I’ll admit I’m not a huge mobile gamer. I dip in and out of Diablo Immortal, and I’ve been losing half an hour here and there to Warhammer 40K: Tacticus for a while, but if I’m gaming on my phone it’s usually a crossword app or whatever match-3 game my favourite celebrity recently endorsed. But big hands and small screens don’t always go comfortably together, so the addition of the 8BitDo Ultimate Mobile Gaming Controller to my life has been a bit of a net positive.
For a start, it’s almost completely faff-free. No faffing here, no ma’am. You slide your phone into the extendable breach, connect the Bluetooth, and you’re away. It doesn’t support iPhone at this point, which will obviously be a deal-breaker for Apple fans, but if you’re an Android user you should be well served.
It immediately feels very comfortable in my hands. The palm-grips ape Xbox’s design to a certain extent, and fit more snuggly in my man-mitts than the Backbone One, which this is also a fair bit cheaper than. You wouldn’t necessarily notice though, as the 8BitDo Ultimate has a really reassuring clicky-ness to its inputs, and an array of options for the customisable back buttons that you can change with the admittedly bare-bones software. You can also choose to ignore the software completely and play as-is out of the box.
I’ve had a few different mobile controllers like this before, and lost more than one to stick drift, so the fact that 8BitDo have included Hall Effect technology in the sticks and triggers as standard here is a nice touch. It makes the thumbsticks much more resistant to wear and tear, while the triggers feel more responsive. It also looks really nice, with a no-nonsense sleek black finish. In fact, that’s probably what I like most about this controller: it’s almost completely no-frills.
More often than not budget controllers will overload their design with unnecessary flash like RGB lighting and gaudy logos, but the 8BitDo Ultimate is refreshingly straightforward. I’ve been using it with a Samsung Galaxy A55, which is a fairly large phone, and it fits snugly. There’s zero latency or delay, either, so you’d have no issues with twitchier games like shooters. The battery life is solid, too, offering a little north of 12 hours from a full charge, though the full charge itself will take over an hour. It does mean you can take it out with you for a day and not have to worry about it running out.
Coming in at under £40 online, it’s a worthy purchase for anyone who plays a lot of games on their Android mobile, and won’t let you down where quality and connectivity are concerned.
