If you like gamepads, this is the best gamepad. More buttons, more accuracy, incredibly useful haptic feedback, and gyroscopic controls that are actually insanely practical. It won't replace a mouse and keyboard setup for competitive shooters or RTS's, but for single player games (including shooters!) it's amazing and it can still hold up surprisingly well even in a competitive environment with the proper bindings.


The most obvious feature are the dual trackpads. They look weird, but they're damn good. The right trackpad is far superior to a joystick for just about any game out there, you're getting far more accuracy with a slimmer profile. It takes a little getting used to, but a properly configured binding profile will feel natural. It even clicks easily without messing up your aim too much, so unlike the right thumbstick in most games you can actually bind it to something important. I actually set it as my Use button, it's like the big green A on a Gamecube controller, it just begs to be The Button.

The left trackpad, on the other hand, is not at all superior to a joystick. Movement in games is very reliant on you returning to a neutral position to signify that you've stopped moving - for a joystick, a spring returns it to a neutral position, while WASD spring back up when you let up your fingers. While you can stop moving on the left trackpad by simply lifting your thumb, you have to lift your thumb. You can't just relax your thumb to stop moving, you have to actually move your thumb to stop moving. Luckily Valve saw fit to add an actual joystick, so the left pad is freed up for more interesting uses.

Typically the left pad is set up as a d-pad. It's weird, but not necessarily bad. You can tell it to activate on touch alone, allowing something akin to a joystick, or you can require a click of the joypad which feels very satisfying. You can specify whether to allow or disallow diagonals, how much preference diagonals get, and the like. This makes the pad one of the best for quickly managing inventories or activating voice commands and the like. Turn off diagonals and you'll always get the direction (and weapon) you need. Unfortunately, the pad is large and the top of the pad is far away from the joystick where your thumb will spend most of its time resting, requiring quite a bit of travel distance to reach your up binding.

That large size also makes it hard to recommend the d-pad for anything that demands a quality d-pad. While you can be sure that you're only ever getting the directions you specify, the pad is just too damn big for the job. On a 360 pad, your thumb almost entirely obscures the d-pad - you can hit any direciton at any time with no need to move your thumb very far. Same with pretty much every other d-pad in existance. On the Steam Controller, there's just too much space for it to be a reliable way to move your character, much less pull off special moves in a fighter.

That's not the only trick the left pad is capable of, though. You can set the left pad as a Touch Menu; if you touch the pad, an overlay appears on the screen and you can highlight a button and click the pad to select the button. You can have up to 16 buttons bound to the Touch Menu, enabling you to bind pretty much every keybind to your controller no matter what. The Touch Menu is too slow for anything time sensitive or twitchy like swapping weapons, but it's great for mapping shortcuts to your inventory, character sheet, quicksaving and loading, voting yes or no to map changes on a server, that sort of thing. I find myself actually getting a little more efficient in city building games as the Touch Menu is way faster than navigating the in-game menu by mouse and all the buttons are labelled with their functions.

Both trackpads owe their accuracy to clever ergonomics, a "just right" texture, and most importantly the haptic feedback.


If you're a touch typist, you know how to find home row just by feeling the keys - the F and J keys have a little nub on them that signals to your fingers that they're in the right spot. As it turns out, that same principle works for mouse movement too. When a trackpad is emulating a mouse, it feels something like a trackball - that side of the controller will very gently vibrate almost exactly like a trackmall mouse does when the slight imperfections in the ball cause a slight vibration that you can feel in the mouse. That vibration tells you when you're moving and not moving your mouse, and your brain can very quickly learn to associate that rumble with mouse movement.

It's feels sorta like you're running your thumb over the pixels on the screen, as if they were rough sand. It's not as accurate as an actual mouse that you can put your whole arm into, but if a gaming mouse were to use this sort of haptic feedback it'd probably be the most accurate mouse you could possibly buy.

The haptic feedback isn't just for the trackpads, however. Nearly all the buttons on the controller can be set to activate haptic feedback upon activation, in particular the dual stage triggers. Once you pass the activation threshhold, by default you'll feel a "clicking" sensation within the grip of the controller. This is almost addictive, you can tell at exactly what point a trigger registers a pull and then feather it for rapid input, and since this is activated by software you can set the precise point at which that happens.

The haptic feedback is probably best used for ultra precise gyro aiming.


If you've played Splatoon, imagine that except the controller is way lighter and more ergonomic and you can feel the controller slowly click with your movements. If you haven't, imagine using the right trackpad to get roughly in the neighborhood of where you want to aim and then fine-tuning it by using a lower sensitivity setting and aiming with both your wrists - this is the secret that lets it be so close to an actual mouse. You're aiming with both hands and benefitting from that haptic feedback which tells you how much you're moving. This video should give you an idea of the kind of accuracy you can expect:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B43ibnztDLc


They're bad. But that's OK, because there's other far superior buttons you can bind your controls to instead.

The ABXY buttons are just so tiny and recessed. They're still work just fine, but their size is a real pain as it can be a bit hard to tell you've pressed them. It feels like they should have been a bit taller like on the 360 pad.

The biggest issue, however, is their impractical placement. They're fairly far from the right trackpad where your thumb will be most of the time, and the way the handle of the controller causes you to cup your palm limits how far you can reach with your thumb. My adult sized hand can barely reach the X button.

