Despite being a rival football game, Rematch is no simple recreation of FIFA, according to devs who argue that the two titles are trying to capture completely different parts of the experience of playing.
Speaking to PC Gamer, creative director Pierre Tarno explained that Rematch is all about making players "feel like an amazing athlete." Developer Sloclap, he explains, wants you "to feel the high-stakes pressure of football. We were trying to get to that core essence of at least part of what makes football so much fun and a beautiful sport."
That's the aim behind Rematch, which puts you in control of a single player in small-sided football matches rather than overseeing an entire 11-person team. That oversight, Tarno says, can make FIFA seem "so disconnected from how it actually feels to play football" - something that Rematch doesn't suffer from.
One of Tarno's colleagues, he says, has a helpful analogy for differentiating between the two games. "FIFA is a football simulation and Rematch is a football player simulation," he explains. "FIFA is serious tactics, and it's actually pretty intricate in how you can order your team around and stuff like that. But in terms of what it feels like to be on the pitch yourself, this is closer to it."
Rather than trying to go in two-footed on FIFA (or EA Sports FC, if we're actually talking about the non-licensed version that's emerged over the past few years), it seems Tarno is trying to articulate where the difference between the two games actually lies. Having put a lot of time into Slocalp's latest already, I can confirm that Rematch is a much more authentic recreation of 5-a-side football than anything FIFA's thrown up in recent years - even if that has its downsides.
Check out our Rematch review.
