Roccat are a brand I’ve come across a fair few times while writing for GBAtemp. Between their keyboards, headsets, and mice, I’ve only really had good words to say. High quality and often affordable, they’ve made a good name for themselves in the accessories space. Coming back to them for the first time since 2021, do they still earn this high great reputation?
Out of the box, I have to say I completely forgot how big a full-sized keyboard actually is. You have a really nice black and what I think is gunmetal grey body with keycaps that sit on top of the switches, leaving the stalks exposed. It looks quite ominous when not plugged in, but with RGB being a key feature, this is naturally going to change. The keycaps feel great, and I’m really a fan of how the bottom row of keys are convex, as opposed to the other more traditional concave caps. I don’t think the definition really makes much of a difference in terms of day to day use, but it is a pleasant finish. I assume they went for this to match the feel of your typical space bar. The Vulcan 2 also comes with dedicated media buttons, and a fan-favourite knob that by default controls volume.
As you’d expect, the keyboard transforms when you actually plug it in. Roccat have always done well with their lighting, and if RGB is what you look for in a keyboard, this is certainly one for you. The exposed stalks make for a really great aesthetic, and while I have the black model on hand, I imagine this would look even better on a white background. The lights are nice, but there’s obviously more at play here. Included in the package is a rather odd looking palm rest, and hot damn is it a big selling point. Attaching to the bottom of the keyboard, the translucent palm rest also lights up! I think RGB at times can be a bit tacky, but seeing this for the first time, I was a little caught off guard by how much I enjoyed it. The effect quite simply works using a light strip on the bottom of the keyboard. When the palm rest is correctly plugged into it, the light just moves through it. It’s a good implementation for how simple it is really.
In general, there’s only one thing I can say I dislike with how the keyboard is put together: the non-detachable cable. And I need to get this out of the way, it does matter even on a non-wireless keyboard. It’s ultimately a point of failure that could be easily replaceable that isn’t, and while this isn’t anything new for Roccat, I still hold out hope they’ll change their ways. To give them what credit they’re due, this is a really nice braided cable. On top of this, the connection to the keyboard itself feels sturdy. I’m sure it will last a reasonable amount of time, but it just could’ve been better.
The final oddity is the fact the Vulcan 2 has two USBs coming from its lovely cable. This isn’t entirely uncommon in gaming keyboards, with companies like Razer often including a USB passthrough in their keyboard for ease of access. In those cases, I can totally see the use case, and I think it’s a nice additional feature. Here though? It’s just for the lights. And I don’t know how I feel about that. In my PC setup, USB slots are becoming more and more competitive, and I just don’t know whether I could justify two to make my keyboard look a bit prettier. There is a silver lining here, and that’s the fact it might just work with one out of the box. I assume it comes down to how much power it can pull from one USB port, and working mostly from a Thunderbolt 3 hub, I’ve had no issues with this at all. If you are considering this keyboard though, plan for two USB slots, and rejoice if you can claw one back. It’s better than the alternative of being a USB slot short.
Though it looks somewhat extraordinary, the typing experience is about as by the books as you can get for a gaming keyboard. That’s not to say it’s particularly lacking either, it just doesn’t do anything particularly interesting. You have Roccat’s own optical mechanical switches on show, with the board not being hot-swappable. The version I have handy comes with the linear red switches (browns also available), with an actuation distance of 1.4mm, a total travel of 3.6mm, and a 45g actuation force. They feel nice to use, but to me they just feel like other red switches. With the switches exposed I do think it’s a little more rattly than other keyboards I’ve used recently, but I might be somewhat unfairly comparing it to my recent DIY build or ASUS’ Azoth, both of which feature several layers of dampening. It feels fine to type on, but it’s not the most satisfying sound profile. I do appreciate there’s a required trade off to get the desired lighting effects here, and I believe they found a reasonable balance. The experience is standard, sure, but not necessarily lacking.
If you really want to get the most out of the Vulcan 2, you’ll be relying on Roccat’s latest iteration of driver software. In this case, we’re looking at Roccat Swarm. If you’ve seen branded driver software before, pretty much everything on offer here is going to be familiar. You have an easy to use app that’ll find your keyboard updates for you once it’s plugged in. It does look a little more sparse than I remember, but it does hit all the notes you’d expect. In the first tab you have settings for repeated characters when holding down a key, as well as a feature I’m not sure I’ve seen anybody ever use: sound feedback. If it appeals to you, you can make typewriter sounds come from your PC as you type. It’s cool that it’s a setting, but I just can’t see who this is for.
The settings you’re likely opening the app for live in the second tab: key assignment. It’s here you have free reign to swap around key functions, as well as assigning actions to the function layer. You have a good amount of freedom here, and can set the keyboard to open apps, start timers, or for the more creative, you can also create custom macros. I’m a little simple in my tastes and like my keyboard to do what the keys say they should do. For the more adventurous though, the sky really is the limit.
Your final tab features key illuminations, and is where you’ll be fiddling with those glorious lights… Or not? While I’ve never been fond of driver apps that have to live in the background, Roccat’s does do one thing differently with its AIMO lighting. With it, you can set your keyboard and it’ll just go. The AIMO lighting is their smart system that’s supposed to react organically without you having to dig too deeply. I really do like it. While you’re doing nothing, the lighting will breathe, and slowly flicker between colours. When you do start typing though, the keys you hit and the area around them will come to life, with the effect becoming more intense the more you type in an area or hold a key down. It’s really great, and while I question whether it can’t be done on the keyboard itself without driver software running, I do feel it a valuable asset.
Is Roccat’s Vulcan 2 Max worth buying? As with any keyboard, it depends entirely on what you personally are needing. This isn’t what I would call an S tier typing experience, but it still does manage to nail the fundamentals you would expect from a mechanical keyboard. The Vulcan 2 is designed to be flashy, and it’s in this area it excels more than most. At £200 it’s feature rich and feels premium. If you need a keyboard to light up your life, this might just be the one.
Fire Emblem has always been a series I’ve held close. As I’m sure I’ve said before, and I’m sure I’ll say again, I started with Shadow Dragon way back in 2008. I can’t say exactly what had me hooked. It was some blend of predictable yet challenging strategy married with resource management and genuine consequences for slipping up (assuming you didn’t just reset the game). At the time for me, there was just nothing like it, and even now, very little compares. It’s a series with its highs and lows, but through it all I’ve been playing, and quite frankly enjoying what’s been on offer to some degree even at the lowest points. So how does Engage fit into the picture?
Our story starts 1000 years before our story starts with the penultimate battle of a story that’s just coming to its end. It’s quite similar to Awakening’s opening with how it’s framed, with the caveat that this is a flashback in oppose to a premonition. You get to use the final boss man as a bit of a punching bag for learning the basics, before falling in a deep slumber for, you guessed it, 1000 years. When you eventually do wake up, you begin to be introduced to the world and its key players.
