Background

This review is of a Razer Wildcat Controller, which was supplied by Razer for review purposes.

Pre-warning. The rating you see with this review has some caveats depending on the type of gamer you are. If you're in a hurry to get to the conclusions, feel free to jump to the "Summing Up" section of the review.

I’m an odd sort. I started my gaming career in earnest with a mix of PC and Commodore hardware, before switching to consoles in the 90’s. I still gamed occasionally on my PC, but for the most part the convenience and ease of consoles, plus the (back then) ubiquitous drunken video game sessions with mates meant they were my primary source of gaming material.

However, even that still didn’t stop me. I found myself falling into an odd pattern. Some game styles I used console for, in other cases I used a PC. In some weird way, that still carries through to today. Even though I came back to the PC for good thanks to Star Citizen in late 2012, I still had a PS4 up until last year and still have access to an Xbox One (belongs to my wife) and a PS3 (too many SingStar songs purchased to get rid of that).

Why am I talking to you about my rather boring gaming hardware history? Well, it has an influence on the review today since try as I might, although where possible now I game on my PC, there are still certain types of games that to me just feel more comfortable with a controller in hand, so even though I’m a PC gamer these days, I still feel like an odd hybrid.

So, until relatively recently, I was gaming on my PC on an Xbox One controller, then an NVIDIA Shield controller and now I’ve been playing with the Razer Wildcat for about a week. This isn’t always the case, I use a HOTAS for flight/space flight games, mouse and keyboard for FPS and strategy games, but then there are a bunch of other games where a controller just makes me feel more at home. Case in point, two games I’ve been playing recently: Assassin’s Creed Syndicate and Project Cars.

Let’s start to take a look at the Wildcat then.

The Spiel

The Razer tagline that you see everywhere there is mention of the Wildcat is that it’s “Designed for E-Sports”. Personally, I’m a bit old to get the whole e-sports thing, but apparently Tom “Ogre2” Ryan (who is a 6 times national champion at Halo) likes the Wildcat. The main draw for me is the programmable buttons. We’ll see how they hold up later.

Open the box and you’ll find a nice Razer protective case. It feels sturdy and well padded so I’d be pretty confident throwing it into a backpack and walking around with it bumping against other stuff without worrying too much. It’s zipped so it’s not going to fall open, and it’s got that nice Razer green zip so any gamer you come across will likely recognize what brand you’re toting about.

Inside the case, you have the controller itself, a built in pouch for the cable as well as the usual Razer logo stickers and an accessory pack. First shock. The side grips and sticks aren’t green. Hmm, this doesn’t bode well for me. I really liked the green stuff on all the promotional material, but as you can see below, right off the bat, this looks mostly like fairly standard Xbox One controller territory…

Also in the case is an Accessory Pack, with… you guessed it! Green stuff! Stick caps, rubberized grips and a little screwdriver… curious… It’s slightly disappointing though. I don’t know about you, but lining up stuff to stick onto things is my own personal kryptonite and that’s when it’s trying to put it onto straight flat edges like a phone screen. Maybe your OCD isn’t as bad as mine, but if it’s not perfectly straight, or I can see a speck of dirt or dust, or feel something under the surface, it drives me insane! Curving it around the handles of the Wildcat strikes me as something reserved for my own personal private hell. A place where the internet is always down, the frame rates are low and the temperatures are high.

Stick caps are a different matter though. I fiddle around with them (they stretch over the sticks pretty easily) and now have green caps on my Wildcat! After thumbing the sticks around for a few minutes though, I decide I don’t like the feel of them so remove them again.

Flicking through the instructions, I discover that the screwdriver is for removing the M3 and M4 trigger buttons on the back for those that don’t want to use them. Let me just repeat that: FOR THOSE THAT DON’T WANT TO USE THEM.

I’m serious. Some people actually are not interested in 50% of the 4 extra programmable buttons the Wildcat gives you. Perhaps there’s a legitimate reason for that, but I’m not sure what it is at this stage.

So, mildly bemused, I start to find my way around the Wildcat.

So here I sit with my non-green (except for the “A” button of course!) Wildcat. The USB cable has the usual Razer braided wrapping around it giving it a nice quality feel and the end which goes into the controller has a nice notched housing to ease the connection woes that always seem to plague me when trying to insert a USB cable without looking at it to line it up. The cable just under 10 feet long (3 meters for those in metric), I guess to cater to those who play on a console from a sofa. I’m on a PC so it’s kind of overkill. It’s got a detachable port close to the end that plugs into your Xbox/PC.

All in all, it feels pretty well put together and anyone familiar with a normal Xbox controller is going to feel mostly at home holding this. The exceptions obviously being the extra buttons…

Custom Buttons

M1 and M2 are on the shoulders (although closer to the center than the triggers), while M3 and M4 are round the back. I’m a pretty big guy and probably have slightly larger than average hands so your mileage will likely vary compared to mine, but my middle fingers slide naturally into place right on M3 and M4 and boy do those buttons feel good.

M1 and M2 aren’t quite as natural. I like to use triggers with the front pads of my index fingers, but in this position I obviously can’t reach the M1 and M2 buttons which are closer to the center of the controller than the triggers. If I’m to use my natural position for triggers, I’ll have to slide the fingers forward to reach M1 and M2. If I want to be able to use the triggers as well as M1 and M2 without changing position, then my the first knuckle behind the front pad of my fingers will need to rest on the trigger which means that I can use the tip of my fingers to reach the custom buttons.

