CleanSheet Soccer 2 Hands On: Breaking A Sweat With PlayStation VR2's New Goalkeeping Game

I’ve spent the weekend playing PlayStation VR2’s CleanSheet Soccer 2, a game that’s equal parts arcade game, training sim, and fitness app. It’s also a whole lot of fun.

CleanSheet Soccer 2 approaches the ball from a different angle, both literally and figuratively. Rather than chase the fantasy of scoring spectacular goals, here you’re trying to stop them. You play as a goalkeeper, using your hands to punch, block, catch, and deflect shots in training missions, mock games, and arcade-style minigames.

What immediately jumps out is just how natural this feels in VR. Every desperate punch to clear a ball, every lunge to catch a perfectly-placed shot, every fingertip stop feels physical in a way that no other medium can replicate. With the PS VR2 Sense controllers tracking your hands, CleanSheet Soccer 2 is so perfectly tuned that reactions become instinctive. It’s a cool feeling, even for someone (like me) who’s not played soccer since grade school.

When you first launch into CleanSheet Soccer 2, you’re given a chance to join one of three soccer clubs. Each of these has its own coach (which is an incongruous anthropomorphized animal?), and its own clubhouse with its own stylized culture. From here you’ll launch into training drills, match simulations, and tryouts, where your performance is monitored and recorded to leaderboards.

Completing drills and matches earns you experience, places you amongst your fellow gamers in online leaderboards, and satisfies mission objectives to unlock gear, new soccer fields, stadiums, and the opportunity to leap to new leagues, new clubs, and more.

Drills sharpen specific goalkeeping skills. Modes like Matrix Reflex, where training balls hit a randomizing launcher on their way to your face, and Lightning Hands, in which you must smash a randomized green button to fire a ball, focus on reaction speed and hand-eye coordination. Drills like Pick-A-Save, where you have to punch or catch a color-coded ball on command, prioritize decision-making and quick thinking. Others simply fire faster and faster randomized soccer balls at you to see how long you can survive.

There’s enough variety in the Drills to keep things interesting, and as the difficulty ramps up through level after level, the drills very quickly become truly challenging.

Match Play offers something a bit closer to actual soccer games. This mode presents realistic motion-captured players in game-like scenarios ranging from free kicks and dangerous corners to 2-1 breakaways and penalty shot situations. While the mechanics are straightforward (you’re only ever trying to stop the ball from getting in the goal), the variety of situations and the well-animated players keep things super engaging.

There’s also a shot creator mode in which you build out custom scenarios and tailored drills. Though I didn’t mess with this mode too much, beyond simply creating a nearly impossible shot from some extremely aggressive strikers, I could see this becoming a fun diversion from the main game for a certain type of player.

The game makes great use of the PS VR2 hardware. It looks great and runs perfectly. Controller haptics add impact to catches and punches, helping to sell the illusion that you’ve actually made contact with the ball.

What’s most surprising about CleanSheet Soccer 2, for me, is how physically engaging it is. Play this game for any standard amount of time, say 20 minutes, and you’ll be feeling the burn in your hamstrings, quads, and shoulders. I’m an active guy, and this game had me sweating.

There’s something refreshing about a VR sports game that understands exactly what it wants to be. CleanSheet Soccer 2 doesn’t try to recreate every aspect of soccer. It concentrates instead on one position and explores it in remarkable detail. It’s a simple idea, executed very well. It’s a focused, energetic, and surprisingly authentic goalkeeper experience that feels perfectly suited to VR.

CleanSheet Soccer 2 is available now on PlayStation VR2 for $34.99.