on paper this is a king-tier gaming
controller offering an unprecedented one-two punch of cross-compatibility and
durability and yet it comes from a company that i only just heard of when
they made the news for offering replacement analog sticks for the valve
steam deck it comes from gili kit and they're calling it the king kong 2 pro
controller but what makes it so special aside from the
fact that it comes with a nice little carrying case man i love that actually
nice little hard case if you like to travel or just keep your belongings safe
when they're in storage although i can immediately see some ways that it could
be improved there's no pass-through for charging so you can't charge your
controller while it is inside the case and also
oh i'm i'm less impressed now this hinge seems like it's
not long for this world but the same cannot be said of the controller itself
on the surface it looks just like an xbox series x controller it's even got
the same little texture dimples on the back although there are some switch
buttons added to it we'll talk more about that later but it's what's under the hood that counts the king kong 2 pro
instead of using cheap potentiometer-based joysticks uses hall
effect joysticks so that means that unlike the playstation 5 nintendo switch
xbox series and even the valve steam deck the king kong 2 pros joysticks
should last much longer the reason for this is that
potentiometer joysticks are kind of like us it's not a matter of if
it's a matter of when they will expire they use two potentiometers one in the
x-axis one in the y-axis and a potentiometer if you're not familiar is
a variable resistor so what happens is
as you move the potentiometer the voltage readout changes indicating to
your pc or to your console where the analog stick is the problem is that
potentiometers have moving wearing parts
and when the metal contacts wear out it can actually change those resistance
values that's what's known as joystick drift so your joystick might be sitting
in a centered position still the springs might be fine but the values have
changed so now in that neutral position
your character starts drifting off to the side or walking
backwards or whatever the case may be hall effect joysticks use an entirely
different mechanism they look and feel exactly the same because they're still
spring-loaded but to get that voltage to
get that value they use permanent magnets now okay before you correct me i
know that even a permanent magnet is not technically forever permanent but
compared to a potentiometer i think it's okay to call it that so
what happens is as we change the relative position of these permanent magnets we get a voltage value that is
never going to change of course if it's attached to a crappy controller we're
not going to care about that so we'll definitely get some impressions there but first let's have a look at what else
is in the box you get some stickers you get some
firmware updates little manual ah yes this matters a lot because there's a bit
of complexity here we got a nice little type a to type c flat charging cable
it's definitely usb 2. you can tell from the white color coding and the fact that
most of the pins inside the type-c connector are missing i'm actually not even sure if it does data nice all right
it does do data there's charging only USB-C cables it's like really
you had to save those fractions of a penny worth of copper next to the
charging port we've got a pairing button with accompanying four led player
indicator just like you'd find on a nintendo switch then on the other side
we've got my first disappointment i'd really hoped given that it is shaped
exactly like an xbox controller that they might have found a way to work xbox
compatibility into the product but unfortunately you need a third-party
dongle like a wingman in order to connect this thing to your xbox the good
news is it does still have decent cross-platform compatibility you can
select either d or x input on Windows depending on whether you're playing or
retro games or if you just want it to be picked up automatically by modern games
that would be x input you can select Android or iOS compatibility mode or
obviously nintendo switch since it seems like their main target is switch players
who don't want to wear out their freaking joysticks because it's designed
for the switch you'll find all the appropriate nintendo specific buttons on
the front i did say i would touch on that later as well as a six axis
gyroscope inside that gilly kit claims
will work just like in pc games without
any software configuration or dedicated utility i am going to want to try that
out oh also it supports amiibo tapping
all right those are still a thing okay cool i mean yeah action figures
right like sure it occurs to me we should probably
have it oh my god the ergonomics of the switch pro controller are not as good
the switch pro controller doesn't have analog triggers i haven't played any
mario kart this generation what the actual nintendo and this thing is so
expensive i guess now's as good a time as any to talk about the price of the
king kong 2 pro it's 70 us dollars putting it right in line with first
party controllers in terms of pricing and i would say pretty damn in line in
terms of the build that's ignoring the hall effect
joysticks too
man yeah in line or better very little
flex good plastics god those are mushy shoulders how do
they get away with it charging as much as they do for first party
but at least they're not mushy
here try this thing
yeah like i would take that over over
any one of these first party controllers soft trigger sorry i realize i haven't
even talked about d-pad is nothing special especially
after playing around with the gpd win max 2 which has like the vita style
d-pad stop trying to reinvent the d-pad it's already been invented okay it's
decent though abxy
decent length travel not like super wild clicky like the remember those xbox
uh compatible razer controllers they did for a bit that had those like hyper
clicky abxy dbrand is apparently the sponsor for
this video and i've been asked to ask what is dbrand doing sent us a game for
for us to play a game to play oh my god
james is going to join in today i've actually played this before and i'm really good at it so when the music
stops be not the last one to push a button
yeah we both did that's how good i am baby
that was it that's the dbrand integration as they zap me i guess you
can buy their stickers if you want they make them for all kinds of products like
tablets phones laptops game consoles
they've got their dark plates for the playstation 5. guys can check them out
they have a weird sense of humor ow that hurt theoretically it should work just
like a native switch pro controller it even wakes the console theoretically
