REMATCH is the perfect competitive game for Steam Deck

I've been after a competitive game for a while for the Steam Deck and it certainly looks like REMATCH fits the bill.

The problem with a lot of online competitive games is the anti-cheat situation for Linux / SteamOS systems. A lot of developers intentionally do not enable to Easy Anti-Cheat or BattlEye support for various reasons. Add to that various other forms of anti-cheat like EA Javelin Anticheat that doesn't support Linux at all, it's a huge problem.

We've had a few games that removed support in the last couple years like Apex Legends, GTA Online and various other EA titles too. So finding a competitive game is not exactly easy for Steam Deck fans. It's part of the reason we have our own curated anti-cheat compatibility page.

Which is why I am so happy about REMATCH as I covered at release. It works beautifully on Desktop Linux, and when I want to go chill in bed or on the sofa, I can play the exact same game in my hands (or docked to my TV). Now that I've put even more hours into it, I can safely say REMATCH has become the Steam Deck competitive play champion for me.

The performance is good enough to crank up some of the graphical settings too. I've been playing hours and hours of it on my Steam Deck OLED on the Medium preset, locked to 45FPS and there hasn't been an issue. Battery life is of course something to think about too but not an issue with the Steam Deck OLED seeing about two and a half hours - that's a lot of matches.

While the game does have issues, Sloclap are working on it and have already released multiple patches since the initial release. Still, there's some quite annoying bugs with it. I don't think they quite expected it to be as popular as it is, with it hitting a 92,841 all-time peak and 82,936 concurrent in the last 24 hours. Some of the bugs I've encountered include a vanishing ball, lobbies that don't seem to connect properly and more. Still, the gameplay is ace most of the time.

My biggest annoyance is probably the camera locking. I really want it to have a proper ball-camera locked to it, without having to adjust any other settings. They do plan to add actual rebinds for gamepads in a future update, so that will make it all the more sweeter. For now, I just have to be quick on the thumbstick.

The developer has put up a roadmap of their current priorities which seems good, they know exactly what they have to do. Given that they're a smaller team though, don't expect bigger fixes and new content to come rapidly.

If you love competitive games, have a Steam Deck (or Desktop Linux, or another system with SteamOS) and have been struggling to find something, REMATCH is firmly one you need to get.

REMATCH could easily end up as my game of the year at this rate.