Fortunately, the Y and B buttons are within reasonable reach and are perfectly suited for binding important things. Instead of using the X and A buttons, you can instead use the wonderful back grips.


Why are these not standard already?

So the idea is that you can use your otherwise unused pinky and ring fingers to push a couple extra buttons. You don't need to take your thumb off of the right pad to use these, making them great for functions like reloading, jumping, sprinting, or anything else you would normally have to make The Claw to pull off while moving and aiming. They're a godsend, playing without ever taking your fingers off of movement or aiming is sublime. They work wonderfully and you should always be using them.


This is the best gamepad you can buy. That said, it's still a gamepad. A keyboard and mouse will give you better aim and more buttons, even if those buttons aren't exactly laid out with gaming in mind. But the Steam Controller is a ton of fun to use and way more ergonomic. It's worth the learning curve.

It's an absolutely brilliant game, the most fun I've had in a game in years, with even its most complex and fiddly bits seeming to have real purpose in either driving long term satisfiaction in progression or pacing the game to space out the adrenaline-pumping highs with quiet or relaxed moments where you just need to sharpen your weapon, heal up, and then track down that boss monster again to continue the fight.

It's also a game that gets some very critical things wrong in terms of usability, with multiplayer in particular showing the game's online heritage as a Nintendo exclusive. To have a friend join you in a storyline mission that has cutscenes in it, you must first start the mission, progress far enough in that mission until you have seen all the cutscenes (which can take as long as 20 minutes to accomplish as you'll often be told to find something with limited direction before the relevant cutscene plays), and then you ahve to abandon the mission and then recreate the mission again so that your friends can join. Oh, and all your friends have to have seen the cutscene as well themselves, so they all have to be doing the same thing, no exceptions. This means that playing with friends in anything other than postgame content almost prohibitively time consuming, and since the main campaign where all these shenanigans occur can easily last you 40-60 hours (I'm 90 hours in at the time of writing this review and I still haven't beaten the main campaign yet) a lot of people simply will never reach a point in the game where they can just play the damn game with friends.

And that's assuming your connection keeps up. For what seems to be a peer-to-peer game, everyone I play with suffers from constant disconnections despite clearly still being connected on Steam and on Discord. Players who are disconnected are then forced to face a boss that's had its HP boosted quite a bit all by themselves. And if you fail the mission because of that disconnect, any resources you spent trying to boost your rewards like vouchers (you get only one a day and can only hold up to five) or investigations are destroyed.

Oh, just to make things worse, those scarce vouchers and uses for your investigations are also used the moment you post a mission, whether or not you start it. You often have to remake a mission because other players can't join it until its remade, so get used to having to choose between your friendships and your willingness to part with your last voucher. It's needlessly vindictive and punishing for a game that's overly fond of crashing on many people's systems, there's no good reason that those vouchers couldn't just be spent the moment you get your rewards.

But I still recommend the game. It's not in as bad a state as the original Dark Souls at launch, and it's an utterly brilliant game. It's hard to know what to gush about first: the sheer variety in playstyles afforded by the fourteen different weapon types that all almost play like unqiue genres of games, the exquistiely paced boss fights that alternate between quiet tracking and gathering and loud and bombastic combat, the loving detail put into everything that makes the forests sway in the wind and interact with your hunts or how a Tobi-Kadachi will leave those marks on the trees you find by using them to scratch itself in a lovingly rendered animation, or the massive variety in weapon and armor assets that all have their own niche uses that give you an excuse to collect them all and theorycraft new hyperspecialized builds meant to play a specific role against a single boss, or how item-only progression fixes a lot of problems with level-based progression in RPG's by removing problems like overlevelling or shoehorning you into a specific playstyle forever...

It's so hard not to gush about the brilliance of the game, and that makes it so much more painful that the port doesnt' quite do it justice. It's not even that bad a port, my game has only crashed once in 90 hours of play as I'm using a CPU with FMA3 support - an AMD FX 8350, a CPU that generally doesn't do very good in games but holds a steady 60 FPS at 1080p with a GTX 1070, I can only assume the game's been multithreaded competently. There's rebinding options and graphic options and little touches that make it clear real effort was put into the PC release.

But the parts where it does fail hurts the most, because Monster Hunter is very much a cooperative game at heart and a game with such brilliant interplay between a team and a monster that could easily combo anyone to death that makes one wrong move just doesn't deserve the disconnects, the crashes, the performance issues on different PC's, the horrible UX problems for playing together, the mean-spirited wasting of vouchers and investigations when it's the game that messed up.

I still recommend the game. I still want people to try it, even if it's only for that two hour refund window, because Capcom has promised to support this game and I think people can still love this game despite its serious flaws. There's just been so much love put into this game that you can feel, the real appreciation for having all these systems interact to create what can only be called fantasy nature porn. There's what seems to be dozens of lengthy animations of cats cooking you food in the most flamboyant way possible for what amounts to just a buff, thousands and thousands must have been spent just animating that alone. There's too much effort here to just dismiss it entirely.

If the game works on your machine, if you have friends patient enough to deal with the need to use what are effectively even more annoying Friend Codes in a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Steam game, if you like Dark Souls-like combat systems, if this game seems interesting to you, this is probably a game you'll want to pay full price for. But if you're unsure, wait a few weeks and see if these issues have been addressed.