Soccer fans should be paying attention to Rematch, the 5v5 game coming this summer from the developer of martial arts hit Sifu

Rematch - Release Date Trailer | The Triple-i Initiative - YouTube

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French game developer Sloclap is known for martial arts games Absolver and Sifu, both of which are very good in my estimation. I also love competitive (car) soccer game Rocket League. So I'm pretty excited for the combination of these things: Rematch, a 5v5 competitive soccer game from Sloclap.

Rematch will be out on June 19, Sloclap announced at today's Triple-I Initiative showcase. A closed beta is happening this weekend, too—you can find details on the Steam page.

There is one thing preventing me from being exactly the kind of person Remach is made for, which is that my Canadian and American upbringing has left me preferring Rocket League's hockey mode to its regular soccer mode.

If only I had some strong familial connection to almost anywhere else in the world, where soccer is a religion (orthodox football, as they call it), I'd be the ideal Rematch player. But I still think it's a great idea.

Sloclap's experience designing complex martial arts systems seems a natural fit for ball handling, and there's a lot of fertile ground still to explore in this sort of multiplayer sports game design.

Rocket League is so fun because while it's abstract in some ways (the flying cars, mainly), it is not abstract in the way a lot of sports games are, where players control a whole field of little athletes. It's a team-based physics game, which makes it feel more like actually playing a sport than most sports games, despite the rocket engines.

Rematch doesn't go full QWOP and make you control your limbs individually or anything, but it's also a sports game in which each player controls one athlete, and so at the tactics level, it looks like you've got to play it something like you'd play soccer—relying on your teammates to be where you need them to be to receive passes and cut off advances from your opponents.

At least, I assume that's the kind of thing real soccer players think about, but alas, all the terminology I could apply is related to sticks and ice.