we heard you loud and clear never in the history of controller roundups has there
ever been a greater Omission than the Gamester Cyclone 2 we covid-19
controllers and the Cyclone 2 was not one of them not because we didn't want
to cover it it was on our original coverage list it just didn't arrive in
time and so lucky for you ShortCircuit exists and we are going to take a look
at what is potentially one of the best controllers on the entire freaking
Market we have our controller we have our included charging stand this thing's
cool it looks like a little monitor monitor stand we have our 2.4 GHz dongle
we have our instruction manuals stickers quick start guide and we have a 1 M type
A to type c USB cable that's fine it's
shorter than a lot of the cables that I see in controller boxes but I'm going to
use this thing Wireless because why the heck wouldn't I we also have the white
version which uh nicely enough comes with a white cable and a white dongle
that's actually a nice little touch I genuinely wasn't expecting we have our
face buttons our asymmetrical sticks we have our menu View and share buttons we
have our Xbox style turn on button it's got a little nice little light around it
on the bottom we have our M button which presumably means mode you can assign
different functions to it and then at the top we have our nice clicky bumpers
our triggers our type-c Port as well as now that I know a phone mounting slots
you put a little phone mount on there that's pretty cool on the back we have two paddles and our little pins for
charging for the dock that comes with it you don't have to get the dock it costs
a little bit more and on the bottom we
have our headphone jack very nice very
solid uh amount of buttons nothing too extra and uh I'm okay with that in terms
of hand feel this is very similar to an
Xbox control it feels a little bit smaller and this back Edge feels a
little bit sharper it lands right in the crevice of my fourth and finger so it's
not uncomfortable um but I think some people won't love it
that does mean that the paddles land right under my middle finger so it's a
very natural hand shape and it feels very comfortable it feels quite premium
uh very solid no like twist or anything the triggers are fairly light but they
feel premium very even across the whole travel on the trigger itself you'll see
there's a little switch that switches it between hall effect and micro trigger
mode that's an interesting mechanism usually there's like a little button
here that adds a plastic stop I don't hate that uh in the clicky mode it feels
totally great I don't think my finger is going to touch that toggle naturally I
kind of have to go reaching for it if I want to feel it so I think that's a actually a pretty ingenious spot to put
it it is a little more finicky uh so I don't think mid game you're going to be
reaching and switching that although that's not a particularly common thing to do oh that's pretty cool you can
actually see what's happening inside the trigger when I switch the toggle there's
a little lever that comes down it looks like a little mouse switch uh and you're
hitting that directly it's not just like a little plastic stop uh and then when
you turn it off it goes back to being the full hall
effect motion that's really cool that you can actually see that I think that makes the transparent even cooler these
bumpers are definitely membran but they're well within good Zone across the
whole thing it feels like a pretty even press although I think you can hear the
difference of pressing closer to the inside than the outside definitely
totally fine cuz my finger is resting on the whole thing it's pretty neat the white one has the transparent triggers
at least more transparent than the black transparent one which is transparent but
as you can see it's hard to see inside so I think this is a more striking look
I like that aesthetic I'm not a big gold guy and I fear that the plastic would
wear on this and not look so great I
think aesthetically speaking it is a fairly striking controller uh quite
attractive face buttons are a fairly short travel with a little click at the
bottom so it's a micro switch style those feel pretty good actually I like
that these buttons aren't as important and they all feel fine the d-pad not bad
uh clicky but it's still a little mushy overall I don't think I would hit
accidental diagonals too often but doing
you know forward quarter Circle forward is not going to be a super consistent
experience these sticks have a good weight to them they feel pretty premium
and part of that is actually the selling feature of this controller these are gamer mag res TMR sticks it's worth
noting that these are 12-bit resolution analog sticks which means that you have
a little more definition and precision on the sticks in my experience that
doesn't translate a ton in game that being said I don't play a ton of
competitive games with a controller so I think it's one of those it's not going
to hurt you and it's good to have that Precision overall although it's probably
not worth going out of your way just to get that in terms of other features
we're going to get into it's got RGB it has Esports level Rumble uh which means