Our continent this time is a new one: Elyos. A doughnut-shaped land, it’s formed of four major powers, these being Firene, Brodia, Elusia, and Solm. Taking them at face value, you have the grassy country, the fire nation, the somewhat icy mountains, and the desert. On top of these, we have Lythos, a secluded island that sits in the middle of the doughnut that’s home to our protagonist and their mother, both of whom are divine dragons. Things aren’t exactly peaceful at the moment, but the most action at the time of waking up are minor skirmishes between Brodia and Elusia. Naturally, all that’s about to change.
I do like the prologue of the game, and it’s interesting to me in how it manages to setup the coming conflict by presenting what you can only assume to be a similar story’s conclusion. You get to see an antagonist, their motivation, and how you might hope to beat them. It’s not like it stops to explain everything to you, but the glimpse it gives you is enough to get you excited for what’s to come, and start putting pieces together as soon as the actual game gets going.
The core of Engage’s conflict comes from “Emblems”, spirits of notable warriors from various worlds confined within rings that, with the right power, can be summoned. To fans of the series, or angry Super Smash Bros players, many of these faces will be familiar. What you have on show is a gallery of famous faces, ranging from series favourite Marth, to beloved but less widely known characters like Sigurd. While you would be right in assuming Marth takes centre stage, I was really pleasantly surprised to see your more obscure characters get some real time in the light. Each of the 12 emblems is host to unique powers that I’ll talk a little more about later, but more importantly, they have the power to grant a wish to the holder of all the rings once every 1000 years. This is where your conflict comes from, and why your thousand-year slumber may not be so coincidental. Somebody’s after the rings, so obviously it’s your job to get to them first to add to your roster of powerful allies.
The Emblems play a significant part in the story, but they also serve as windows into their respective game worlds, either bringing up either a sense of nostalgia or intrigue depending on how you’ve engaged with them previously. These feelings come to a head when playing each Emblem’s paralogue map, representing pivotal moments of that character’s journey. They’re incredibly well-crafted maps in both their design, borrowing from popular maps from the series’ history, and in how they manage to present these important moments without really spoiling much of what happened. It’s a great balance that’s presented as a teaching opportunity for the protagonist, while just being brilliant fun to play and experience.
Through and through Engage comes across as a love letter to the franchise in the same way Generations was to Monster Hunter. It’s a marvellous celebration, and the plot makes a lot of sense when you view it through this lens. When you look at it in isolation though, it’s a little lacklustre. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a bad story, but it was in an especially unfortunate place having to follow the incredibly intricate and intertwined plot of Three Houses. The closest game I could compare it to is Fates, but that’s not as negative as some series veterans might think. Sure the plot of Fates is renowned for being a bit of a series low, but to me, its gameplay was among the best at the time of release. Engage is no different.
At its core, this is Fire Emblem. We’re not reinventing the wheel here, it’s your usual grid-based tactical RPG where you’ll take turns moving across a map with a set goal in mind. This is usually wiping out your opponent’s army, but it can also be things like surviving for so long, or even making an escape against an insurmountable foe. The maps themselves are really quite fun, and Engage borrows some aspects from its predecessors. Notable among these are unbreakable weapons and weapon refining trees to give you clear upgrade paths. On top of this, you have a limited-use do-over mechanic akin to Mila’s Turnwheel in Echoes or the Divine Pulse in Three Houses. I like this mechanic and how it allows you to both experiment with new strategy and not be punished too harshly for actions largely out of your control, such as missing a 98% hit chance.
There is more on offer of course, and Engage’s additions to the tried and tested TRPG formula are genuinely valuable. Much like with the game’s story, Emblems live at the centre of this. To use an Emblem, you have to equip their ring to your character of choice before the battle starts. Once that’s done, you’re free to summon your Emblem with the titular “Engage!” mechanic as and when you see fit, with the caveat that the summon will only last for three turns. After that, you’ll need to charge up your Engage Meter through combat or by ending your turn on specific tiles to use it again. With your Emblem summoned, you’ll gain a variety of bonuses that vary from Emblem to Emblem. Sigurd is an Emblem you get quite early on, and he’s one I used heavily throughout the game. When summoned, the character wearing his ring will get a colossal 10 movement, as well as a few new weapons and abilities. This 10 movement is entirely agnostic to the unit class, meaning I spent my game with a rocket-powered armoured unit, and loved every minute of it. Emblems also come with a once-per-Engage attack unique to them that can deliver explosive damage and provide incredible utility to get closer and run away from foes. The mechanic as a whole fits seamlessly into the existing formula, and really takes no effort get used to. There are aspects associated with Emblems that are a little less fleshed out though.
The predominant example of this is Tempest Trials. If you happen to play Fire Emblem Heroes, that name might sound familiar. Introduced in the hit mobile game, Tempest Trials are a mode where you bring your army through a trial of between three and seven maps where if they fall, they stay down for the remainder of your run. For completing a run, you get points, which will then reward you with the game’s premium currency, a rare unit, and a whole assortment of other goodies. The mode isn’t anything particularly standout, but it is something I enjoyed while playing for the accumulated rewards and how easy it is to just pickup and run through. Looking to Engage, we hit a lot of the same marks. You’re limited to three maps here, which are admittedly larger with far more enemies. You progress from map to map with units falling not returning to you until the trial is over. Unlike Heroes though, there’s no real incentive to play. You have no accumulated rewards, and the size of the maps make them feel like a slog. Your rewards are some stones that can make your Emblem’s weapons stronger, and a flat 50 experience points for everybody who made it to the end. There’s not even any stakes to losing; even when playing Classic mode, characters who die here will just be revived at the end. Tempest Trials are thankfully entirely optional, and doing my usual Hard/Classic first playthrough, I had no issues at all in not skipping them. I feel they’d have gotten more mileage out of mimicking a more unique game mode like Hall of Forms, where you train units from zero throughout the trial.
Sitting somewhere in the middle of the Engage mechanic and Tempest Trials, we have… Gacha! Now I’ll try to calm your anger, we’re not looking at Fire Emblem Heroes here, even if they share a game mode’s name. I actually have no issues in how this was implemented. As you unlock each of the 12 emblems, you also unlock a pool of lesser rings you can try to create. Each ring ranges from C rank to S rank, and offers stat bonuses or a relevant skill. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys using a large army, these are wonderful for giving your secondary crew a boost when all your Emblem Rings have been doled out. They’re by no means game-breaking and it’s all done using in-game currency. They just give your playthrough a bit of random flair, and it can just be nice to see your favourite character from an older game lending a helping hand.
