We heard you loud and clear. Never in the history of controller roundups
has there ever been a greater omission than the Game Sir Cyclone 2.
We covered 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 fricking market. We have our controller. We have our included charging stand.
This thing's cool, man. It looks like a little monitor stand.
We have our 2.4 gigahertz dongle. We have our instruction manuals, stickers,
quick start guide, and we have a one meter 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 nicely enough comes with a white cable
and a white dongle. That's actually a nice little touch. 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 amount of buttons, nothing too extra.
And 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 finger.
So it's not uncomfortable, 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, very solid,
no 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.
In the clicky mode, it feels totally great.
I don't think my finger's gonna touch that toggle naturally.
I kind of have to go reaching forward if I wanna feel it. So I think that's actually a pretty ingenious spot to put it.
It is a little more finicky. So I don't think mid game you're gonna 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,
and you're hitting that directly. It's not just like a little plastic stop.
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 in membraney,
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, cause my finger's 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, 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. 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 Game Surge, Meg, Rez, 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,
which means absolutely nothing, as well as an 860 milliamp battery,
which is adequate size for this, and a thousand Hertz polling rate over
its 2.4 gigahertz mode, which is very good.
So far, everything is pretty darn good on this thing.
And I'm really excited to test it out in game. But first, let us tell you about our sponsor.
I'm 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, it's going to connect, and it's supposed to auto-connect as soon as you take it off.
That's actually a pretty slick system for a PC thing. 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.
You can turn it down, I guess, if you want it to conserve the battery,
we're going to keep it at a thousand. Over here, we have our gyro controls.
We can change our x-axis output modes that you can control what directions
it's actually going to output in, 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,
and then our Professor X mode. 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.
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 reassignments, we're just going to leave everything at default.
But that's a fairly comprehensive amount of control in this app, and it worked pretty good.
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. Input latency on this feels spot on,
and with our Labs testing, this fell right in the middle of the pack with input latency around nine milliseconds,
although we've seen reports online of big input latencies over the 2.4 gigahertz dongle.
Our testing over Bluetooth was not particularly good. Wired seems to be the most consistent,
but personally, I would suffer through the spikes
to have the wireless mode, because 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.
These feel exceptionally good. And then the regular Hall Effect trigger travel
also feels really premium. This feels exquisite.
I didn't even test the stick circularity yet. Oh, that's looking pretty dang good.
Oh, average error of 0.1%.
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, game, sir. You know how to game, sir.
I like recycling jokes from LTTs. This is a really good controller for hand-filled too,
if you're a sweaty gamer, it has this textured plastic feel,
so it's not gonna 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 gonna test
other aspects of this controller? Even in a game that demands precision like Super Meat Boy,
this is 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 made out of metal, it holds the controller well,
and it has the little dongle slot. Seems worth the $6.
And this controller works on Switch, it works on PC, Android, iOS.
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 good controllers
that I just wasn't aware of. I don't see any major downsides to the Cyclone 2.
It's a 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 to ShortCircuit and watching more videos.
I recently unboxed the Apex 4, which arguably is a better controller,
but it's a different price tier. So it's an interesting one to have in your conversation,
but you should watch it.