A few months ago, I took a look at a Gamestop PS2 controller that I thought was pretty good for what it was. I ended that article by saying that I feel like every third-party controller (that doesn’t serve a special purpose) gets judged in a negative light, simply because they appear cheaper and aren’t the premium, first-party controller. I feel a lot of third-party controllers are at least acceptable in doing what they are designed to do, but that doesn’t mean they are good. But today I have a controller that is truly the definition of a bad third-party controller. A controller that I would never use, even if it were my only option, I wouldn’t even use it if someone paid me to use it. Today, I am going to look at the Digital Essentials: Switch Pro Controller.
I remember seeing this controller at my local Five Below and being interested in it. Firstly, it’s a Switch controller that looks like a cheap Playstation Dualshock, which is interesting and could work better for some games, especially 2d platformers. Secondly, this controller was only 15 dollars, and it has Bluetooth wireless and vibration. That’s something that those PowerA controllers that I see all the time don’t have, and they cost 25 dollars, so if this controller was alright, I would’ve seen it as a steal for 15 bucks. I ended up buying it a few days ago (at the time of writing this) to see if it’s good, or if the price is too good to be true.
In the box, you get the controller, a USB-C cable for charging, and an instruction sheet that you will need to hold on to. At first glance, the controller actually doesn’t look that bad. The face buttons feel decent, and the d-pad is probably the best d-pad I’ve felt on a third-party Switch controller. The shoulder buttons aren’t that good, especially ZR, and ZL. The thumbsticks are just bad, they don’t feel great at all, it's almost as if they aren’t supposed to move, which is odd considering that's the whole point of a thumbstick. Syncing the controller to the Switch requires you to hold down both the Home button plus the Y button on the "Change Grip/Order" screen.
I tested a variety of games with this controller to see if it could truly give me a good experience with any of them. The first game I tried was Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for pretty obvious reasons. Lately, I’ve been fighting Spirits on the Spirit Board, so I decided I should tackle some of the easier Spirits with this controller. At first, I felt the controller was doing a fine job until I noticed that my Smash attacks were getting severely delayed whenever I tried to attack towards the left. I went into training mode to see what was wrong, and then I noticed the biggest issue with this controller. The right thumbstick gets stuck when held towards the left side (visual below). It shipped defective, which automatically makes it a terrible controller. Someone might tell me to grab another one and see if it shares the same issue. I get that idea but think about the average consumer, if they bought this controller, and it was defective, they will likely not buy another one. Quality control is important, and when that’s not met, people lose faith in your product. All of this made Smash feel unresponsive and created a terrible experience.
I then played Toree 2, an excellent indie 3d platformer, that only costs 99 cents. I hated playing this game with this controller. The harder levels were even harder since a lot of the tricks I can generally pull off are harder to pull off due to how cheap the controller is, and its different layout. Camera control was also a nightmare, because of that defective control stick. Toree 2 was an unpleasant experience with this controller. I then tried Kirby Star Allies, making me the only person to have played Star Allies recently. I wanted to play Star Allies to test a 2d platformer that I was kind of familiar with, and I wanted to see how that one HD rumble easter egg sounded on this controller, Kirby Star Allies was fine on this controller, not good, not bad either. The HD rumble easter egg also didn’t work properly on this controller, probably due to the rumble motor being cheap. I also tested Kirby's Dream Buffet, which was the best experience I had. Finally, I tried Splatoon 2, by playing a few Octo Expansion levels. Due to this controller not having tilt controls, you have the R stick for full camera control, which is awful, because that stick is defective. Splatoon 2 was just awful, everything felt clumsy, and wrong to me.
This controller also works on PC, and in order to sync it to your computer, you need to hold down the Home button, and the A button, and pair it using Bluetooth. I can say that this controller didn’t have any Bluetooth issues, which is a good thing I guess. I didn’t try a lot of games on PC, because I was tired at this point, and I gave myself a strict deadline in terms of testing the controller, I basically did all the testing in one day. Steam Input works well with the one game I tested, which would obviously be Thrillville: Off the Rails, because I’m a man of culture. Thrillville allowed me to test an FPS with the controller, which was horrible. I also played NoahNCopeland’s Sonic Triple Trouble 16-bit, which is an amazing fan game that is a million times better than this stupid controller (please check the bottom of the page for a link to download the game). I also tried a handful of emulators to see if they recognize the controller. I tried Kega Fusion, Dolphin, Project 64, ePSXe, VBA, snes9x, and FCEUX. All of them worked except for ePSXe, which tends to always give me issues with Bluetooth controllers, maybe my version is severely out of date. This controller could be used for emulation and could’ve been a good option considering that the D-pad and the face buttons are decent, but even if I could ignore the thumb sticks, I don’t feel right in using a defective product.
The Digital Essentials Switch controller is awful, even for 15 dollars. I was actually going to try to live with it for a week, but just couldn’t, because it’s so damn awful. I used a PowerA wired controller months before I got my hands on an actual pro controller, and I can say that my experience with that was good. Considering that the PowerA controller is only 10 more dollars than the Digitial Essentials controller, you get far better quality and usually some nice artwork on it. The only real reason to buy the Digital Essentials controller is that it has BlueTooth. However, when the controller itself is pure crap, why would you want it? It’s like being offered a bad pizza you can eat on the go, or a decent pizza you have to eat in the pizza parlor. You would take the decent pizza because it’s not gonna give you a bad experience you would wish to forget. The Digital Essentials Switch controller is that crappy pizza that you would never want to eat, even if you can take it with you.
Download Sonic Triple Trouble 16-bit: https://gamejolt.com/games/sonictripletrouble16bit/322794
Comments