France-based indie game studio SloClap released their latest title, Rematch, to PC, Xbox, and PlayStation gamers this past September after lengthy early access beta period, which began back in June. The teamwork-focused arcade soccer (football) game was a hit early on with fans around the world, thanks to similarities between Psyonix’s Rocket League, given a realistic twist as you play as a single player on a team of 3, 4, or 5. Transparent walls surround the pitch, keeping the ball and players from exiting while allowing for exhilarating passing plays off the wall to yourself or to your teammates. With this intriguing mechanic in a soccer game, the likes the world had yet to see, it’s no wonder the game’s Steam beta test saw a concurrent player peak of nearly 160,000, and upon the game’s release, it saw over 3 million unique players between Xbox and PC alone.
In the few months since Rematch’s release, however, fans have slowly begun moving away from it as updates became sporadic and seemingly inconsequential, leading to the concurrent player count to drop from its peak to just around 5,000 as of today. Much-needed bug fixes were put in place by the developers to iron out all of the kinks in the game’s glitchy code, but even after their implementation, players would often still find themselves faced with the game’s primary flaw: being disconnected from the game’s servers mid-match. Season 1 kicked off on September 23, seeing the introduction of cross-platform play at the request of much of the game’s community; however, this addition has so far been unable to bring back the players who left. Today, we see the announcement of the third chapter in Rematch’s first official season, with the typical additions of new character, ball, and field cosmetics. Alongside chapter 3’s announcement came the surprise unveiling of a brand new limited-time game mode called Fireball.
The trailer released by SloClap briefly goes over the new additions to chapter 3, only giving fans a glimpse at the new mode, further explaining in the video’s description that Fireball is designed to challenge players’ teamwork skills. Due to Rematch’s nature as a teamwork-focused soccer game, where each player takes on the role of an individual player on a team, passing between teammates is as important as it is in real life. That being said, it seems Fireball was designed to keep players from ball hogging, a phenomenon rampant among new players to the game. Players will have to pass and intercept the ball to build the ball’s “heat”—represented as a rising and lowering circular meter at the top-center of the screen—to ultimately score a goal of up to five points in a single shot. Based on trailer footage, players on both teams will be expected to shoot the ball at circular targets that color the wall’s borders as opposed to the traditional two-goal soccer field setup. Based on the trailer, we can also see that this mode may likely be a 4v4 only mode; however, as Rematch can support teams up to five, there is the possibility that this mode will be playable for all of the game’s available team sizes.
Despite Rematch’s vast fall off after its initial launch and early access periods, players will hopefully begin returning to the field as SloClap rolls out exciting new limited-time modes and game-altering balance and bug patches.
Rematch Season 1 Chapter 3 began this past November 5, and the upcoming limited-time Fireball mode is planned for release later this month.