Looking beyond the Emblems and all they bring with them, there’s a few other points of interest worth bringing up. Something that’s particularly important to me in a Fire Emblem game is a good balance of having the option to grind, and having experience as a limited resource. Traditionally my favourite titles in the series have been the linear ones, where experience is just another thing you have to manage alongside your weapon durability, item stocks, and the like. I won’t blame the games for this, but I find where I can grind freely, I will. It’s like having the option there removes the meaning behind the joyful suffering of the games I’ve come to love. Engage’s between-battle grinding has a few layers to it. The simplest grinding is at the arena. After beating a map, you get three battles in the arena with no consequences to losing. It’s free experience at no cost, but you’re hard-capped to those three battles. Then, you have a bit more complexity in the between-battle skirmishes that also pop up on beating a map. What gives these depth is that your rewards will vary based on how much you’ve invested in the region that battle is based in. You see in Fire Emblem Engage, you can pay some of your already-stretched battle funds to support any of the four regions as you move through them. As a divine dragon, this kind of support does make sense in-universe. The gist is that the more you invest in a region, the better your rewards will be for clearing out monsters that come their way. I really enjoy mechanics like this that ultimately add another layer of strategy. Do you use your funds now to upgrade your weapons and buy items, or do you go for the long term payoff by investing it? There’s no real right answer, and it gives you options in terms of the larger replayability of the game.
In what I’m fairly sure is a series first, Engage also gives you the option to choose how level up stats are distributed. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, they’re not letting you pick where the stats are going directly. Instead, we get the choice between fixed and random growth types. Random growths are what we’re used to. Characters and their current classes will have a percentage chance to gain a point in a given stat every level up. This might mean that an armoured unit will have a 60% chance to gain a point of defence. With random growths, it’s entirely possible to go ten levels without getting any defence points because you’ve been unlucky and hit that 40% chance of not getting a point each time. On the other hand, fixed growths will give your characters set level up stats based on who they are and what class they are. It’s great to have this as an option, even if I’m somebody who would generally stick to the traditional random level ups.
What’s particularly interesting here is how the game’s Maddening difficulty forces you to use fixed growth types for your first playthrough. It’s not difficult to see why either. In fixing your level up stats, you allow for a much more intricately designed hard mode. You’re far less likely to find yourself in a position where you physically can’t continue because your best unit just got no stat points three level ups in a row (it can happen!). It is a bit of a shame that this is forced on you instead of being presented as a warning message, but I can still understand the choice.
Graphically speaking, Fire Emblem Engage isn’t going to be a game that pushes the Switch to its limits, but I did want to at least give it a mention for just how much brighter it is when compared to recent entries in the series. This more-anime style to me really does look good, and makes the world one I’ve really enjoyed seeing. I don’t think either style is particularly bad, but it’s really refreshing coming from the darker and moodier Three Houses.
All things considered, Engage has come out as one of my favourite entries to the series, even if it’s not perfect. If you’re new to Fire Emblem and want the full package of interesting gameplay and compelling storytelling, I’d encourage you to start with Three Houses instead, and to come to this later. While I really did have a great time, it’s definitely in its gameplay Engage sets itself apart from its predecessors. The new mechanics blend in well with the established series norms, and add further levels of strategy to be utilised or not as you see fit. If you’re already a fan of the series, I can’t recommend this enough. Even if the story falls short, you’ll have a great time meeting some familiar faces, and perhaps an even greater time being introduced to some new ones. With further story content to come in the form of DLC, I’ll be looking forward to my return to Elyos down the line.
AYANEO is a name you should know by now if you’re at all familiar with handheld PCs. Coming onto the scene in 2021, they’ve been fierce competition to GPD with style and polish at the forefront of their devices. Roll on 2023 and the AYANEO 2 is just landing in the hands of early Indiegogo backers. Is it worth a look?
The unboxing experience is the best I’ve come across in the handheld space, and what you get in the box is pretty good as well. The overall aesthetic matches the device itself, being a fairly sleek white box, with no screws I might add! Inside you have three foam layers featuring the system itself, some paperwork, and finally the included accessories. The system and accessories each come with a sheet plastic layer on top to show you what they are, and I suppose to hold things in place. It looks great and feels great to unpack. In terms of accessories, you get a 65W charging brick and USB C cable, along with three attachments to clip onto the plug. It’s a really clean design, with the base plug supporting US sockets, and the three attachments going over it in an incredibly natural way to give you UK, EU, and what I believe is AU plug support. I love that all of these are available to everybody, and it’s a plug I’ll be keeping for traveling down the line. An added bonus in the box is the inclusion of two USB C to USB A adapters, which does make sense given the device’s three USB C ports. Finally, you get a pair of replacement tabs for the console’s sides should you decide to open it up and damage them in the process. It’s nice that these are included, but the real question to be asked is why there’s a need for these to be included. We’ll come back to this though.
With the AYANEO 2 being a Windows 11 device, setup is about as easy as you’d expect if you’ve ever bought a new PC before. There’s an argument to be made at this stage about reinstalling Windows if you don’t trust the version that’s been shipped, but I decided to throw caution to the wind and roll with what was sent to avoid the hassle of having to reinstall the device-specific stuff required to get the most out of the system. With the standard Windows setup out of the way, I was introduced to AYA Space, the software at the centre of the AYANEO experience. I like the idea of it. You get a unified game launcher for your PC storefronts, alongside various applets and customisability for the overlay that’s available to you when pressing the dedicated AYA button. When it works, it works fine. It’s just incredibly rough around the edges. My biggest issue came with updating the app. Though I managed to get the update downloaded fine, the actual update process was entirely in Chinese (who knows what terms I accepted), and the entire app switched to Chinese once the update had applied. Thankfully for me, this is a common issue, and as such, the process of changing the language back to English is well documented. Having said that, it shouldn’t need to be in that way. The device itself looks and feels hugely premium, and small things like this take away from that, if only a little.
Looking to the larger device, it’s hard not to be impressed. Between GPD and AYA, two of the big hitters of the handheld PC market, we’ve seen a huge bout of inspiration taken from Sony’s PS Vita. GPD have done a great job of taking on the Vita’s form factor, packing incredible power into a smaller form factor that at a glance, could genuinely be mistaken for something of Sony’s. AYA went a different route however, taking the OLED Vita’s completely-glass face, and boy does the device look and feel great for it. The display is the same size as the Steam Deck’s seven inch 16:10 panel. The key upgrade on offer here when compared to a Steam Deck though is that it’s 1200p, in oppose to the 800p display you’d find in the Deck. That’s not where it stops though. The bezel-less design fits brilliantly in the frame, and looks even better with the glass covering the full face of the system in oppose to just the screen. While it isn’t an OLED display, it’s definitely one of the nicest ones I’ve used to date, with some pretty good colour accuracy from what I’ve seen online (note I don’t have the appropriate setup to test this for myself). The only criticism I can find with the full glass face is that it really discourages me from putting a screen protector on. Adding a bump where the screen is just feels really wrong; I wish they offered a full-face screen protector, but I can imagine that’d be a costly custom order.
