Mine came in and I spent the day fiddling around with it in a variety of games. I went in with no expectations. I had heard mixed things about the controller but I never bothered having an opinion on one myself because, well, I didn't need anymore controllers. But hey, $5 is apparently the price if you want me to impulse buy things I've convinced myself I have no interest in.
After a day, I like it a lot, but this is clearly a controller not suited to every game out there. The customization options are incredible, and it seems like many significant releases have many custom controller profiles, so even if your game isn't perfectly suited to the controller, there's a chance that someone with OCD out there may have figured out a way to make it work. I'm not going to detail the options---it's probably been done to death and there are better salesmen than me, but it's deep.
The controller feels nice in the hands. I like the outwardly protruding grips. I think they may feel more natural than the grips on the PS4 and XBone controllers (remember, this is the honeymoon period). I really like the weigh and feel of the controller. Feels like quality materials, it's light. Your fingers glide over those touchpads like buttah. All the triggers have pretty nice action and the placement seemed suited for me (this will vary from person to person). I did run into two issues with the feel itself:
1. I don't like the face button placement. I think this is what's going to make it unsuitable for a lot of games. I have pretty sizable hands. When you're holding the controller, your right thumb kind of naturally orients or lands on the touch pad. The touch pad is pretty large. To reach the face buttons, you have to pull your thumb down, and reach to the left. I don't mean to make this sound like a terrible chore, but the "reach to the left" side of the equation feels like it includes too much reaching to feel very natural, or comfortably, or repeatable at a very high rate. It's possible I can adjust to this for those fast-paced games where this might be a problem, but I have PS4 and Xbone and whatever controllers all over the place.
2. Not going to waste too many words on this: I don't like the haptics in this in comparison to other controllers. If I had to put a word to it, they kind of feel too mechanical? I dunno, that feels wrong. Anyway, you can customize or turn haptics off so it's no biggie.
Not really a complaint, but a side effect of offering so many customization options: it can be confusing looking at a game's custom control profile and figuring out what the hell is going on, even when comparing it to the controls listed in the game's settings. It would be nice if this could be simplified, but this is probably just the sort of thing you have to learn from experience. There are enough options that making it less confusing would probably leave out too much important info.
Anyway, I hope they do a version 2! If they can conclusively tackle that face button issue, I think everything else is a winner. I feel like they might have to shrink, or readjust, or do something to that exquisite right pad to fix it though, which is kind of a bummer. I think you could sacrifice some size there and not lose anything though.
