Razer Wolverine V2

On paper this is a rather good device. It has two pairs of back paddles, which are configurable. It has two additional buttons between the bumpers and the triggers. It has a wireless and wired mode, as well as some mechanical switches that convert its triggers into short-travel buttons.

The controller is rather expensive, but you do feel the expense pretty much in every aspect of it. Its exterior finish is weighty and solid. The buttons have a clicky mechanical crisp feel. The controller sticks feel premium. It is a well-made controller.

The controller is extremely expensive. This is not exactly disappointing, as much as the overarching confounding variable. It is the reason why this chapter even exists.

With shipping the overall package took something approaching $300 to get. Keep in mind at the time I had a lucrative job working at a boutique L2, that I should have recognised was run by criminals. So I said, what the hell, I never splurged on a controller, might as well.

And while I do acknowledge that it feels somewhat more expensive than the others I have considered, I don't necessarily feel that it translates into being better.

First and foremost, the layout is IMO not ideal. In fact, I'd go so far as to call it bad. The basic DualSense is in my experience a rather ergonomic package. The symmetrical stick positioning and the fact that the face buttons and the dpad are essentially interchangeable allowed me to adopt a left-handed layout.

The same does not work with the weird asymmetrical shape that for some reason persists to this day in XBox controllers. It has two nubs, which you are meant to grab, but which also give you RSI. The controller is inconvenient to grip, to the point to which I did not use the paddles for their intended purpose when playing through Elden Ring. On paper you read that this design is more ergonomic, but I have found that to not be the case at all. The main issue is that for something as exotic as the Razer Wolverine, unless you live in a western country, you are unlikely to be able to take it for a spin, and try it in your hand.

In fact the weird-mishshapen form of this controller made me swear off from buying peripherals online in any which way. If it's something I am intended to spend a great amount of time with, holding and straining my hands and fingers I should better see it for myself. Weirdly, the Steam Controller, that has a similar appearance has a much better layout. The "how" eludes me to this day.

The extra buttons are not additional buttons that get recognised by the game and can be bound independently as a feature of the controller. Razer is too niche, and Wolverine is too niche within that niche for that to be the case. I had hoped that because the Dualsense Edge exists that the support for the back paddles would at least materialise as additional buttons, but it did not.

These buttons are useful if you want to move the dodge roll away from the face buttons, (which are now harder to press as per the previous point), but they are not additional buttons if say, you wanted to have extra controls in Beam NG drive, or FreeSpace 2. Nay. They are the same buttons, just located in different places.

Contrast that with the Steam Controller, which just provided you with a new controller layout, and wherein the extra buttons had actual function. Where the stance control could be separate from the interaction control, such that one could use the back paddle as a modifier. Alas.

Razer's nascent entry into the controller world has a peculiar lack of haptic feedback. It is said that a controller like that is designed for e-sports, and as such the haptic motor is not considered important enough to be included. Well, I suppose the logic requires a genius to understand, as to me the unnecessary heft of the controller provides more than enough opportunity to include a haptic motor.

That is something that I should have perhaps paid attention to when buying. In fact, me not double checking every aspect of every purchase seems to be what's causing a lot of these impulse purchases to fall apart. But this is a feature which I had assumed was broken at the software level, and was actually simply not there.

For a cheap 8-bit-do or if Linux did not actually support haptic feedback I'd say – whatever, not working, I can live with it. Not for an expensive controller that specifically does not require any spyware to be installed on your system to control.

The main issue that I ran into was the fact that the controller presented a gyroscope rather inconsistently, and with rather unreliable results. The Gyroscope in the Steam Controller provided better-than-mouse intuitive input. Furthermore, because one could activate/deactivate the gyroscope by touching the trackpad, the system worked quite well. With this thing reaching the top touchpad is a struggle, using the imprecise Gyro is a struggle and getting the desired outcome of Gyro Aiming + Flick Stick is a struggle.

While I was quick to dismiss the Horipad as being a sub-standard substitute to the Steam Controller and giving the slight edge to the Razer Wolverine… I must say that having capacitive thumbsticks would have been useful.

They rattle, and they are not the TMR kind. They have replaceable caps, which add nothing except the aforementioned rattling.