I may have been playing Rematch wrong for several weeks, because apparently it's "not just a football game," but a "samurai game," which suggests that it's a little deadlier than I first thought.
In a recent dev update ahead of Rematch patch 1, developer Sloclap explained that Sifu, its previous game (whose players it admits to somewhat leaving in the dark when it came to Rematch), was "not just a king-fu game." While Sloclap doesn't quite explain what it means there, I think I get it - Sifu sometimes felt to me like a rhythm game, and while there's a lot of rhythm inherent in any martial art, there was something more to it than a simple brawler.