Despite the AYANEO 2’s screen being the same size as the Steam Deck, the system comes in both shorter and thinner. There’s a bit of a trade-off here. It’s definitely the more portable device, and while the difference isn’t huge, I’ve had a much easier time fitting the AYA in my bag without having to really shuffle things around. What you lose is some of the ergonomics the Deck is heralded for. While the Deck is quite thick, it’s pretty much entirely because of how much space the grips take up, and they take up that space for a reason. The AYANEO 2 doesn’t feel bad to hold by any means, but if you’re coming directly from a Steam Deck, there will be a brief period of adjustment and maybe even discomfort since there just isn’t the hold you’re used to. Having extensively used the device in the few weeks I’ve had it, including numerous play sessions of up to eight hours, I can say the form factor is comfortable overall though.
One of the aspects touted most on the Indiegogo page is the hall effect joysticks and triggers, and I can see why. For those who have been out of the loop in the past year, hall effect sensors have become wildly popular in controllers for their increased precision and durability. We’ve seen them on controllers from 8BitDo, Retroflag, and even on joysticks you can install on your Joy Cons. These are an absolute joy to use, though the travel distance for the triggers might be a bit much for some. The buttons feel good to press and have a decent travel distance, but again with a potential drawback of feeling slightly stiff. They’re satisfying, but they fall short in games that require mashing; they’re not what I’d want in a pivotal Mario Party minigame. Probably the most divisive aspect of any controller is the D-Pad, and while this one doesn’t quite fit my idea of a perfect D-Pad (see the Vita’s if you want my favourite), it does a decent job. A lot of my time with the AYANEO 2 has been spent playing D-Pad heavy games, and I’ve not really come across any notable issues. It pivots well enough, and I’ve only caught up and down inputs while holding right a few times.
For those paying attention to the images, you’ll have probably noticed the two extra buttons in the bottom-right of the face. These represent the AYA button, and a function button respectively. The AYA button will bring up the AYA Space overlay when pressed, and the AYA Space app when held. It’s great to have a dedicated button for this, and puts it a step closer to the Steam Deck in gaming usability. I know for a lot of people, Windows as an OS for a handheld like this can be a negative due to its unintuitive nature when paired with a game controller. The flexibility and compatibility of Windows makes it my OS of choice however, and these small software tweaks just make the larger experience smoother. The function button can be mapped using the AYA Space software, but it unfortunately can only be mapped to a set list of functions. These do cover a reasonable spectrum of uses at least, like screenshots, closing an app, and returning to the desktop. I hope in future this can be opened up to allow for key mapping. Outside of the console face, there are actually two more of these function buttons, each sitting next to their respective bumper on the top of the system. Even if I can’t map these to be key presses, I do appreciate that you can have separate actions mapped to both pressing and holding each button.
The last big point of interest in terms of the device’s build is its screwless design. This is actually a big selling point of the device, and while it does make for a really nice finish all I can really ask is… why? I can’t think of a single time I’ve had a device, premium or otherwise, where accessible screws have been a negative. It looks good, but when it results in a device where you’re having to include replacement parts on the expectation you’re going to actively be ruining it by trying to open it up? It’s not a positive. It’s nice the screws are hidden, but they really need to go back to the drawing board if they want this going forwards to come up with a more sustainable design.
Now the burning question on many a mind with any device like this in the modern age will likely be just how it stacks up against the Steam Deck. To this point I’ve made some passing comparisons. When Valve launched their own system last year, they rocked the handheld world with the sheer value they had on offer, paired with capable hardware and software support you can only really expect from a company as substantial as Valve. Can the AYANEO 2 really stand up to that? Put simply, the answer is no. It’s not to say the AYANEO 2 is an inferior product either. In terms of both performance and build quality it wins out hands down, but at the price point it sits at, you would certainly hope it does. This device’s cheapest variant is double what the most expensive Steam Deck is, and almost three times the most basic model. For anybody just wanting to get into the handheld PC space, the Steam Deck will likely offer enough. The AYANEO 2 sits in a much more premium space, and I do think it’s fine for both of these to exist for different audiences. For those wanting more than the Deck but not quite wanting to spend the $1000+ required for the AYANEO 2, there is a relatively good offering from the AYA team that fills this void in the AYANEO Geek. I unfortunately don’t have one of these on hand to give a more thorough look, but at its core you can think of it as a slightly less premium take on the AYANEO 2, with that being reflected in the price. You lose out on the full glass face, and have the option to go down to an 800p display, all while keeping the same 6800U on the inside. The cheapest model of Geek with an 800p display is currently sitting at $100 more than the most expensive Steam Deck. At this price, it offers fantastic value. The issue with this is that this value is an early bird price, and will go up $100 once these units are gone, and a further $100 once the Indiegogo campaign ends. For $749 it’s fantastic, but as time goes on it becomes less and less competitive as a natural next step up from the highest-end Deck. That’s a shame in my eyes.
Since receiving the AYANEO 2 a few weeks ago, this has become my primary means of both playing PC games and emulation. Given how many options you have available to you on Windows, I thought it’d be a nice idea to just go through how I decided to set things up, and what options you have available to you to make it a more gamepad-friendly OS. In an ideal world, AYA Space would be where this starts and ends, but to some extent I’m glad it isn’t. What I love about having Windows over something like SteamOS is the flexibility after all. It’s not like I don’t use AYA Space, but its use for me is limited to giving me a clean interface for my Steam, Epic, and Game Pass games. I appreciate how easy it is to use, and how it’ll just automatically sweep for new games when it’s turned on and pull in relevant information. If you’re heavily invested in the Steam ecosystem, or perhaps are coming from a Steam Deck, you do have the option of Steam’s new Big Picture Mode, which is modelled after the Steam Deck experience. It is missing some features when compared to the full SteamOS, but the compatibility you see from using Windows more than makes up for it in my mind.
In terms of emulation, I decided to try a frontend for the first time. Though many swear by RetroArch, I still prefer the idea of having individual and familiar apps for each console. To this end, I downloaded my go-to emulators console, and used Playnite to tie them all together. It’s a great interface that’s incredibly easy to setup and maintain. What’s more, you can use this with your PC games if you want that library aggregation without AYA’s own software. For the first time in maybe ten years, I also installed Rainmeter to make my desktop both touch-friendly and tidy. Though it’s just a few icons to launch Steam in Big Picture Mode, load Playnite in its console mode, and take me to my emulation folder, it goes a long way in improving the overall experience.
