Like many of you we love our Switch, but the battle for solid controller options (especially in handheld mode) has always been a slippery slope. Of course the default option of Joycons + no grip is terrible and those first wave of grips in the early life of the Switch were okay, but never really helped that much in my opinion. Then came along the Satisfye grip which has been absolutely fantastic the past couple of years and will still be my go to option when travelling. The trouble even with the Satisfye grip though is of course you are still dealing with Joycons with suck and even by designing the grip to force your hands / fingers to go a certain way the button / stick placements on the Joycons are also terrible to go along with the bad build quality.
Enter these Binbok joycons. I had always had my eye on the Split Pad Pro, but I just couldn't get over how bad I thought they looked. To me they just looked like these giant add-ons that looked tacked onto the Switch screen. So when someone mentioned the Binbok joycons in a thread it looked like it would hit both buttons for me. Better ergonomicis, quality (hopefully), and still looking nice:
To me personally these just look like they were designed to look uniform with the Switch rather than tacked on. My holy grail of controllers will always be the 360 / Xbox One so no matter what kind of controller I pick up I will always compare it to those. This gets pretty darn close in my opinion. The buttons are nice and clicky and the sticks feel firm to move (but not too firm) very similar to the Xbox controllers and they snap back to the middle quickly when let go. The one thing I truly hate about the original Joycons is the right stick placement being directly below the 4 face buttons. Was such a pain in the ass whenever you had to hit the B button and would bump that stick. Just playing 3D World and trying to jump and not accidentally rotate the camera was a big pain. Now that issue is eliminated. I love the + and - buttons on these too as they're much easier to press and find compared to the original Joycons. Haven't tested out the D-pad in game designed to use it, but browsing menus seems to work fine. My only issue is that the right stick and 4 face buttons aren't at a 45 degree angle apart. Looking at the Xbox One controller and the Split Pad Pro those look like the stick is truly at a 45 degree angle. I feel though if they tried to extend that angle out to 45 degrees it would've compromised the look and then you're getting back into Split Pad Pro look being too big. The original Joycons basically had a 0 degree angle down from the buttons and my ideal controller has a 45 degree angle and these Binbok ones seem to be probably right in the middle of those two. So again not perfect, but a hell of a lot better than the OG joycons.
Anyone looking to upgrade their joycons or even improve their handheld experience on top of the original Satisfye grip these seem like a fantastic option.