absolutely nothing as well as an 860 milliamp battery which is uh adequate
size for this and 1,000 Herz pulling rate over its 2.4 GHz mode which is very
good so far everything is pretty darn good on this thing and I'm really
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a big fan of the USB port on the stand which means you can plug the USB cable
into the stand the dongle into this and that's all you ever have to do is just
plug this thing in stand it there it's going to charge is going to connect and
it's supposed to autoconnect as soon as you take it off that's actually a pretty slick system for a PC thing I'm I'm a
big fan and once connected we get our RGB controls that's pretty nice we have
our polling rate they're calling it the report rate uh you can turn it down uh I
guess if you want it to conserve the battery we're going to keep it at 1,000
over here we have our gyro controls we can change our xais output mode so that
you can control what uh directions it's
actually going to Output in uh how you turn it on with a button and then the
method of either holding on or just pressing to switch our output modes we
have our stick our Mouse uh and then our
Professor X mode uh if you know what that is let us know in the comments down
here we have trigger controls including Dead Zone which by default has a little
bit of Dead Zone on both sides we have our adaptive mode although these are not
adaptive triggers there's fixed mode oh
there's actually more hidden controls uh same thing Dead Zone anti- Dead Zone
there's a curve adjustment which is pretty nifty we're going to leave it at default as well as the hair trigger mode
I'm not going to use that because I'm just going to use the triggers locks
themselves when I want to use that we have stick control same thing Dead Zone
anti- Dead Zone curve adjustment and then stick trajectory we have button
reassignment we're just going to leave everything at default but that's a fairly comprehensive amount of control
in this app uh and it worked pretty good
uh pretty impressed with this controller it's time to game first impression these
sticks are very precise they feel very good the triggers feel awesome uh input
latency on this feels uh spot on and with our Labs testing this fell right in
the middle of the pack with input latency around 9 milliseconds although
we've seen Reports online of big input latencies over the 2.4 GHz dongle our
testing over Bluetooth was not particularly good wired seems to be the
most consistent but uh personally I would suffer through the spikes uh to
have the wireless Mo CU I'm usually sitting away from my
screen I think these might be the best
feeling triggers with micro switches I've ever felt generally it's just that
plastic toggle but this still has that tactility of a little micro switch uh
these feel exceptionally good and then the regular hall effect trigger travel
also feels really premium this feels this feels Exquisite I didn't even test
this stick circularity yet oh that's looking pretty dang good oh average ER
of 1% these are precise These are nice
sticks which puts it within margin of error of our Labs testing which was 0%
Labs explicitly said these are among the best analog sticks they've tested yet oh
gam sir you know how to game sir I like
recycling jokes from ltts this is a really good controller for handfield too
if you're a sweaty gamer it has this textured plastic feel so it's not going
to have that gross rubbery Decay and it feels very nice in the hand now that we
know that the sticks and triggers are phenomenal why don't we play a game that's going to test other aspects of
this controller even in a game that demands Precision like Super Meat Boy
this is a a Flawless experience I am
having a hard time finding any negatives on this thing I actually really like the
amount of click the face buttons have it's clicky so there's a definition of
when you know you're pressing it but it's still an acceptable travel amount
so it feels not that far out of the ordinary coming from like an Xbox
controller the Cyclone 2 might be the new king of controllers especially
considering that this controller is only $50 or 56 if you want the stand which I
think is actually worth it it's it's made out of metal it holds the controller while and it has the little
dongle slot uh seems worth the $6 and
this controller works on switch it works on PC Android iOS uh it's an excellent
package this is hard to argue with $50
for such an excellent controller wow there really is no reason to buy
first-party controllers unless you're playing on a console I am left wondering
should I get this or the Vader or the
Apex man there's so many there's so many good controllers that I just wasn't
aware of of I don't see any major downsides to the Cyclone 2 it's an
really well-rounded controller that's built for a lot of purposes at an
absolutely fair price I would definitely add this to the list of controllers you
should consider just like you should consider subscribing a ShortCircuit and
watching more videos I recently unboxed the Apex 4 which arguably is a better
controller but it's uh a different price tier so it's you know it's an interesting one to have in your
conversation but uh you should watch it