I was initially sceptical of Rematch, wondering why the team behind intricate martial arts games Absolver and Sifu were making what looked like an awkward turn to street rules football. But that early doubt was almost immediately overhauled by a sports game that’s bizarrely true-to-life – warts and all.

Rematch is a small-sided football game, in which you play in teams of either three, four, or five players. Unlike the FIFA or Madden genre giants, however, Rematch places you in control not of the whole team, but a single player. The focus, true to developer Sloclap’s previous work, is on physicality. You’ve got intricate control of your player, and that transfers to intricate control of the ball – you’re responsible for accurately threading passes, placing tackles, or aiming shots.

While the made-for-TV perspective of major sports games is built around precise passing at the press of a button, Rematch opts instead for the success and failures of real-life sport. If you want to send a long pass up to a striker, you have to aim and weight it correctly. If you dive in for a tackle at the wrong moment, you’ll leave your keeper undefended. If you want to hammer home a volley as the ball is crossed into the box, you’ll have to get your positioning right to ensure you actually direct your shot towards the goal.

Liquid Football

Granted, there are a few instances that are not quite so true-to-life. In all my time playing 5-a-side football, I never saw anyone alley-oop the ball off the back wall and then score a ridiculous flying bicycle kick off their own setup. Nor did I see all that many goalkeepers leaping like the proverbial salmon for an outstanding diving save. But I did see (and feel) the frustration of a missed tackle or a pass that’s just a little too heavy for a striker to run onto.

The result is that within minutes of playing Rematch over Discord with some friends, I felt myself slipping back into my old 5-a-side boots. Callouts that I hadn’t used in years found themselves pouring forth almost instinctively as I shouted for passes or warned of encroaching opponents. The same feeling of satisfaction over a solid pass or tackle swelled within me, as did the feeling of self-disgust when a trickster on the enemy team broke my virtual ankles with a piece of skill that left me in the dirt.

The price of Rematch’s authenticity is that it doesn’t just match the highs of team sports, it also captures the lows. But while one of those real-life lows was dealing with the skill-gap, in most of my real-life games, my opponents weren’t rainbow flicking the ball over my head to set themselves up for a flying volley off the back wall. What Rematch captures far more accurately, however, is arguably the biggest low of any amateur team sport: learning to deal with your team.

Eat my goal

If it took minutes for my 5-a-side communication to come back to me, it only took seconds before I started to recognize a few very particular types of players. The ball-hogs who would never even look to pass, attempting instead to trick their way around their opponents before inevitably losing the ball for absolutely no gain. The goal-hangers who could invariably be found hovering around the enemy penalty box, but could never be prevailed upon to track back when the other team were on the attack. The never-keepers who would immediately abandon their defensive duties, leaving the goal completely open. Without exception, these players would be the noisiest on the pitch – if they weren’t endlessly calling for the ball, they were mouthing off if you made a mistake, oblivious to their own role in the team’s downfall.

Two things make all this sting more than normal. In real-life, I’m a defensively-minded player, happy to hold back from joining the attack or take my stint in goal. But in Rematch, that means very rarely getting the ball, which often means a lower-than-average personal score at the end of the game, turning you into an easy scapegoat if things have gone badly. Even worse is the fact that the game desperately tries to cut off these selfish behaviors straight away.

The mandatory opening tutorial is all about a player who has to learn to be part of a team rather than chasing personal glory. There are several different cutscenes about him being cut from his team because he never passes to his open teammates. The tutorial is peppered with drills about passing and defending, attempting to show how being a team player is more important than simply firing a screamer towards the top corner.

It’s a parable that’s about as subtle as a Christiano Ronaldo celebration, and it does seem to have landed for the majority of Rematch players. But you can always spot the player who never quite learned that there’s no ‘I’ in team. And while that might be frustrating during a given match, it is testament to just how authentic this game can be. There’s room for all types of players – even the ones you’d prefer to have simply stuck with FIFA.

Check out our Rematch review.