I am nowhere near a professional gamer. One example that illustrates this (that a friend constantly brings up) is when I amazingly managed to flip a helicopter upside-down in Battlefield. Another is my constant losing steak in pretty much any fighting game. Still, I’m decent enough and a change might help to turn things around a little. Enter the Nacon Revolution X Pro controller.
The Nacon Revolution X Pro controller is a high-quality, highly customizable controller for the XBox One, Series S|X, and Windows 10 PC. It’s aimed at competitive play, but does it give you an advantage? This review will aim to answer that.
Initial Experience
Opening up the box of the Nacon Revolution X Pro controller reveals a rather nice carrying case. It feels incredibly solid and I have no doubts that the controller will be protected in transit. This touch gave me the impression of a premium experience right off the bat.
Diving further in revealed the controller itself, a strong-looking braided cable a number of leaflets, and a little plastic case. The case contained some small weights, two concave analog grips, and some metal joystick grips – these are in the form of rings to go around the analog stick and restrict their movement. I was a bit mystified by these extra items in the case at first. The instruction manual made no note of them and the online manual only briefly referred to their existence. I eventually puzzled it out.
Before looking into customization I decided to plug it into the USB port and play. This was straightforward on both my XBox Series S and my PC, with no required setup. I could even switch between the standard controller mode and four preset configurations aimed towards different types of games by flicking a toggle on the back and pressing a button to switch.
Customize Your Controller – Software
Diving a bit deeper into the controller, you can customize it both via software and physical changes. The software is both available on Windows 10 and XBox stores for free. This lets you customize multiple profiles, four of which you can assign to the controller at a time. It’s easy enough to change which ones are assigned to the controller if you like to customize for each game. The default profiles are Racing-Sports, FPS, Arcade-Fighting, and Infiltration.
You can make a lot of changes to how the Nacon Revolution X Pro controller works. This includes:
- Being able to remap all buttons
- Being able to invert left/right sticks
- Adjusting the response curve (per stick)
- Configuring the dead zone (per stick)
- Changing how much you need to press triggers down (per trigger)
- Setting vibration levels (individually to the left/right grips and triggers)
This is a huge amount of customization for a controller and isn’t even everything. I should also note here that remapping the buttons extends to four additional buttons on the back of the controller. I tried using these for firing weapons and found it much quicker than pressing a trigger down after some adjustment time. Of course, the same can be said about the feature to customize the triggers too.
I expect that players will benefit from this as much as they put time into it. Some basic customization is easy and I found it useful. My reaction time was improved a lot just through remapping. Changing the response curve took more experimentation and varied more per game, but certainly helped me aim more quickly. Advanced features can really change how the game feels and plays, but even the presets are good for most games and make a difference.
Customize Your Controller – Hardware
As mentioned, the Nacon Revolution X Pro controller comes with some extras. The first of these are a number of metal weights at 10g, 14g, and 16g each. You can pull covers off handles of the controllers to insert weights if you prefer a heavier controller – it essentially works like putting a battery in. This seems like an improved method over the Nacon Revolution, where a key had to be used to open compartments.
The analog grips can be pulled off. By default, they come with standard concave grips, which tend to be better for players who place their thumb on the grip or want better movement control. The convex grips can be switched on for players who instead prefer to push the analog stick from the side and are said to increase accuracy.
While the grips are off, the metal joystick grips can be slipped over the stick if desired. These rings restrict the movement. Restrictions don’t sound like a good thing, but they can be useful for certain games to more quickly complete actions and increase reaction speed. I found them useful for fighting games in particular; I was getting what felt like twice as many hadoukens in the same time and succeeding in getting them more consistently. Again, reaction speed was certainly increased too with movements taking less time to complete.
The Appearance
The Nacon Revolution X Pro controller looks good. It’s a plain matte black, but has a lot of little extras. From the chrome analog sticks to the Nacon logo embedded in one of the concave analog sticks, there are subtle touches that look great.
More obvious is the ring of light around the right analog stick. In default mode, this is a bright XBox green, but switch to advanced mode and it changes colors based on the profile used. When setting up the profile, this can be chosen from a wide variety of colors and effects. I even had a mixed pink and blue ring at one point.
Comfort, Layout, and Shape
The Nacon Revolution X Pro controller is approximately the same shape and size as an official XBox Series S|X controller and the layout is almost the same, with a few minor exceptions. It fits in my hands without any issue and is comfortable to hold and use.
The sticks are slightly longer and wider than the standard, even without any additional modifications, the D-pad is a cross rather than a circle and the middle buttons are around the XBox button, instead of underneath. This spreads them out a bit more. The analog sticks are comfortable and I’ve had no issues using them.
As mentioned, there are four extra buttons on the back too. I did find that they take a while to get used to, but it can be very comfortable to just twitch a finger to tap the button instead of making a larger motion.
The controller is quite lightweight which is great for longer sessions. I imagine that it’s partly because of the lack of battery – it’s a wired controller after all. Still, the Nacon Revolution X Pro controller weighs in at 80% of the weight of the official XBox Series S|X controller. It does come with a high-quality three-meter long braided cable, but that doesn’t feel significant in terms of weight as it will mostly be resting on a surface. The cable is long enough that it should fit almost all situations too.
The buttons are nice and clicky. I particularly like the ABYZ ones as they’re slightly larger than normal, flat-faced, and feel responsive.
Much like the Nacon Pro Compact controller, the triggers don’t go in all of the way. This means there’s a shorter distance than the official ones, though not much as these are taller. With the right settings in the software, these can be incredibly responsive in games like FPS.
Extra Features
This comes equipped with Dolby Atmos for headphones which is a nice inclusion. To use this, you need to download some extra software and set it up.
Verdict
The Nacon Revolution X Pro controller is a solid controller. The price is relatively high, but you get a lot of additional features and a ton of customization for it. It’s certainly a professional controller and even helped me to up my game.
The only real improvement I’d like to see would be for it to be wireless, but realistically it’s not an option for a professional controller; being wired reduces the latency.
If you want to completely customize your experience, the Nacon Revolution X Pro controller is worth it.
NACON REVOLUTION X PRO IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
Purchase: Nacon Website
Like the sound of this, but a bit too expensive? Why not check out the Nacon Pro Compact?
Many thanks go to Nacon for providing a review unit for this title.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
