Rematch Releases Important Hotfix Update for June 2025

Sloclap has recently released Hotfix 9 for Rematch, fixing some major exploits in the popular soccer game and improving its stability. Developed by Sloclap, which released Sifu in 2022, Rematch has been greatly popular lately, but gamers have been discovering some weird exploits as they try out new moves, and fortunately, these elements are being quickly patched out.

Released earlier this month, Rematch became quickly popular, peaking at 92,841 players on Steam, and still maintaining around two-thirds of this number at the time of this report. Rematch gained mixed to positive reviews, but criticism of its lack of a solo mode and some performance issues was not enough to eclipse its strong gameplay.

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Now, Sloclap has released Hotfix 9, also known as Patch 1.20.009, which is currently available for Rematch on all platforms. The major hotfix solves mostly two exploits: the outfield dive (AKA Dolphin Dive) and wall dribbling/climbing. Flagged by many players as weird and somewhat annoying, the outfield dive allowed Rematch players to keep jumping instead of running, moving quicker than intended on the field. Wall climbing was somehow even more bizarre, as it allowed players to “fly” and avoid interacting with other players by spamming volley lob taps against a wall. Apart from these problems, the patch also corrected cam jitter during goal replays and improved the overall stability of Rematch.

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The patch notes also explained why these changes were made to the popular soccer game. According to the developers, they’re closely monitoring how the meta of Rematch evolves and how creative players can get, but tactics such as the Dolphin Dive allowed gamers to overcome stamina limitations, and mechanics such as wall climbing were “completely at odds” with the developers’ vision. As these changes could have unintended impacts on gameplay, Sloclap promised to keep looking closely at how the experience of playing Rematch is felt by the player base, correcting what’s necessary over time.

Apart from these patches, Sloclap has promised to add crossplay to Rematch soon. The devs originally intended the game to have crossplay at launch, but unforeseen technical issues prevented it from working, and it will be one of the first major new features that the competitive soccer game will get. Gamers can expect even more updates soon, and in 2026, Rematch is said to finally get its single-player mode, which can be fairly interesting for players who liked the title but are not very interested in playing with others.

Rematch Hotfix 9/Patch 1.20.009 Notes

June 27th, 2025 on all platforms

Exploit/Balancing

Outfield Dive : (aka Dolphin Dive) tweaked values to make the character speed lower during the ability’s recovery period.

We are closely monitoring how the game and its meta are evolving day after day, and we are seeing a lot of new mechanics and ways to play being discovered by our players. We think a lot of these are cool and interesting, but some others have a negative impact on the game The ability to spam the dive to instead of sprinting is one mechanic that is a clear balancing issue. It allows players to bypass the limitations of stamina and sprint speeds, and has a negative impact on the look and feel of the game. We have adjusted the speed of the player during the recovery of the ability to make the dive spam less efficient as an acceleration exploit. This is a small enough adjustment but will have an impact on how the ability feels and functions even in legitimate circumstances, so we will be monitoring these effects closely. We are looking at more precise ways of resolving these issues in future updates, but it will take a bit more time and we felt we needed a solution now to this exploit.

Wall Dribbling/Climbing: we aimed to fix some issues that allowed players to “fly” and avoid all interactions with the other players by spamming volley lob taps against a wall.

This is another mechanic that is completely at odds with our vision of Rematch as a football game. The fix involves making the ball interactable 5 frames later than it used to be. This also affects abilities other than taps, such as being able to perform a volley shot (or any other volley action) after a volley lob tap on a very high ball. This removes the aforementioned issue but will also have an impact on the rest of the game, specifically by making some solo backboard setups harder to execute. As such we feel this is a good thing for the game. It does not remove the mechanic but makes it more demanding in terms of player focus and precision. We will keep monitoring the effect of this change on the rest of gameplay mechanics, and will rely on player feedback to further adjust the feel of the game.

Rematch is a game with a lot of complex interactions between mechanics and even the smallest change can have a big impact on how the game is played. At the same time, we must be able to answer serious issues in gameplay in a timely manner. Our objective is to refine this balancing act between the pacing of fixes, and the stability of the game and its mechanics. We admire the way players have come up with new emergent mechanics and advanced techs, some of which add a healthy amount of depth to the game, but some of these unintended mechanics cause more harm than good, and we think they should be removed from the game. We will post a new devblog about these emergent mechanics and our intentions about how we, as developers, wish to deal with them.

Bugfixes

Fixed cam jitter during goal replays Various fixes on stability issues