Razer Wolverine V2 Chroma Review – Better than an Elite Controller??

This is the Razer Wolverine V2 Chroma, a high end wired xbox compatible controller that even comes with RGB lighting. Why? Because Razer. This is actually a pretty great bit of kit, so if you’ll give me a few minutes of your very precious time I’ll show you around it, and hopefully give you enough information to know if you want one or not! 

Physically this is a decently custom Xbox style controller. You’ve got the asymmetric thumbstick layout as you’d expect, and (bracing for the flame war in the comments) I actually prefer. These somewhat unfortunately aren’t hall effect sticks so they will eventually drift, but they do have magnetically attached tops – and you get three options in the box, one concave tip, one taller concave tip, and one convex dome tip – and both joystick tips can be pulled off and replaced. The tallest tip might be good if you’re the sort of person who pinches the stick, and the convex dome tip I know some will prefer, but for me I’m clearly too basic as I prefer the stock concave tips. They are nicely rubberised, with the right balance of soft yet firm feeling to them. The one weird thing for me is that these joysticks feel incredibly light. Like there’s less resistance than I’m used to. Perhaps for more competitive FPS games this might be an advantage – which is what this is meant for – but personally I’d prefer a little more weight to it, a little more resistance. 

The D Pad is very much a pad here, with microswitches under each direction, making for a very clicky affair and remarkably little pretravel before the switch actuates. It feels pretty good, and a nice departure from a lot of controllers which offer mushy D pad inputs. My only minor gripe here is the physical shape – the individual directions aren’t very pronounced which makes it slightly difficult to hit, say, just right, confidently. I know this lilypad style hat is great for games that require lots of D pad inputs so this is kind of a compromise between the two styles, but perhaps just slightly more pronounced features would help. 

As for ABXY, that’s where the Wolverine V2 Chroma really stands out. These are mechanical switches, rated for 3 million actuations, with 0.65mm of travel before actuating, that’s shorter than usual, meaning you can hit the button faster, and therefore react quicker. A competitive advantage, you might say. These feel great, and they sound great too, have a listen.

As for all those extra buttons – if I’m honest I’m a little conflicted. The four on the back are positioned in such a way that you can’t accidentally press them – which is great – but that has the side effect of them being quite out of the way, making them a little uncomfortable to use. My fairly large hands only just about reach those buttons, so anyone with smaller hands is definitely going to struggle, and even though I can reach them, it’s a bit of a weird posture. I’d definitely prefer the elite controller’s side-facing controls over these. Hell, even the Steam Controller’s integrated paddles feel better to me. The extra two buttons up top, on the other hand, are pretty well placed, and have a distinctly clicky-er sound compared to the bumpers, giving an extra bit of feedback, which is great. The bumpers feel pretty good too, with their own nicely tactile click to them, with a decent amount of travel. They don’t feel mushy nor too stiff – as goldilocks would say, just right. 

The triggers have some customisation too. They are remarkably light, although if you’re an FPS player there are easily reachable sliders to lock the triggers into hair-trigger mode. This feels pretty solid, as in you can reef on the trigger and it doesn’t feel like anything is going to break, and provides just enough travel to feel good, but not so much you get a workout spamming the trigger. With the locks off, the trigger has a good sweep and is nice and smooth. It feels pretty good.

One thing I can’t say I understand is the Chroma RGB lighting. Out of the box it’s on by default, set to slowly cycle through the rainbow of colours. They’ve positioned the lighting so it isn’t covered by your hands, meaning it’s always visible, and kinda distracting. Like, it looks cool when it’s on your desk, but I think I’d want that switched off if I was using this as my primary input method. Luckily, assuming you can get Razer’s Windows Store app to work, you can disable them from there.

Speaking of customisation, Razer has opted to limit the customizability here to a separate, standalone Window Store app – I assume because it’s the same app you’ll use on an Xbox and why design it twice. The downside to this is that it’s a terrible experience, and for me straight up didn’t work on my PC. It got stuck on the first “there’s an update” screen and never moved off of it, with no error codes or anything. I installed the app on my laptop and finally got it to work. From there you can customise the joystick sensitivity – specifically the “clutch” setting, so when you’re holding the assigned buttons on the back you can limit the joystick’s sensitivity which is actually really cool. You can also adjust the deadzone, and change the button mappings. Extra features like multi-actions or macros are not available, as Razer says this is meant for a competitive environment where macros are generally banned. 

One of the other unique features Razer is keen for you to know about is the slightly different shape – the bulbs you nestle into your palm are a little shorter and fatter than a traditional Xbox controller design. That makes it easier to reach up to the bumpers at the top, and combined with the rather nice textured rubber coating, this does feel great in the hands. It’s very well built, feels properly premium, and felt pretty good in my hands. 

On the whole this feels pretty good for gaming. The thumbsticks take some time to get used to, and using the sensitivity ‘clutch’ buttons on the back – those are the lower two buttons on the back – takes even longer to get used to, but it’s a definite advantage. The mechanical switches, to me anyway, feel pretty nice – they’ve got the right amount of travel while still being nice and tactile. It is a shame the sticks aren’t hall effect though, and I’d definitely prefer those rear switches further out for easier pressing. Of course, all of this is mute if the controller costs a million pounds, and being Razer it just might. Actually, MSRP is pretty crazy at £150, although it’s currently on sale for just £80 which is much, much more reasonable. For the MSRP I’d 100% rather get an Elite Controller Series 2, but for its current sale price I think this is pretty decent. Being wired it should be a little lower latency – and yes I’m working on an update to my open source latency testing tool to be able to test controllers – and the mechanical switches add to the value proposition for me. The software sucks, but once you’ve got a setup you like you shouldn’t need to use it too often. It would be nice to have game-to-game layouts though, or at least a way to cycle through profiles on the controller itself without losing useful functionality. On the whole I do like this, and for the current price I think it’s decent enough. For MSRP? Hell no. That’d be one hell of a Razer tax!