The device has been great for everything I’ve thrown at it, and I’ve tried my best to give it a variety. In terms of emulation, it’s handled everything from Game Boy to Switch admirably, though your performance will naturally vary based on your TDP setting. In simple terms, the more power you’re willing to use, the better performance you can expect to get out of it. The trade off for this is naturally going to be battery life. Using AYA Space, you have three set TDP configurations: 11W, 15W, and 22W, dubbed power-saving, balanced, and gaming respectively. On top of these, you have a final “pro” setting that you can set manually to be anywhere from 3W to 33W. I tend to have this either set at 6W for easier emulation and indie games, or 33W for the more difficult to emulate titles or certain PC games that push the system to its limits. At each extreme, you can expect around 4 hours of gameplay at 6W and less than an hour if you’re pushing it to 33W. Battery life has always been a struggle with x86 handhelds, but I am happy to see it meet my two hour portability threshold at 11W. I find 11W lets me play most of what I wanted if I was willing to make compromises in terms of graphics or framerate. It’s not like you need to set things any lower than 800p most of the time anyway, so games will still look fine.
My favourite, albeit somewhat niche, use for the AYANEO 2 is its ability to be an entirely portable Wii U when paired with a portable monitor. Plugging in my ROG Strix XG17AHPE, I had a Wii U in my hands with all the creature comforts. Sure, it doesn’t last long without being plugged in, but the fact you could see such a setup on your commute to work if somebody felt that way inclined amuses me to no small extent.
The inclusion of two USB 4.0 ports alongside the USB C 3.2 port means the AYANEO 2 has great potential for a high performance docked setup. If you haven’t been keeping up with USB standards, USB 4.0 is the latest in this absurd line, and comes with an impressive list of optional features. Despite being seen as an open implementation of Intel’s Thunderbolt protocol, it’s actually not a guarantee USB 4.0 has compatibility with eGPUs and other Thunderbolt devices. There’s a whole host of other features that may or may not be included when you see USB 4.0 on the box, but at the very least, I can say eGPUs work great with the AYANEO 2. Having a Razer Core X Chroma on hand along with a spare 5700 XT, I was able to see the system at its best. This is what I always wished the Switch would be, even if it is remarkably impractical in terms of cost.
Coming back around to emulation, I really have been quite impressed by what the AYANEO 2 is capable of. In retrospect, much of this shouldn’t have been a surprise having owned both a GPD Win 3 and Steam Deck. You have one device that really can just replace a Switch in terms of console gaming, as long as you’re willing to accept a compromise in terms of battery life. For comparison, you get somewhere around five hours of play time on Breath of the Wild on the Switch… You’d be lucky to get that idling on the AYANEO 2.
Using Breath of the Wild on Cemu as a bit of a benchmark, here’s an idea of what kind of FPS you can expect on various TDP settings at both 800p and 1200p:
TDP
800p
1200p
11W
34-40fps
24-32fps
15W
44-52fps
32-36fps
22W
50-54fps
36-40fps
33W
50-60fps
38-42fps
The above results were using stock settings for the most part, with FPS++ enabled and the resolution altered to the 16:10 800p and 1200p. As somebody who really doesn’t mind 30fps in Breath of the Wild, 15W is plenty of power to get what I’m wanting, and the graphical leap from 800p to 1200p is surprisingly significant. What surprised me is the diminishing returns you get when putting in power beyond 15W, with 22W and even 33W really not giving you that much of an improvement when compared to the additional battery drain you’re paying. I will add that this test is by no means definitive, and that you can most liikely eck out a solid 60fps if you know your way around Cemu settings better than myself. Breath of the Wild seems one of the toughest to emulate from what I’ve tried, so you can think of these stats as a bit of a worst case.
Looking at Switch games, you’ll find some really variable performance depending on exactly what you’re wanting to play. Games like Skyward Sword HD can maintain 60fps in docked mode running as low as 11W, while games like Smash Bros Ultimate will be looking for 22W to hit similar numbers. Despite being a portable system, it really shines at its brightest when you’re close enough to a plug to push it to its limits. To me, this isn’t as much of an issue as it used to be, but I would still love to see these devices start hitting longevity to rival true handheld consoles now performance is as good as it is.
PC gaming is about as good as you’d expect. Browsing Steam, you can think of the Steam Deck verification as an indication that it’ll run on this with no issues at all, and it’ll almost certainly run better. I’ve put a good amount of time into playing Hitman 3, and the idea that a game of that scale can be on a handheld is something I’ll never quite get over. At 1200p you won’t be hitting 60fps, but you can maintain 30 perfectly well on some pretty spectacular-looking settings. Bumping down to 800p will natutally give you that edge in performance, and is an option you will always have on hand as you decide what you value more on a per-game basis. Running Windows is a huge boon in the native gaming department, completely eliminating issues with the various anti-cheat measures and launchers within launchers some publishers are known for. Though it’s definitely a poor use case, I was happy to be playing MapleStory with no problems.
So the burning question remains. Should you pick up the latest AYANEO handheld? If you’re on the fence after reading the above, my answer would probably be no, and that’s to no demerit of the system as a whole. If you don’t already own a Steam Deck, it’s just a far more compelling package that I feel companies like AYA and GPD need to be putting more effort into truly competing with. The AYANEO 2 is a super premium device through and through, and that’s heavily reflected in the price. Even if the Deck offers better value, I can’t deny just how much I’ve loved using the AYANEO 2. If you have the budget and want more than a Steam Deck, it’s one to look at, and definitely not one you’ll regret.
Now this isn’t my first rodeo. Having reviewed one of E-Win’s chairs back in 2018 I found it a comfortable companion for my day to day work and play. As time’s gone on though, the seat started to show some wear, and in looking for an alternative, AndaSeat offered one up for review: the Kaiser 3.
To start from the start, assembling the chair was incredibly trivial. AndaSeat celebrate their use of magnets to assist in an easy chair assembly, and advertise an assembly that only requires one person. From start to end it was quite simple, and while the magnets feel more novel than crucial, they are appreciated in nonetheless. The basics didn’t change much when compared to the E-Win construction in terms of having a seat and a back, and having to bolt them together. The magnets come into play in adding the cover over the bolts themselves, giving you a really clean aesthetic with minimal additional effort being required. Getting the wheels onto the base is just a case of slotting them in, and the mechanism to raise and lower the chair is more of the same. I can’t imagine many people having trouble setting this up outside of the weight of carrying the initial parcel. At 35kg it is heavy.
The use of magnets does go beyond the assembly process, and I feel these ones are a bit more useful. You see this in both the arm rests and the head rest. What I think is good here is that these are two relative points of failure when it comes to long term use, with head cushions seeing heavy wear, and arm rests typically being the things I accidentally hit other things with. In theory, being able to replace these without having to replace the larger chair is a big win for me, but that is just in theory. While AndaSeat do have a section on their site for pillows and other accessories, the Kaiser 3 stuff seems to be absent. It’d be my hope that AndaSeat would be able to offer replacements if contacted directly, but I have no way to confirm this for myself.
