Controller with a SCREEN! Nacon Revolution X Unlimited Xbox Controller Review

Forget the Wolverine V3 Pro, this is the ultimate controller, hands down. This has more customisability and features than you thought could even exist, including, but not limited to, a damn display built right in! This thing is the complete package, so let me explain just why I’m so excited by this thing, starting with what’s in the box. Everything is nicely housed in the fairly large hard carry case, and I do mean everything. The 3 metre nicely braided USB C cable, the box of accessories, the dongle, the controller and the charging stand – everything. That does mean it’s pretty big and a little cumbersome to travel with, especially compared to the more sleek V3 Pro’s carry case, but still. Accessories wise you get two different sets of thumbstick tips, a taller puck and a convex dome rather than the concave tips that come on the sticks, along with two different sets of weights I’ll come back to in a second. The stand is also a nice bit of design, with it not only acting as a charging stand by just placing the controller down onto it, but it also has a well positioned USB A port and slot to pop the dongle into, meaning charging and connectivity is all handled by one cable, which is also easily accessible should you want to run the controller wired instead. The base also has a huge rubber pad on the bottom making it remarkably solid on your desk. 

When it comes to those weights, one set – the mini dumbbells – are there to clip into the back of the grips under the textured rubber covers. You have three options, 10 grams, 14 grams and 16 grams, although personally I’m not entirely sure why you’d want to add weight to your controller. Perhaps if you use the gyro function you might want a bit more hefty to make it feel a little more balanced, but that’s kind of the magic of this controller – it has so much customisability that the odds are most people won’t use every single feature, but some will and I think that’s pretty cool. The other set of weights are actually for the joysticks, as crazy as that sounds. These are, of course, hall effect joysticks, which actually lends itself to a bunch of cool benefits we’ll be getting into here, first of which is that there’s no damage done by adding weights to the stems, which alters the feel of the sticks quite dramatically. It does also limit their travel, depending on the thickness of the weight, but that’s taken into account with the software so that isn’t a huge problem. Adding the weights does actually change the feel of the sticks quite dramatically, and is something I actually would really like to have available on the Wolverine V3 Pro as that’s something I noted in that review, the sticks feel just a little too light and springy. These ones feel a touch better even without the weights, but add them in and it feels perfect, at least to me. 

Continuing our tour around brings us to the D pad, a very nice clicky affair, with a swappable face plate too. The fault flat-plate works well for me, but if you prefer a more traditional cross you can swap that over no problem. The ABXY buttons are also nice and clicky, with the right balance of travel and kinesthetic feedback – have a listen… And have a listen to the D Pad too… As for the triggers, those are a little strangely angled for me, but they do have a travel limiting switch on the back which slides a microswitch up into the housing so you get a nice click out of the now much shorter travel for shooter games. The lock is really easy to use, and locks itself in place which is nice. Naturally you’ve also got a bunch of extra buttons, six hotkey buttons actually, two sets in each of the grips, one that sits nicely under your middle finger and one more recessed for your ring and pinky fingers, plus two up top by the shoulder buttons for the claw-grippers. You’ve also got three slide switches on the back, with the middle being essentially the power switch, letting you swap between connecting via the 2.4GHz dongle, Bluetooth or wired. The switch to the right is to pick between “Classic” and “Advanced” modes – we’ll come back to that – and the button on the left is to cycle through the profiles. You’ve also got a headset jack on the bottom, along with a mic mute button, and up top you have the USB C port, a lock switch, and a multi-function button that is mostly used to activate the settings menu on the display.

Seeing as we’ve just mentioned it, and it is kind of the defining feature of this controller, let’s talk about this display. On the face of it you might think this is a gimmick, a flashy bit of tat you’ll not actually get any use out of, but honestly… I found it genuinely useful – although that’s mostly because this is a really bloody complicated controller with a whole bunch of features that just can’t really be controlled without a screen. By default anyway you see is: an xbox or PC mode icon; classic or advanced mode; profile number; connection mode; mic status; and battery status. You can change between Xbox and PC modes by holding down that multi-function button at the top for 3 seconds and the controller reconnects. Just tapping the button opens the menu, where at least in classic mode you get four top level options, audio, joysticks, mapping and settings. One thing to understand here is that depending on what modes and profiles you are using depends on what options are available to you. Nacon’s manual for this controller has two full pages of tables detailing what options are available under what conditions. As an example, in Xbox mode you can’t enable the gyroscope, but in PC mode the option suddenly appears in the joystick settings. That sort of thing takes a while to wrap your head around, but you do work it out eventually. 

