented indie Despelote (set in Ecuador instead of Spain) also examined childhood and growing up in the 2000s through the lens of football as a national obsession.
Unlike Julián, I wasn’t any good at chasing or kicking the football. I could say I managed well enough on defense – mostly as a big obstacle to get past – but I hated when I was asked to run with a ball without losing it or to be a reliable goalkeeper. I wasn’t put on this Earth to do those things well. Since I don’t have to use my real legs and (poor) stamina in a video game, Rematch is a totally different story: After only a few hours, I was pulling off sick tricks and had a grasp on distances, good positioning, and whatnot. This suggests maybe I could enjoy the big-boy football video games, but again, I’m not that interested.
That’s the main difference between me and Despelote’s protagonist: He cared, perhaps too much, about football. It’s what he dreamed of every waking moment, at least until he was forced into growing up and following a life path away from the ball. I was (and still am) the opposite and regularly am shocked by how much it means to millions of people worldwide. I’m a “fan” of many things, but I just never understood having a religious-like fervor for, well, anything. I can see the basic appeal of it all though. In practice, however, I almost always answered the call to play “fake football” for a few hours just to hang around with pals and away from the screens. It’s now been like two decades since that last time I did that.
Maybe that’s why Rematch resonated with me. By pushing the headache-inducing noise around football aside and focusing on its central loop, it illuminates why it’s the biggest competitive sport in the world, no matter what your previous experience is. Anyone can understand football. For me, it also was a painless way to realize I actually had a lot of healthy fun sucking at it right before starting high school and life getting complicated. We were lucky enough to have long and carefree summers back in the day, and video games, trading card games, and hide-and-seek weren’t enough to please everyone over entire afternoons and evenings.
Fast-forward to 2025 and I’m still trying to work out my complicated relationship with this damned sport. Maybe I low-key enjoy it after all; maybe there’s more than one way to engage with it, away from large crowds and verbal abuse. I resent the kids that often shouted at me because I was bad at the sport I hadn’t voted to play, but also appreciate the ones who didn’t take a random street match too seriously. There was fun to be had that way, and Rematch channels that energy even if the space to act all sweaty is right there as well.