What really drew me to the Kaiser 3 in particular was the availability of a fabric version. I feel gaming chairs too frequently fall into the same designs with that almost rubbery look thanks to the PU leather materials. With my E-Win chair being PU leather, I can at least vouch for its comfort, but to be blunt I just got tired of seeing it. It doesn’t fit in with a normal room, and while garishness is somewhat of a gaming staple, it really doesn’t have to be. AndaSeat aren’t the only company to be putting out fabric options, but having used this chair for a few months now I can say it’s been genuinely refreshing. I love having a chair that doesn’t seem out of place in a room, and the fabric feels great when sat down. The only flaw I could really come to with fabric as a chair material is ease of cleaning. With PU leather you can naturally just wipe it if you spill something, and while you can still tackle fabric with a cloth, it’s something I can see coming into play as the chair sees more use.
In terms of lumbar support, you have a good degree of flexibility in how you want your spine to rest in the chair. On the back of the chair you have a knob on each side that can be twisted to easily move the internal lumbar support up and down, and alter how much it protrudes outwards and into your backbone. It’s really intuitive, and can be altered entirely on the fly to suit your current mood or particular flavour of lower back pain. It’s a huge step up from the simple cushion I’ve previously had, and the flexibility it offers does top the office chairs I’ve used for work.
Can I recommend the Kaiser 3? In no uncertain terms, yeah. It’s comfortable, and that’s obviously the biggest thing you’re looking at in terms of a chair investment. But on top of that, the fabric is breathable, it’s easy to assemble, and makes it easy to replace a few common parts that might fail first. It ticks a lot of boxes for me, and with a two year guarantee to support it, the £400 it costs feels a bit safer.
It’s no secret I’m a fan of ASUS. Since I started reviewing their keyboards, mice, and other fun gadgets, I’ve come to expect a certain quality and a certain degree of fun uniqueness from the products they have on offer. Be it a two-screened laptop or a keyboard that you can move the number pad to the left of, their more out-there peripherals are the ones that have stuck with me, and they’re the ones I’ve gone out and bought after finishing my reviews. Roll on the grand year of 2023 and we’re back with not just a clean-looking 75% keyboard, but one with a small OLED display in its corner? Consider me suitably intrigued.
The out of box experience with any ASUS product is a good one. You don’t quite have that feeling you might expect from something like an Apple product, but it’s still somewhat distinct. It’s a box within a box, with the keyboard protected with a nice sleeve that you might want to keep for transporting it. Underneath the keyboard, you get your usual bits of documentation, a USB C to USB C cable for charging, and a switch lube toolkit that includes tools for removing keycaps and switches, a few spare replacement switches, and some Krytox lubricant. It’s a great set and more than I’d usually expect to see from a gaming keyboard. To me though, this feels like more than just a gaming keyboard.
The ROG team have somewhat outdone themselves with the larger design of this keyboard, bringing in some of the features you’d generally only expect to see in your custom DIY models on top of their usual bells and whistles. On the surface you have what looks like a fairly normal ROG keyboard. It’s all black, got plenty of lights, and is packing great connectivity with a combination of USB C, Bluetooth, and 2.4 GHz wireless. It’s not all too different to the STRIX Scope RX I looked at last year at a glance. There is an elephant in the room though, and that’s the compact OLED display and associated knob that sit in the top-right of the device. I don’t want to oversell this, you’re not getting something like Razer’s Deathstalker Ultimate. This screen isn’t going to house a browser window or really do anything spectacular. Instead, ASUS opted to shift a lot of what you’d usually find on a traditional function layer into this neat package with a simple but really clear display. Here, you can control audio, media, and the keyboard lighting, as well as a few other interesting things with the help of ASUS’ Armory Crate, like your motherboard fan speed. The display can also show a number of things while sitting idle, ranging from a looped gif to system stats, to the date and time. The controls for the display are a really simple knob that clicks up and down, as well as being able to be pressed in. It’s a really intuitive implementation of features you would generally expect on this kind of keyboard, and while I don’t necessarily think it’s a revolutionary feature I’d struggle to do without, I do think it’s a meaningful addition.
There is more yet to the keyboard though. Screens and other eccentricities might be what you expect from a gaming keyboard nowadays, and to an extent I certainly do. What I don’t expect however are a build quality and typing experience on par with DIY builds. In no uncertain terms this keyboard is a joy to type on. The switches come pre-lubed, and thanks to there being three layers of dampening alongside a silicone gasket mount design, typing feels cushioned and much more muted than other gaming keyboards I’ve come across. Still having the STRIX Scope RX on hand, its similar RX red switches feel far more hollow. I don’t think I’d notice half as much of a difference using clickier switches like blues, but with reds this muted and cushioned feel is genuinely sublime.
Looking at the larger build quality of the keyboard, you have a metal top cover paired with a sturdy plastic base. ASUS did comment in the promotional materials that the plastic base was picked to minimise wireless interference, but it really doesn’t take away from the larger premium feel or aesthetic. I actually quite like the two-tone look the two materials provide. Despite the plastic base, the keyboard itself is rather weighty, coming in just shy of 1.2kg. For comparison, that’s around 300g heavier than my full-sized Wooting two HE. It sits really nicely in place on the desk at the cost of being slightly more difficult to justify carrying in a backpack.
I took a bit of time to play with the keyboard itself, dismantling it and throwing on some keycaps I had lying around. Due to only having ANSI keycaps handy, it looks like a bit of a monster with some of the keys having light shine through them and some not, but it did highlight a small design issue for me. I really don’t like the spacing of the function keys. This is definitely a subjective point, and I do understand why they’re clumped together with the space being needed for the screen. Putting my own keycaps on, I realised just how much nicer it was to have some kind of definition, even if it was just having the central four function keys be a different colour to the rest. But that is some of the joy of this keyboard, and in fairness, a good number of keyboards lately: you can make them entirely your own. To give due credit, there aren’t many gaming-oriented keyboards with hot-swappable switches, and it’s nice to see a brand like ASUS take that step. I bought ASUS’ Claymore II for its great wireless connectivity and flexibility, and I am genuinely considering this keyboard as a base to just have fun with. Once you throw on some new keycaps and turn off the lighting, you really wouldn’t know this is a gaming keyboard, and in a market of often-garish and in your face designs, I think this is a really cool thing. It’s a bit of a shame ASUS didn’t take it a step further and offer different case colours or designs, but I can understand the need to stick with a simple black, if only to maintain parity with the larger ROG brand.
