One of the most interesting aspects about playing games in VR is giving players a somewhat realistic and safe place for them to practice sports. Tennis, boxing, basketball, those are all proven concepts that have worked incredibly well in virtual reality, mostly because the upper half of your body is where most of the action happens. VR motion controls work incredibly well when it comes to hand/arm tracking. As of now, there isn’t a reliable way for VR to track your leg movements. As a result, I have always thought I’d probably never going to see a VR football game being released, at least with the current technology we have available. Then Premier League Player showed up.

I was immediately curious. Was someone releasing a virtual reality football game? Not only that, but with actual Premier League licensing? How the hell would that work? Would the game be a fully-fledged football simulator? Furthermore, how would I be able to kick a ball without leg tracking? Would it work? Well… the developers sure tried, but it simply doesn’t work very well. On the other hand, there are some gameplay elements that worked incredibly well in this game, to the point of making it better than a mere surefire disaster. It’s not very good, but there are like one or two things about it that actually won me over.

I need to start off by stating the unfortunate obvious: Premier League Player is a low-budgeted VR game, and as such, it doesn’t look impressive. It borderline looks like a Roblox / Second Life title, even if the stadium recreations were somewhat impressive. I loved being inside the Amex Stadium during gameplay, for example. In this regard, the game feels a tad bit immersive, even if it’s very ugly. The character creator is really limited, and it’s nigh impossible to make an avatar that doesn’t look like a wax figure of that one Jesus painting which became a meme years ago.

Now, for the actual good. Premier League Player is not a fully-fledged football game, being more of a football minigame compilation. Anything that doesn’t revolve around kicking works really well. There is a minigame where you’re the goalkeeper, which I really enjoyed. Furthermore, there was a header challenge, and it also worked surprisingly well. They were quick, easy to pick, hard to master, and very replayable. Each time I’d complete a round, I’d get experience points and unlock Premier League player profiles to look at in a (poorly made and unintuitive) museum. The problem lies with the actual foot-related side of things.

The devs tried. They sure tried. I cannot call this a lazy attempt. Sadly, I am to review a commercially-released product, and this just doesn’t work at all. The way you’re supposed to kick a ball is very, uh, “unusuall”: you use your arms. In theory, what game wants you to do is relax your arms and have an elongated version of them kick the ball for you. I tried controlling and kicking the damn ball for hours with this control method and it never felt anything but cumbersome and unintuitive. I struggled to kick the ball to a goal, or pass it to a stationary teammate. It’s just proof that you need some kind of sensor to detect your leg movements in order to make this work. This makeshift attempt to have you kick stuff like Sebulba barely works, and never makes things feel interesting or fun.

Again, I will commend the team behind Premier League Player for, at the very least, trying. They were able to come up with actually fun goalkeeping and heading minigames. The game might be ugly as sin, but I loved being inside my favorite Premier League stadium. Sadly, anything related to kicking a ball, with this bizarre makeshift “use your arms as legs” solution, was nothing short of disastrous. It is barely responsive, never intuitive, devoid of immersion, and completely lacklustre. Premier League Player is not as terrible as I imagined, but it’s not a really good sports simulator, nor even a worthwhile recommendation if all you want is a fitness app on your VR system. There are dozens of better options out there.

Graphics: 4.0 Let’s just say that the visuals make FIFA games from the Gamecube era look like you were actually watching a live Premier League match on TV. I guess it was a compromise in order to deal with a small budget and ensure a high framerate, but damn, it’s ugly.	Gameplay: 5.0 Anything involving using your legs is a catastrophe. Anything involving using your hands or head actually works pretty well.
Sound: 4.5 It’s just some a handful of sound effects and background stadium white noise. Nothing spectacular.	Fun Factor: 4.5 It’s not a football simulator, but more of a compilation of football-themed minigames for VR. Goalkeeping and heading is actually really fun, but not as interesting as other fitness software for the Quest. The actual “pretending to be a footballer” part of this game is pretty freaking bad.
Final Verdict: 4.5

Premier League Player is available now on Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3 and Meta Quest Pro

Reviewed on Meta Quest 2.

A copy of Premier League Player was provided by the publisher.