The creators of Sifu and Absolver are making a football game, set many decades from now

master and absolve Developer Sloclap has announced the summer 2025 release of Rematch, a 5v5 multiplayer football game with a science fiction feel. I am also discouraged to find this news. football? We already have it at home. It’s like martial arts, but all you can kick are some… ball.

I’m not sure I’ll ever fully swallow my disappointment, but to its credit, Rematch does look like both an enjoyable game and a quietly subversive one. It also resonated with me because it was a new way into sports culture, which I had mixed feelings about.

The first thing to understand about Rematch is that it’s third-person and you can only control one character at a time, including when you don’t have the ball. This directly differentiates the game from the top-down FIFA and Pro Evos, where you jump between player bodies and hand over control to artificial intelligence.

When not in possession of the ball, you’ll be moving around the pitch, positioning yourself to receive passes, marking opponents and communicating with your friends using voice chat or the message wheel – in short, becoming part of a football team. Collaboration beyond individual talent is very much the ethos of Rematch, with Sloclap co-founder Pierre Tarno remarking in a hands-off speech that “delivering the perfect assist is more satisfying than scoring for yourself.” I’ll let you brave centers be the judge of that statement.

It may not be a kung fu fighter, but “The Rematch” looks like the work of someone who knows kung fu. While there is a choice of body type, the players are all majestic athletes, dancing around the ball and performing moves like bicycle kicks that would put me in the hospital forever. The game is in the same vein as Sifu, with graphic novel-esque character models that glow from within but have believable proportions and weight.

The controls are simple, as I can feel them in Tarno’s dramatic gestures through the webcam, with the same button used for different things in different situations. However, there are more specialized mechanics for the defenders, who will automatically intercept shots in certain situations, while the goalkeeper can sprint and tackle the ball, but can also push forward into a midfielder role if necessary. .

Sloclap is particularly proud of the game’s volleying moves, kicking the ball before it hits the ground, because of how they speed up the tempo, make passing feel more exciting, and encourage you to “share the ball” (to paraphrase Tarnow’s Youth Idyll words).

They also feel really good about the game’s online features – I can see no single player – which draw on everything they learned in PvP-oriented Absolution. Rematch will have dedicated servers and support private games and custom lobbies where players can organize tournaments and tweak the rules. It’s an instant-service game, but in a less contrived way than Destiny’s habit of reigniting solar system wars. As Tarnow puts it, Rematch borrows “the vocabulary of a real football season,” with new modes, environments and decorations arriving just in time.

You might be wondering when we’re going to delve into science fiction stuff. Before we begin, allow me to offer some homely reflections on my football experience, which I somewhat despise but also feel I have grossly misunderstood. To me, football has always been a game played by bullies. As a kid, I associated it with kids attacking me for not being manly enough (I played lawn hockey instead, which, as I would menacingly point out to people, meant I could carry a big stick around walking around school). As an adult, I associate it with grown men yelling at young children in the street. At Home: Have an Sorry Relevance The relationship between England’s losing matches and domestic violence. As Britain’s ‘national sport’, football has an inescapable association with jingoism, and as a multi-billion pound industry it is equally prone to corruption and corruption. morally compromised partnership As tends to happen in multi-billion pound industries.

If you think I sound like a drive-by killjoy, you’re guilty. While I think my ambivalence was well-founded, I never really understood football. One thing I don’t understand is how it fits into Britain’s toxic class system. As Alice Bee (RPS in Peace) once cruelly summed it up, I was “the ultimate middle class” and while English football had a strong working class culture, in hindsight I think my apathy as a teenager was just snobbery. As I got older, I also began to realize the value of football as a source of community because it was relatively easy to pick up and play. In particular, I’ve been thinking lately about how useful it could be for people in isolation, including people with disabilities who might need assistance with fitness.

With all of this in mind, what really fascinates me about The Rematch is its role as a social force tied directly to the beautiful game, a way to bring people together and organize their worlds. It attempts to “distill” the best pastimes, and if the success of the project remains to be seen, then the project is worth discussing.

This is where science fiction comes in: The Rematch is set in the near future, a more “sustainable and fairer” near future where renewable technologies are ubiquitous. The stadium is an animated holographic box with a similar appearance rocket leaguedomed stadium that relays the game scores along with beautiful images of the world beyond: windmills turning under a flawless sky, shimmering coral reefs, silvery cities and picturesque sunsets that would not look out of place in the Pardoner Out of place. From a more practical perspective, the walled-stadium format means the ball never stops playing, which makes for faster play with fewer breaks.

It’s all very “hope-punk” and runs the risk of being smug and shallow, a post-historical paradise where all the bad stuff has been politely deleted. It’s not intended to be sophisticated social commentary, either: as Tarnow said when I asked if Remake takes any stance on today’s football world, “We kind of shy away from that – we do our own thing”.

The optimism isn’t just reflected in the scenery, however: it can be felt on the pitch, too. There were no fouls in the bubble, and therefore no referees, which means people are done with this nonsense. There are also mixed gender teams. Currently, there are few traces of football as an industry: no real-world licenses, and no star players being traded for eye-popping transfer prices, although Sloclap doesn’t rule out a future “with the themes and values ​​of this game.”

“It’s not about how many fans you have or money or anything like that,” Tarnow continued. “I think in the near future, the values ​​have moved in a more positive and collaborative direction, where it’s more about the team rather than the star player. Everyone is important. This also translates into the game mechanics, because you’re always rotating. As the situation develops, the players on the court will change dynamically as the situation changes, so it’s not like there is a star forward or something.

“Even in terms of scoring, we don’t want to overvalue the higher-scoring players,” he said. “Because the score is really the result of all the team effort behind you, and you’re just the last step in a series of successful challenges.” Tarnow noted that the game’s title doesn’t prioritize the concept of winning, as it suggests you’ve already lost a game.

All of this is again worthy of cynicism. You might say that you don’t need to jump ahead to Tomorrow’s Wakanda for decades to master the community features of friendly futsal. The premise of Holodeck Stadium is appealing, but it’s rather solipsistic and perhaps a little dystopian: Can the players leave their boxes? Is the crowd bigger than the wallpaper? But even if “The Replay” proves to be superficial, even sinister, I think it deserves attention because it treats football as a site of world-building, a portal to all kinds of futures. I’d love to try it and see if it helps me put some demons to rest. That said, the Absolver will follow whenever you’re ready, Sloclap.

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