Can I recommend the Azoth? Being told it’ll retail around the £200 mark, I think I can. This is the first gaming keyboard I’ve looked at that really does feel like more than just a gaming keyboard. This feels like the keyboard of an enthusiast, and a grand entrypoint to the larger world of keyboard customisation. With a useful screen and connectivity that you generally wouldn’t see in a lot of DIY models, it does enough to sell itself as a unique product while keeping up in the areas that really matter.
Xiaomi are a name that have quickly moved to the forefront of phone makers thanks to their wide range of devices at usually-affordable prices. Sticking with their yearly schedule of an upgraded flagship to end the year, we check out the Pro flavour of the 12T to see what’s new this time around.
If you’ve been keeping a keen eye on the review box lately, you’ll know we recently covered the Xiaomi 12T, the base model of the phone I have with me. There’s actually a lot of cross-over between this device and that one, with the two key changes that I’ll be focusing on being the improved camera and Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset. From the screen to the charging speeds and aesthetic, everything else matches up with the 12T, so I’d encourage you to give that review a read before looking at this one for a fuller image.
To give a brief overview of my general thoughts though, this phone is fantastic. I’ve previously covered the Redmi Note 11 Pro+ 5G from Xiaomi as a really sleek midrange device, and it’s great to see the strong points of that shining through here with the added performance you would expect from a flagship offering. MIUI remains an incredibly clean and responsive Android skin with plenty of available customisation via the built-in theme manager. Both the 12T and 12T Pro have also been promised three major OS updates and four years of security patches, which is a nice assurance to have given the rate Xiaomi put out phones. The question quickly moves to whether you’d want to be using this phone for four years, and honestly, there’s not much I can say against it.
Now £700 isn’t necessarily a budget phone, but it is a relatively affordable flagship device, especially for the chipset you’re getting. In terms of performance, the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 is phenomenal, and able to handle even the highest of emulation hurdles. As I discussed in a recent post, this was the big draw for me with the 12T Pro, and having it setup for emulation and some of the trickier high-end Android games is a really pleasant experience. Switching the default launcher up to something more controller-friendly and throwing it into a grip gives you an absolute emulation titan, and this is something you can explore even with this as your daily driver using the Second Space feature.
Second Space is something I’ve generally overlooked in previous devices, allowing you to launch into an entirely separate Android configuration by using a different password at the lock screen. You can even have two different default launchers. Using this, you could have MIUI and your usual day to day setup on hand, while also getting a dedicated and isolated gaming setup. It’s a neat feature that can take away a bit of the Android emulation clumsiness without compromising your day to day usage.
To give a brief overview of what it can take on emulation-wise, Citra MMJ has run everything I’ve thrown at it at x3 native resolution and speed up options enabled. AetherSX2 has no trouble running Shadow of the Colossus at 720p, and Dolphin MMJR can even tackle games like Mario Galaxy without having to disable your cursor if you’re happy to play at native resolution. I’ve even managed to play some Switch games thanks to the in-development Skyline Edge emulator, though it is still very much a work in progress. To put a Geekbench score to it, you’re looking at a single-core score of 1308, and a multi-core score of 4186, which is fairly standard for the SD8+G1.
The other half of the 12T’s Pro moniker is of course its 200 MP camera, a relatively hefty upgrade from the base model’s 108 MP variant, at least on paper. As a bit of a photographical novice, I quite enjoyed using the camera, and there is a relatively impressive amount of detail that can be captured when you bump it all the way up to the highest quality picture taking. As phone cameras continue to get better though I feel much more of the experience starts to fall on the software, and it’s here Xiaomi really stand out. You have an assortment of really intuitive AI-enabled options to complement your more standard editing suite. My favourite of these is by far Xiaomi’s ProCut feature. Only available for pictures taken in the 50 MP or full 200 MP mode, ProCut looks at your original image and gives you a number of crops, each with a different aspect ratio or primary subject. Though it can do a decent job of reframing any picture, you do need as focal point to get the best results.
With the phone shipped to me with an EU charger, I took it upon myself to head to Xiaomi’s UK storefront and pick up my own 120W brick to see if the promises made in terms of its fast charging were all they were saying. To give you a brief overview of the Xiaomi store experience, it’s quick and easy. The plug and cable came to £40 with an additional £5 delivery. It was posted on the day I ordered it and turned up the day after. You usually would get this with the phone assuming you’re buying in-region, but if you happened to find yourself in a position like mine, is it worth spending the extra £45? Yes. 120W charging is wild, and completely eliminates the routine of leaving your phone plugged in overnight. With 0 to 100% taking around 18 minutes, I plug it in while I go for a shower and know it’s ready to go for either a day of usage, or a day of gaming in my case. Both the 12T and 12T Pro don’t feature wireless charging, but when you can charge it as fast as this, it feels like a redundant feature anyway.
So can I recommend Xiaomi’s 12T Pro? I can, undoubtedly so. You have an incredibly strong flagship device with the hardware to support both daily use and some pretty heavy gaming. With security patches promised for the next four years, my only real question is how such fast charging will affect battery life in the long-run. 120W charging only debuted last year, so we’re left trusting what we’re told from Xiaomi themselves. I’m hoping it has what it takes, but only time will tell.
Back when the Switch was originally announced, I had a vast assortment of miscellaneous excitements, each fuelled by the then-unique design. A dockable tablet with detachable controllers as a concept is phenomenal. You could have an entirely modular and upgradable platform between the dock, controllers, and tablet; the possibilities were endless for unique controllers, and docks that could provide power boosts when playing on the TV. In the end, my excitements remained just that. Nintendo never really iterated on the Joy Cons, and the dock is still just a block of plastic that’ll output HDMI and little more. My dreams of unique Joy Cons to match the company’s greatest controllers are all but up in smokes, at least officially speaking. While Nintendo sticks to its guns and holds tightly to its original designs, third parties continue to develop and iterate, and now we’ve finally arrived at my dream design with Retroflag’s very non-specific Handheld Controller for Switch. I’m in love.
Now there’s actually a good bit to break down here. On a surface level, we have a beautifully nostalgic translucent purple shell that’s designed to wrap around the Switch, interfacing with it via a USB C port at the bottom and being recognised as a wired Pro Controller. You have all the buttons you’d need for a Switch controller to work, with both sticks clicking in for a third input, and one additional button available for some nifty features we’ll go over later. Looking at the dimensions it’s 273mm wide and 110 tall, which is relatively comparable to Hori’s popular Split Pad Pro, if not a good bit sleeker in design. It’s got a really premium finish and holds both the standard and OLED Switch tablet well thanks to it overlapping the frame of the console on the left and right, as well as small clips on each side that catch the Joy Con rails.
