Penalty Shootout

Penalty Shootout recreates the tensest moment in football: one striker, one keeper, twelve yards between them. You take five spot kicks a round, and scoring three of them keeps you alive for another five. It sounds simple, but between choosing your corner, judging the power, and out-guessing a keeper who reads where you're aiming, every kick is a small test of nerve.

The game is built to feel fair. The keeper doesn't cheat and doesn't see the future: they commit to a corner as you strike, and if they've guessed wrong they have to physically cover the ground to get there. Early on they're beatable even when they read you correctly, because a firmly struck ball arrives before the dive does. That changes. Every goal you score makes the keeper a shade quicker off the mark and a shade quicker across the goal, so the shootout that felt generous at three goals will punish a lazy shot at fifteen.

What never changes is the geometry. The keeper's reach is an oval centred on their gloves, a little over halfway up the net, and the top of the goal sits outside it. The dashed green line drawn across the goal mouth marks the ceiling of that reach. Put the ball above the line and no dive saves it — which is why the reticle turns green when you're aiming there.

1. Aim. Move your finger or mouse (or use the arrow keys) to place the target reticle inside the goal.
2. Charge. Press and hold, or hold Space, to start the power meter sweeping back and forth.
3. Release. Let go when the meter is in the green sweet-spot band. Too little power and the keeper smothers it; too much and the ball flies over the bar.
4. Repeat. Five kicks make a round. Score three and you go through to the next one against a faster keeper; score two or fewer and the shootout is over. Your total goals are your score, and your best is saved.

• Keep power in the green. The sweet spot gives you pace without sacrificing accuracy. Blasting at full power sends the ball high and wide.
• Aim above the dashed line. That line is the top of the keeper's reach. A shot placed above it cannot be saved, only missed — so the only thing left to get right is staying under the bar.
• Aim away from your run. The keeper leans toward where your reticle sits at release, so shifting to the opposite corner at the last moment pays off.
• Mix it up. Don't hit the same corner five times. A predictable pattern is easy to read.
• Watch the reflex pips. Once they're past halfway the keeper is quick enough to reach a low corner even after guessing late. Switch to height before that happens, not after.
• Don't rush. There's no shot clock during the aim phase. Settle the reticle before you start the power meter.

Every save in this game comes down to two questions the keeper has to answer, and you get to make both of them harder. The first is which way. The keeper looks at where your reticle is sitting the instant you release, and some of the time they go that way; the rest of the time they pick a corner at random. That is why late movement works. Settle the reticle in one corner while the power meter sweeps, then slide it across and release — you have shown them one thing and done another.

The second question is how high, and it is the one most players never think about. A dive is not a wall. The gloves travel along a low arc, roughly a third of the way down from the crossbar at their highest, and everything above that is simply out of the keeper's world. A ball rolled into the bottom corner has to beat a guess. A ball lifted into the top corner does not have to beat anything at all, as long as it stays under the bar.

The trade-off you are actually making

Height is not free. The higher you aim, the smaller the margin between the top corner and the crossbar, and the power meter's overshoot band pushes the ball up as well as wide. Hit the very top of the meter and the shot lifts on its own, turning a good idea into a wasted kick. The reliable combination is a corner, a height just above the dashed line, and a release near the top of the green band rather than past it.

There is also a floor to how soft you can go. A shot struck under roughly a third power never troubles the keeper regardless of placement — they simply gather it. Beating the reach ellipse requires the ball to arrive before the dive completes, and a weak shot gives the keeper all the time in the world.

A shootout where the tenth kick is exactly as hard as the first gets boring quickly, so this one tightens as you go. Each goal you score adjusts two numbers behind the scenes. The keeper's reaction delay — the pause between your strike and the start of their dive — gets shorter, and their travel speed across the goal gets higher. Their reach grows very slightly too, which is why the dashed green ceiling line creeps downward over a long run.

The eight pips in the corner of the screen labelled Keeper Reflex show where you currently stand. At one pip you can beat a correct guess with a firmly struck corner, because the gloves are still travelling when the ball crosses the line. At eight pips the dive is finished before the ball arrives, the horizontal read is close to reliable, and height is the only route left. Most players find that their scoring rate holds up until about the fifth or sixth pip and then falls off a cliff — that cliff is the moment to stop hitting the bottom corners and start lifting everything.

The controls adapt to whatever you are holding. On a touchscreen, drag a finger to move the reticle, hold to charge and lift off to shoot — the whole kick happens in one gesture without ever lifting your thumb. On a desktop, moving the mouse aims and holding the button charges, or you can play entirely from the keyboard with the arrow keys and the space bar, which some players find gives them finer control over placement than a mouse does.

The pitch, goal and keeper are all drawn to the size of your screen rather than scaled from a fixed image, so the goal mouth occupies the same proportion of the canvas on a small phone as it does on a widescreen monitor. Nothing is downloaded, there is no sign-up, and your best score is stored locally in your own browser — clear your browser data and it resets, which is the trade-off for not asking you for an account.

Real penalties are taken from twelve yards, and the ball covers that distance in roughly four tenths of a second. A goalkeeper's reaction time plus the time needed to move sideways is very close to the same figure, which is the entire reason penalties are scored around three-quarters of the time at professional level: the keeper genuinely cannot wait and see. They have to commit early and hope, exactly as they do here.

It is also why the two dominant real-world techniques are the two that work in this game. The side-footed pass into a corner trades power for precision and relies on the keeper going the wrong way. The driven shot high into the net relies on nobody being able to reach it even if they go the right way. Both beat a keeper. Blasting straight down the middle at full power, the instinct most beginners have, beats nothing at all.