£16 Wireless Hall Effect Game Controller?? EasySMX X15 Review

I paid £16.31 for this, the EasySMX X15. Is this the absolute best value controller on the market, or did I waste my money? Well, let’s take a look, test it, and find out! First, what did I actually buy? The box itself has a weird look – it’s a funko-pop lookin’ box, yet the controller inside is wrapped incredibly loosely in a plastic bag, making it look truly awful through the plastic. Still, once you get it out you’ll find what sure looks to be a perfectly normal, and fairly decent quality, controller, plus a pretty cheap feeling USB dongle and a very short and cheap feeling USB A to C cable. You get what you pay for after all. 

The controller itself is a fairly typical Xbox style layout – offset sticks, ABXY buttons, and a nice round D-Pad – although it’s worth noting this thing isn’t an Xbox controller. The box makes this clear, it’s for PC, Nintendo Switch, or your phone. That might be worth keeping in mind, despite their somewhat contradictory claim of “Universal Compatibility”. Anyway, from the front you’ll notice the interesting styling. From the “117” on the left side, I have to imagine this is a vaguely Halo-esque styling, but it looks cool enough. There are like 10 different styles you can choose from though, but at the time I bought this, this style was the one on sale for £16, down from the apparent standard price of £30. Once you plug it in, you’ll notice all the RGB LEDs, which definitely accentuates the styling even more. Those can be turned on or off with the aptly named “on” or “off” switch on the back too, which helps a lot for battery life for sure. 

The physical fit-and-finish is actually really pretty good. You’d think for £16 shipped to my door next day (so Amazon’s hefty cut means probably £10 to EasySMX) that it’d be horrific, but no. This is actually pretty nice. It feels decent in the hands – sure, the ABXY buttons are the most basic plastic you could imagine and the joystick tips are worryingly shiny, but it’s really not bad. The textured hard plastic on the grips does feel a little rough, but it’s not bad. The buttons are a little mushy, the d-pad too, but the joysticks are freaking hall effect so they should never drift, the triggers are HE too, and my god this is a wireless game controller for 46 Freddos! Oh, and if that wasn’t enough, you even get two extra buttons on the back that are placed real well, have a nice enough tactile feel, and you get a 1000mAh battery inside which is in theory good for 20 to 40 hours of usage depending on where you look on the Amazon listing. Not bad, huh?

If you were interested in the latency, well first I should mention that this thing is actually a 1000 hertz controller both wired and wireless – I’m surprised that isn’t one of the key highlight points on the product page! Second, this thing is fine. It isn’t the fastest, in fact it isn’t super close to being the fastest, taking 14.6 milliseconds on average when wired, or 22.4 milliseconds when running wirelessly. This is closest to the slowest controller I’ve tested (that isn’t utter trash anyway), but it’s still more than adequate for gaming. Speaking of… for what I consider more controller-appropriate games, like Dirt Rally 2.0, it’s nice enough. The joystick tips do feel pretty cheap, and the sticks themselves feel fairly light. You do get used to it for sure, but these are far from my favourite joysticks I’ve used. The buttons are on the mushy side – save for the two extra ones on the back which are a little more tactile – but are more than usable for sure. The built in vibration is also fine. It’s hardly the strongest or even most textured feedback I’ve felt in a controller, but it’s also not the worst. It doesn’t feel like it’s rattling around inside, it doesn’t sound bad, so on the face of it this is fine. It’s average. That goes for games I absolutely cannot enjoy on a controller – FPS games. While this thing’s averageness is a factor here, it’s only a part of my poor performance. The tips really did get in the way of good control though, even if the sticks feel decently sensitive.

To be honest, everything about this thing feels average. It feels mid, and yet I paid a VERY low end price for it. For that kind of money I’d really struggle to complain about literally anything this thing doesn’t do quite as well as I’d hope. Seriously, for £16 shipped to my door, I cannot argue with this thing at all. Sure, there are other controllers I’ve tested that have some more features, some better performance, and cost more – between £40 and £90 generally gets you a noticeably better controller – but when we’re talking about the discounted price I paid, it feels a little hard to justify the potentially five times more money just to have nicer stick tips y’know? If I’m being truly honest with myself though, I think I’d rather have something nicer, but I’m in a position where spending £40-90 on a controller I’m gonna use a whole lot is reasonable for me, but if you are in a position where you only have £20 to spend on a controller right now, you will not be disappointed by this thing. The EasySMX X15 is a more than adequate controller, so good job them!