Speaking of the joystick settings, my god there’s a lot here. At least in PC mode like I said you can map the built-in gyro to either joystick or the d-pad, you can adjust the response curve to five different options, you can alter the deadzone, and enable “Shooter Pro Mode”, “Sensitivity +” and reverse the Y axis. The right stick has slightly different response curve options, and you can even invert the whole sticks too. In the mapping settings you can remap all six shortcut buttons right on the controller, and in the settings page you can enable and disable vibration for each stick and side. The audio settings are even more incredible, see this can act just as a Bluetooth headset as well as a Bluetooth controller, and this has a Steelseries-like game/chat mixing mode, so you can connect your phone or laptop to this thing as a Bluetooth audio device, connect your headset to the controller, and then get game audio AND chat all through one headset, from multiple devices, and you can control the mix right on the controller. That is absolutely amazing! 

But that’s not even everything! See if you connect this in wired mode, and advanced mode, and in Xbox mode (yes there’s a lot of steps), and download the correct Revolution X Unlimited app (not the one their own website takes you to…) you get EVEN MORE CUSTOMISABILITY! You can tweak the exact mapping of the joysticks, what every single button on the controller does, limit the trigger range and sensitivity and even customise the RGB ring around the right joystick. It is frankly insane how much you can tweak with this thing. You can store up to TWENTY different profiles on this thing, twelve for classic and another eight for advanced mode. It is frankly insane, but that’s kind of what makes this great. You don’t need to compromise for basically any game, because you can cycle through your options all nicely laid out on the display so you know that for, lets say Dirt Rally 2.0 you want classic mode and profile 3 on PC, but for Siege you want Advanced mode profile 1. It’s all nice and clear and easy to use. 

Amazingly we’ve managed to get this far into a controller review and we haven’t actually talked about how it feels to use, so let’s do that. Physically this does feel a little bulkier than Razer’s options. There’s a sleek elegance to the Wolverine lineup that this RXU doesn’t quite capture. The grips, especially the mid section at the back, are just a little thicker and bulkier, and combined with Razer opting for slightly nicer feeling plastics and rubbers I’d say Razer has the win for the more premium feel, albeit a close race. This RXU does fit in the hands pretty well still, although I said I’d come back to the triggers and I guess it feels like they are just slightly too canted over. You push them diagonally down, pointing towards the centre of the controller, rather than more straight down towards the grips. That feels just a little off to me – it’s not a deal breaker or anything but it definitely feels just a little weird. The joysticks though, especially with at least the mid weight on there feels excellent. Just the right balance of feel and spring. As I mentioned the ABXY buttons feel great, nice and clicky, and the bumpers feel good enough – not quite as clicky as the V2 Chroma’s bumpers, but nice enough for sure. 

As for gaming on it, well that’s just excellent. For racing games, as an example anyway, it’s perfect. The granular control of the joysticks means you can tailor it to your driving style with more fine-grain control in the centre and wider swings on the outside, and I did of course have a play with it in gyro mode which… well it works perfectly fine but my god it takes some getting used to. I think I’ll stick to the joystick for the time being… For FPS games, I am not the right person to be judging this, but I can say that again being able to tweak the joystick settings on the fly was amazing to get it dialed in to my tastes (as wrong as they are, I’m sure). The fact you don’t need the software for a lot of the setup is amazing too, although I’m yet to mention the polling rates. This actually offers four polling rate options (which I did test with my latency tool of course), 1000Hz (in PC mode, wired only), 500 Hz (PC mode via the dongle) and 250Hz (xbox mode, wired or wireless). I’m happy to say that the 1000Hz mode does work as expected, cutting three milliseconds of latency off the wireless results – although there’s very little difference between the 250Hz and 500Hz modes on average anyway. This is also the fastest controller I’ve tested at 11.3 milliseconds on average, down from the next best which is the Wolverine V3 Pro in its 1000Hz wired mode at 14.1 milliseconds – the same as the wireless results for this RXU! 

So, on the whole anyway, this is one incredibly impressive controller. This has basically all the bells and whistles you could imagine, and the real surprise for me is that this is £20 LESS than the V3 Pro. It is still incredibly premium at £180, but to be actively cheaper than the V3 Pro while offering an order of magnitude more features and customisation is pretty incredible. While for me the V3 Pro – and even the V2 Chroma – feel more premium in the hand, I can’t deny how impressive this thing is, and if it were my money I think I’d put it here. The convenience of the charging stand, the super easy and quick on the fly customisation thanks to the display and the wealth of options make it easy to justify over a frankly kind of minor improvement in in-hand feel. Of course those are my thoughts but I’d love to hear yours in the comments below, what do you think of this RXU? And would you opt for this over the V3 Pro, or one of the cheaper options like the PXN or NYXI controllers I’ve reviewed recently – videos in the cards above or on the end cards!