Xbox One Elite Controller Review - Rerez

Microsoft sent me their Xbox One Elite controller for review. Now this controller as many of you know is really expensive but that's not a bad thing. See this controller isn't designed for regular everyday game players that are looking for a little Halo fix once in a while. This is the kind of controller that comes out once in a blue moon that kind of shows that a company is really paying attention to that hardcore crowd.

Now this isn't the first time that Microsoft has ever released a pro version of one of their controllers. Earlier with the Xbox 360 they released a pro controller that had the ability to switch the little D-pad from a shield into a proper D-pad. Now this one here not only has the ability to switch out D-pads from the original D-pad design to a shield design, and by the way a metal D-pad now has to be the standard for anyone releasing D-pads, but this thing also has the ability to switch out the analog joysticks on the left and right. What I like about that is that you can switch out these joysticks to be convex or concave or basically outie or innie. And on top of that you can make them a little bit longer, a little bit shorter, you can really customize and decide the way you want that controller to feel. I really like that and one thing I was pretty sure I wasn't going to like was the back paddles on the controller and I was right. Now I know there's a lot of people out there that enjoy having those paddles on the back of their controllers but I'm not one of those people. I kind of felt that whenever I held on to the controller I was always hitting them by accident and screwing up a combo or an attack and that didn't make me too happy. But they're so easy to take out and also so easy to customize that I felt that I could get used to it over time but I didn't want to do that so I just took them out. Now another thing that this controller does that's so awesome is that the analog triggers on the left and right can be turned into hair triggers which I love. Now let me make this perfectly clear. When I started playing Halo 5 I was getting my ass handed to me left and right but when I switched on the hair trigger option on this controller damn I was tearing it up! It was just so much faster for me to shoot at people that didn't have the Xbox One Elite controller that it was almost ridiculous. My rate of fire was improved so much by using this controller that honestly no one else stood a chance which is pretty impressive when you think about how this controller can be utilized for a professional league player.

There's some downloadable software you can get for this controller for the Xbox One and the PC. While it isn't the easiest thing to use you can adjust two different presets for the controller that allows you to remap all the buttons and also kind of adjust the sensitivity on the triggers and stuff. I really liked that. What I did was I had one preset specifically for standard Xbox One games and then the second preset was designed specifically for first-person shooters. I found on the fly it was very easy to use and honestly it made my game a lot more fun. Overall this controller feels really good. It's got about twice the weight of an original Xbox One controller with batteries in and I kind of like that. It's got a really strong, sturdy feel. It feels pretty much like the most expensive controller I have ever played with.

Because no joke this is a really expensive controller and I think that it's really useful if you play like more than two or three hours of Xbox One a day or if you're going to be using this on the PC all the time. But if you're the kind of player who doesn't really care about controllers and maybe you're not really that into the gaming aspect of owning an Xbox One and bought it just to watch Netflix movies well you're definitely not going to want to buy this controller. It will serve no function for you. But if you're the kind of person that really wants to maximize your gameplay experience and if you're an online gamer this is the kind of controller you really want. And I know $150 sounds like a lot but hell I probably would have paid $200 for something like this.

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