let's just cycle through the modes here to be clear i don't know that this is gilly kit's fault but this has not been
a great experience so far okay let's go come on buddy i don't think that's the
right that's not the right one if you look at the instructions close the screen and
select grip order seriously that's the one no because you
have to uh for certain what the it paired
am i the idiot is that no one hears me it's just a misunderstanding you know
what now i get to embarrass myself in breath of the wild because i haven't
touched this damn game in like a thousand years this feels great
i like this controller though gyroscope aside i think that they could have a
little less friction around the edge of the analog sticks so i do notice a
little bit of pull i'd like to see them do better with that i think they've got
like a beauty ring like a kind of accent around here that's causing a little bit
of friction i think it's the kind of thing that you could easily solve for yourself if you wanted to with like a
little bit of like paraffin wax around the outside or something like that you shouldn't have to do that it should just
be using delrin or like some kind of self-lubricating material instead so
maybe for the king kong 3 pro but ignoring that man do these ever feel
good the spring tension is great and one of the benefits of hall effect joysticks
i haven't even mentioned yet is that because of their excellent durability
the manufacturers can trust that zero
will stay zero so they tend to have much smaller dead zones you can see
i need to make only a slight oh
see that the slightest deflection of the joystick and link starts walking so
you're fine control way better which may not be as important on the left stick
but on the right stick for aiming it's a big deal it was immediately
noticeable when i upgraded my steam deck to gili kit joysticks oh i guess now's
this good a time to mention uh these this is really cool unlike the major
first party controllers gili kit provides replacement mechanical buttons
so these are for your abx y's as well as keycaps and i don't think they have
replacement joysticks yet for this particular controller maybe they are
confident that they will never die but they do offer replacement joysticks for
the steam deck so i would hope that either those are compatible with their
own controller or that they plan to offer replacement ones themselves in the
future i love love seeing additional repairability
make its way into the electronics space
they have the sticks themselves but not the joystick box that's
hilarious talk about confident man why
don't we why don't we try out the gyroscope in one of the pc titles that
they claim it will just magically work in now seems like as good a time as any
to talk about some of the other functions of the controller by using
this gear button they call it like ai button
doesn't seem very ai to me but it definitely does some cool stuff you can
swap the xbay so if you prefer the north
american style confirm here back here but you're playing a nintendo or a
playstation game then you can just do what's natural for you although it'll
definitely cause some confusion if you have to do any kind of button mashing
quick time events i would think you can set up basic repeat macros so by holding
the gear button and then pressing any of the right shoulder trigger or abx y you
can have them repeat up to 20 activations per second it has this
really weird thing uh like autopilot or something like that where you can pretty
much record and then replay like long it's
like up to 10 minutes or something like that right like long strings of inputs
and this is meant for fine-tuning the repeatability of like
say for example uh some kind of speed run i
don't know that that's necessarily in the spirit of speed running depending on
how you're doing it but i know that there are cases where speedrunners will
use hacks and cheats just to determine the viability of a particular strategy
so i could see it being fine for that like hey oh that particular section
that's not what i'm focused on right now but i can i can often fail at that let's
just blow through that so i can practice the next bit i could see it being useful
for that another really cool one is you can adjust the vibration intensity so
that's just gear plus or minus
yeah plus my sorry it has a plus and minus
button so that's really confusing uh gear up or gear down motion sense aim
assist on pc cool
let's turn it up so we do gear and then
left or left trigger by hitting the gear and either
the shoulder or the trigger you indicate which one you want it to
activate the gyroscope when you're holding so if i press gear left shoulder
then when i hold the left shoulder the gyroscope will be active and if i press
gear left trigger which is what i want for this game then when i hold the
trigger so you can see here the gyroscope will be active but when i hold
the shoulder oh wait nope it's working with the shoulder as
well okay i don't know then
oh i might have done both okay yeah so let's turn this one off long vibration
is cancel yes okay yes oh well that's cool so you
can have them at even different sensitivities if you really want wow
that offers a lot of flexibility that's super cool now to be clear like
other gyro based aiming schemes it's not meant for you to enter gyro mode and
like hold control your controller like this
you're still going to be using your right stick for the majority of your
course motions it's just for making little adjustments
i'm getting some jitter in the side to side
up and down feels smooth
you can calibrate it you say whoa high sensitivity is
very high let's try low sensitivity
yeah i feel like i'm going down more than i'm coming up
but maybe i just feel like that no i'm coming up more than i'm going down now
i mean i'm kind of hovering in about the same spot it just doesn't seem
consistent i really like the finish on the top it's
like it feels soft to the touch but doesn't appear to be that like
rubberized junk that comes off like a soft touch you can customize the
sensitivity of the sticks and the triggers that's also through their gear button here it works both wired and
wirelessly i guess we didn't mention how long it's supposed to last on a charge
it's rated for 25 hours and i guess that's all there is to really say about
it is it perfect no but it's absolutely embarrassing that
it takes a company like gili kit to come out and put high quality joysticks in
their controller when we're paying so much for our first party controllers and
what i hope is that products like this put pressure on the major controller
manufacturers to switch over to this objectively superior joystick technology
thanks for watching ShortCircuit and get subscribed