Active Soccer 2 DX is a top-down arcade football game, developed by the Italian studio The Fox Software, that provides a fast-paced arcade football experience. Active Soccer 2 DX is the ported version of the same named game, without the DX part, that was originally released on mobile devices and later on PC and Mac.
Football games nowadays are pretty much categorized by two big franchises, FIFA and PES. Before these two franchises took over the football scene in video games, there was once a third option that probably only some of the older gamers out there remember, and it was called Sensible Soccer. Sensible Soccer was a top-down football game released in 1992 that was more focused on providing players with a fun experience than a more realistic one like FIFA and PES. I still remember how the players and teams had slight vowel changes in order to avoid any licensing issues. In 1994, the studio behind Sensible Soccer released Sensible World of Soccer, which included hundreds of teams from all over the world, including national teams, and also had a full career mode. Active Soccer 2 DX tries to recreate that old purely-focused-on-fun experience from the Sensible Soccer games on Xbox One. From the menus to the vowel-changing players and team names, there are a lot of resemblances between Active Soccer 2 DX and the Sensible Soccer games.
At its core, Active Soccer 2 DX feels totally fine. The inspiration from Sensible Soccer is deeply seen in it, but it won’t exactly exceed expectations. The controls of the game are simple and easy to catch on as A is used to pass, B to perform a lob pass, X to shoot and Y to give a little sprint boost to the player you are controlling. Although there are two control schemes for you to choose from, it isn’t possible to remap or customize them.
As far as the gameplay, in general, it’s completely playable even with some of the issues that it has, the most notorious of them all being the lack of adherence with standard football rules like offsides, penalties, and fouls. Their adherence goes from not marking any kind of fouls at all to marking a foul even if the ball is taken from the adversaries in a clean and legitimate way. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty much certain that the majority of the goals that I’ve managed to score in some of the matches I’ve played were scored while I was offside.
Another big issue that Active Soccer 2 DX has lies in its menus and their navigation. Although the menus are simple, they are also a bit clumsy, but the true problem lies on their navigation since both the D-pad and the analog stick are overly sensitive. Trying to select a specific menu or option will kind of become a bit of a logic puzzle that will rely on the pressure you make while pressing the designated direction. This is something that over time becomes extremely frustrating, and even messing around with the customizable option of the Elite controller, regarding the analog stick sensitivity, it was always present and kind of gives the feeling of lack of polish of the game regarding its menus.
As for the game modes featured in Active Soccer 2 DX, you can count on the usual modes like Quick Play, Tournament, and Career. The Tournament mode gives you the opportunity to create your own tournaments as you like while spending too much time around in menus. The Career mode lets you pick up any team, from clubs to nationals, and make your way through it using the usual transfers and squad management, which instead of the system used in FIFA or PES is a bit more like a spreadsheet. The career mode also has some strange issue which is related to the squad lineup before each match. Although you can choose, edit, create and save your own formation, the player’s lineup, and the formation, will always be reset to default on each game. You can save the formation and load it up on each game but as for the actual player’s lineup, you will need to rearrange it on each game no matter the formation you decide to use. It’s quite an odd design choice I must say.
In terms of graphics, Active Soccer 2 DX uses a simple art style that fits into the game fine. It also includes some nice weather effects such as snow, rain, and even lightning effects. Even the most popular teams have their outfits matching the real ones. As for sound effects, you will encounter a small variety of chants performed by the team’s fans, which fit well and give a little more mood to the matches but unfortunately, the variety is very small and doesn’t really vary from team to team.
It is also possible to play Active Soccer 2 DX not only in single-player but also in local multiplayer, with up to 8 players at the same time. Unfortunately, there isn’t any possibility to play it online, which may diminish its appeal.
Summary
Active Soccer 2 DX tries to bring back the fun experience of a football video game like the Sensible Soccer games rather than the realistic aspects like FIFA and PES but, unfortunately, it has some issues at the moment, such as the clumsy menus, the glitched player animations, and the buggy football rules system that seems to have a random situation. The inspiration by Sensible Soccer is present and may appeal to some players but in the end, it fails to deliver due to its issues. Although The Fox Software has already come forward saying that they are working on an update to fix some of the game’s issues, this review only takes into consideration the state of the game as it was upon its release.
João is a games journalist, Senior Editor at XDA Developers. They contributed 156 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: previously reported for Neowin before joining XDA Developers in 2021, where he leads coverage of Windows, Microsoft, and hardware.