The five-minute version of every cup final, on loop
Penalty Shooters 2 strips a football match down to the only moment most people remember — the shootout. You take the kicks for your team. Then the camera rotates and you're in goal for the opposition. Five rounds either way, whoever scores more advances. Lose and the tournament resets to round one.
10x10games shipped it in April 2016 and have been pushing updates ever since — the 2024 patch added the Global Cup mode (48 national teams, World Cup-style group stage into knockouts). Pick a country first, then one of the league's clubs. The names are scrubbed so Real Madrid becomes a Spanish club in white and Liverpool a Merseyside red, but if you watch football the kits and badges give the originals away. There's a short tutorial. Run it once.
Controls
- Aim the shot — Move the mouse — a red marker slides across the goal frame / Drag with your finger — same marker, same axis
- Set shot height — Hold the click longer before letting go — longer hold means higher arc / Hold tap — same idea
- Shoot — Release the click / Release the tap
- Save as keeper — Hold click, the keeper drifts toward where you're pointing, release to commit the dive / Hold tap, release to dive
Game modes
Tournament
Three-round knockout. Pick a country, pick one of its twelve clubs, win five-turn shootouts to advance. Any loss kicks you back to the country select — re-enter with the same team for a rematch, or grab a different country for a different keeper AI. A full clean run is eight to twelve minutes.
Quick match
One shootout, any team, any league, no bracket. This is the mode for learning a keeper's dive pattern without a tournament resetting on you, or for a single match between coffee breaks.
Global Cup
Forty-eight national teams in World Cup format — group stage feeds knockouts feeds the final. Patched in around the 2024 update. The national kits don't fight licensing the way the club kits do, so this mode is the closest the game gets to looking like a real tournament broadcast.
Tips & strategy
For the shooter
The first thing to know is that the keeper remembers. Pick a corner — say top-left — and aim there for two rounds, and on round three the AI will be planted on that side before you even pull. The fix isn't complicated: every shot has to come from a different intent than the last one. Two safe placements you can hit reliably, then a third one — center, dead height, the kind of shot you'd never choose if the keeper hadn't been moving — works more often than it should.
Hold time controls the arc. Short tap stays low and central. Hold longer and the ball lifts. The top corners are where the math says aim; they're also where the timing margin between corner and crossbar is narrowest, so the misses sail. If you're still learning the windup, ground shots into the corners pay more than top-corner attempts that go over.
Mouse speed during aim matters less than the release. A jittery aim that lands cleanly is fine; a steady aim that releases late lets the marker drift past the corner you wanted.
For the keeper
You're not reading the ball, you're reading the shooter. The AI's stance shifts a frame or two before they release — the foot plant tells you which side they're committing. Hold the click and let the keeper drift toward your pointer; don't commit the dive until you've watched at least the first frame of the windup.
Center shots — Panenkas, dead-height down the middle — read like nothing. There's no stance tell. The only counter is to default to partial commits when the shooter is on the third or fourth round of a perfect-record game: that's when the AI is most likely to roll the dice on a chip.
Penalty Shooters 2 vs Penalty Shooters 3
They share the shooter-and-keeper alternation and they share the click-hold-release control. Past that they're different games.
PS3 reframed the campaign around Tier Mode — six difficulty tiers gated sequentially, with adaptive AI that tracks your placement choices across the whole run instead of only the previous turn. There's a power-up system, jersey customization, and around 250 teams. PS2 doesn't bother with any of that. PS2's selling points are the breadth — twelve leagues, 360 clubs, 48 national teams in Global Cup — and the older, slightly more forgiving keeper AI. Calling it "more forgiving" is from feel, not measurement, but the win rate against equivalent-tier teams runs higher in PS2 for most players I've watched.
If you're new to penalty games, PS3 will probably feel punishing on tier 2 or 3. Start with PS2 instead, clear the tournament path a few times, then move over. If you've already won every PS2 country at least once, PS3's tier mode is where the difficulty curve actually picks up.
