Has PC gaming evolved, or has Valve taken on too much?
Valve certainly savoured the media attention it got for the long-awaited Steam Controller. We were tantalised with brief images, we marvelled at the technical specifications, and we were bombarded with prelaunch videos of whooping gamers claiming it was the most marvellous thing ever created. But is it?
With the Steam Machines now here and the Steam Link on the shelves, the Steam Controller can finally have its day in the limelight and in your living room, It's a kind of Frankenstein’s monster combination of a keyboard, mouse and gamepad, designed to fill the gap between PC gaming and consoles.
It features two large touchpads to either side of the controller body. The one of the left is a D-pad arrangement, with a decent tactile feedback, and the other is a solid touchpad with a push button. Both have quite a powerful haptic feedback and work well in some of the games we tested the controller on.
The four action buttons can be found in the lower right of the controller and are very similar to that of an Xbox controller. They are quite small in comparison, though, and feel a little close together, to the point where it’s easy to hit the wrong button.
In addition, there’s an analogue stick to the lower left, which feels really good and is a solid build, with a rubber grip to stop your thumb slipping off. There are also a pair of triggers under each index finger, and added to the mix are a pair of paddles on the rear of the controller, which cover the battery compartment.
The buttons, touchpad and feedback from each feel good, and they’re certainly responsive enough. The rear paddles take some getting used, to and you’ll find yourself tapping them by accident from time to time. But on the whole, it’s not bad.
The Steam Controller is slightly different from the usual PC, PlayStation or Xbox controller. It’s roughly the size of an Xbox pad but a lot thicker in places, which makes it feel a bit better to hold. Having said that, we do have bigger hands, and when we tested it with a 13-year-old, she did complain that the controller felt a little too big for her to reach the touchpads comfortably.
Hooking up the Steam Controller is simple enough. It comes with a length of USB cable, a Bluetooth receiver dongle and a USB extender so you can work the Bluetooth dongle up through the back of your TV unit and place it next to the TV for a direct line of sight.
Out of the box, and once the included pair of double-A batteries were fitted, it worked straight away on our Steam Link. The only major issue was the notice of an update to the controller that required us to plug it into the host PC.
When connecting it to your PC, you’ll need to run Steam in Big Picture mode. If not, you’ll find the controller ends up in a haptic feedback loop, while slowly moving the mouse pointer across the screen. Once in Big Picture mode, it returns to normal and will be ready to be configured from the Settings option.
In game, though, things didn’t quite go according to plan. While it worked in a lot of the games we own on Steam, there were quite a number that really didn’t like having the Steam Controller plugged in. They either didn’t work at all or had some strange input reactions to the button presses, some of which seemed totally random and changed from button to button.
Of course, you can apply custom Steam Controller configurations to some games, but these are still quite limited. Mostly, the controller works, although the touchpad does feel a little sensitive for the majority of games. Remapping the buttons is easy too, but it’s a time consuming affair, and if you’re coming from a console to Steam, it’s no doubt something that you’ll find extremely annoying.
For around £40, it’s not a bad price for a feature-laden PC controller, but you get the feeling that it’s trying to be a jack of all trades but sadly a master of none. As a controller, it’s okay; as a replacement for a keyboard and mouse, it’s not good.
It’ll take some getting used to, but with regular updates and support it could be better over time. David Hayward
Good, but doesn’t quite live up to the hype.