It’s not ideal for me, I’m not sure how other people use the tips of their fingers rather than the knuckle immediately behind them on triggers, but if you do use the tips you’ll find yourself shifting to reach M1 and M2.

Other Points

The weight and balance feel nice and with regards to the ergonomic design, two ridges on the back side help my hand fit quite snugly into place. It’s not immediately noticeable as being significantly more comfortable than a standard Xbox One controller, but comparing one immediately after the other, you do feel slightly more comfortable.

On the front you have a successfully replicated Xbox controller layout with a few key differences. At the bottom of the controller are 4 buttons allowing you to:

• Program your custom M buttons.
• Switch between the default and 2 custom profiles.
• Mute an attached microphone.
• Change volume to an attached headset.

They’re unobtrusive and don’t get in the way of normal operation.

Additionally, there are some trigger guards which you can slide to stop the triggers fully activating.

The sticks have a bit more weight to them than a standard Xbox controller but I wouldn’t describe them as heavy, while the D-pad also has individual buttons for each direction rather than the solid single D-pad of a normal controller.

Where the difference really comes into play for me is the ABXY buttons. The Wildcat has got some clicky switches here, which feel very different to a normal controller with its dull bump. The buttons are very light and actuate extremely easily. At a guess, I’d say the travel distance is about half that of a button on a normal controller. Personally, I prefer clicky stuff. My keyboard doesn’t run on Cherry MX Blues by accident (much to the bane of my wife!)

Finally, to gaming. I recently finished Assassin’s Creed Syndicate but still had it installed so figured I’d head to the level 9 underground fight club for some good button mashing. The Wildcat felt great. Combos are easy to pull off and it feels much as a good controller should, namely intuitive and letting you get on with the game. The lightness of touch for the button activation isn’t problematic and gameplay felt good and smooth. I tried out the custom buttons and found them to be mapped to existing buttons elsewhere on the controller (yeah, I hadn’t read the instructions, learn by doing and all that!).

Ok, so coming from a standard Xbox One or nVidia Shield controller, the Wildcat feels great. Does it feel $150 (£124 on Amazon UK, €150) great? Hmm, not to me. Time to try another game and see how it handles at driving.

I’ve had Project Cars in my library for a while now, but only recently started to try it. Racing games to me are either controller or wheel based (or many moons ago, neGcon back in the early days of Gran Turismo!) so the Wildcat should feel right at home here for me and it doesn’t let me down. I’m still discovering Project Cars and it seems that by default it uses Automatic gear changes. That’s all well and dandy but I suspect (as with most racing games I’ve known) that if you can master it, manual gear changes give you the edge in racing so I need to try them out. Enabling manual gearbox is problematic though, as the default controller buttons to change gears are the shoulder buttons above the triggers and this just feels all wrong to me. Time to break out the Wildcats’ instructions and figure out this custom button programming…

Sideshow: Custom Buttons

Yeah, I’m a bit of a lazy guy at times. The path of least resistance and the mantra “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” are my friends, so when Assassin’s Creed functioned exactly as I needed it to, I didn’t bother looking at M1 – M4. Now, however, there’s a problem.

The instructions are actually remarkably straightforward. Select a profile where you want to save your custom config (profile button, it highlights an LED to the left or right of the Xbox button at the top center), hold down (in this order) the program button, the button you want to program and then the button you want to replicate. The Wildcat buzzes and that’s your confirmation. Rinse and repeat. 30 seconds or so later and I’d programmed all four of the custom buttons, the left two (M1 and M3) were now my LB shoulder button (for gear down) and the right two (M2 and M4) were now my RB for gear up.

Back To The Game

Ok, this is more like it. Gear changes are now easy (ish). I tried using the M1 and M2 buttons, but quickly stopped using them for the same reasons I mentioned above. I want to use the tips of my index fingers on the triggers and want to be able to change gears without moving them from my optimal position. As such, M3 and M4 became my immediate default buttons for gear changes.

Did I immediately become a racing legend? Of course not, that’ll take practice time in Project Cars, but the Wildcat with its custom buttons has given me an easy route into manual gear changes which felt uncomfortable before and meant I had to move from my optimal and most comfortable position, so I definitely see the attraction of the custom programmable buttons.

Overall, the Wildcat is a great controller. It feels well put together, familiar, useful and generally an improvement on the standard Xbox controller in most ways. Additionally, it gives me that extra functionality I just love in the M3 and M4 buttons.

But here’s the thing. As great a controller as it is (and the more I play with it, the more I see its clear superiority over the standard Xbox controller), we need to look at more than just how good it is and address the slight intangible of value.

Value, of course, is relative. While rap stars likely throw this kind of money around on toilet paper, it’s probably fair to say that Razer isn’t aiming the Wildcat exclusively at the ultra-rich crowd.  This is priced at the top end of console controllers. Do I like the Wildcat? Hell yes! Would I pay that kind of money for it? That’s a tougher question.

Perhaps it comes down to your gaming style. For me, my gaming is split primarily between mouse and keyboard or HOTAS. As such, while I think the Wildcat is great, I’d be unlikely to spend that kind of money on one myself, simply because I'm not a huge controller user. Now that I’ve gotten used to it though, I’m certainly loathe to go back to the standard controller. As such, the rating in the main headline is aimed primarily at people who are considering the Wildcat and looking for reviews for it since I feel these people are likely to use a controller as their primary input tool for gaming. For other gamers who use a combination of input methods and who aren't particularly into controllers, the value proposition hurts the Wildcat, so while it's an excellent controller, I would likely mark its value lower. If money is no object and you want an excellent controller regardless, of course go for it.

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