To stop beating around the bush, what we have here is a controller grip that’s clearly inspired by the GameCube controller, and as I’ve commended Retroflag for in the past, they’ve done a brilliant job with the theming. Both analogue sticks feel great, and feature the growingly-popular magnetic hall effect sensors to avoid the drifting that’s plagued the vanilla Joy Cons. The D-Pad feels really nice, and definitely feels larger than the original GameCube controller’s. Each button feels great to press, with the plus and minus buttons, as well as the home, screenshot, and extra button being clicky; your usual face buttons by contrast have a satisfying travel distance to them. There have been some liberties taken to modernise the layout and bring it in line with what Switch games are expecting you to use, adopting the diamond-shaped ABXY over the GameCube controller’s own style. On top of this, we get a set of shoulder buttons and a set of digital triggers. I’m a little sad they didn’t jerry-rig something together to make the Switch think this is an actual GameCube controller so they could add analogue shoulder buttons, but I can imagine that’d add a number of restrictions that wouldn’t make sense given it’s only really Super Mario Sunshine that’d actually recognise them.
While I am on board with the modern take on the GameCube controller’s design, there are a few things I’m disappointed to see from this transition. Perhaps the most obvious of these for the eagle-eyed GameCube enthusiast is the lack of notches in the plastic surrounding each of the analogue sticks. It’s hard to really say whether this is a negative, since Switch games are probably expecting you to have full motion on both of your analogue sticks in oppose to being limited to an odd octagon. Even thinking like that though, I do think it’s a missed opportunity. Both analogue sticks just feel too close to the original, with this missing piece adding an initially-foreign sensation to the mix. Though an even more minor criticism than the lack of notches, the matte finish on the face buttons didn’t quite sit right with me at first, with the GameCube controller buttons being glossy. I will say that after using this controller for a week or so now, I’ve come on board to both of these discrepancies from the source material, and I do understand it can’t be exactly the same. With how close it is though, you’re overtly aware of anything that’s even slightly off.
I have been mentioning a special button, and it adds my favourite feature of third party controllers: rapid fire. If you hold the special button down and press any other button, the button will then have the hold mode rapid fire enabled. This means that if you hold the button down, it’ll act as though you’re mashing it. To give you an idea of how fast the mashing is, I decided to boot up Mario Party Superstars and start a game of Mecha Marathon. The aim here is to mash A and B as much as possible in 10 seconds. I managed to max out my score at 70m, so it seems plenty capable. On top of the hold mode, there is also a toggle mode that you can turn on by holding the special button and double tapping the button you want to enable it for. This will enable rapid fire regardless of whether you’re actually holding the button, and can be toggled on and off easily by just pressing the button.
The special button also has an additional feature in enabling you to remap buttons on the fly. The idea of this is a good one, but it is ultimately a useless feature for a reason I never expected: the controller is detected as an official Pro Controller by the Switch. What does this mean for button remapping? It means you can do it using the Switch OS itself, instead of having to rely on weird on-controller button combinations. On top of this, the controller even features motion control, though your use for this will likely be limited for handheld play. While the controller itself is perfectly comfortable, it doesn’t make for the best experience when playing a game like Splatoon 3 that expects you to be rotating the controller to aim efficiently. The one feature it’s missing versus an official Pro Controller is NFC support, but I don’t believe this is even possible to include with a wired controller, with even official Pro Controllers not allowing NFC usage with wired input enabled.
You do also get some rumble features here, with the controller vibrating to indicate when turbo functionality is turned on or off. It does also naturally work as you’d expect with Switch games. The one I looked at in particular was Splatoon 3, knowing it has a good variance in rumble strength between actions like swimming in ink and launching missiles. Though it can feel a little weak for the most subtle vibrations, it is noticeable and does enhance the larger experience. It has some of the subtlety you’d expect from HD rumble, even if it does fall slightly short on the strength.
Though the controller takes up the Switch’s USB C port, there is a USB C port on the bottom of the grip itself, allowing the Switch to be charged while you play. The only reason you’d need to take it out of the grip is if you wanted to dock it, since the additional bulk and slightly-repositioned USB C port would get in the way.
All in all Retroflag’s Handheld Controller for Switch is a hit with me. It looks great, feels great, and has all the features you’d realistically want from a Switch controller. With the only feature it’s missing being NFC support, I can highly recommend picking this up if you happen to see it in stock. At $70 you’re looking at a premium price, but I truly do believe this is a premium product to live up to that.
I’ve been playing Pokemon for as long as I can remember. Starting with Yellow in days gone by, I’ve been with the series for all its highs and lows, and I’ve always found something to enjoy. Since the 3DS games in particular, I’ve sunk thousands of hours into catching them all several times, breeding competitive Pokemon and battling with them, as well as exploring the non-official fun that can come from randomizers and an assortment of self-imposed challenges. It’s a series that means a lot to me, and one I continue to look forward to playing as each new release is announced. Do Scarlet and Violet meet the expectations that come with such excitement though?
Starting out in the Paldea region, you’re given the chance to customise your character before being shown a presentation about your new school: Naranja (Orange) Academy in Scarlet and Uva (Grape) Academy in Violet. Though nothing necessarily revolutionary, the customisation options on offer are the best we’ve seen to date in the series. Outside of the hair styles, which are largely reminiscent of what was on offer in Sword and Shield, you can now customise your character’s facial features. It’s no Mii Maker, but I do appreciate the individuality you’re able to inject from the outset. The presentation that follows your initial setup is a little dull but it does do well in its aim to get the majority of the exposition out of the way before you actually start playing, and ends somewhat strongly by introducing you to your game’s legendary Pokemon and the mysteries surrounding it. And with that, you’re free to start your adventure. Or at least the brief introductory portion of it anyway.
Unlike other Pokemon games where you’re tasked with becoming the champion right out of the gate and get distracted by evil organisation or football hoodlums on the way, Scarlet and Violet offer you a degree of freedom by laying out exactly what it has in store for you from the start. You can think of the games as five sections: an introduction, three central storylines, and a conclusion.
The introduction serves its purpose well in giving you time to meet the central figures to each of the game’s paths, as well as getting you started with your legendary Pokemon of choice: Koraidon in Scarlet and Miraidon in Violet. Meeting a legendary Pokemon at the start of the game isn’t necessarily anything new, with Pokemon like Tapu Koko being shown in the first hour of Pokemon Sun and Moon. What is new however is that Pokemon joining you from the start and becoming a character that grows as you progress. While at the start of the game you find it weakened and somewhat feeble, it has a personality beyond being a sprite you can interact with at the end of the game to catch. It’s refreshing, even if I still do find it a bit strange that you ride it like a motorbike instead of using it in battle. For your playthrough of the game, the bulk of your time will be spent jumping between the central plots, each offering a different style of gameplay to accompany its narrative.
By far the most traditional of the questlines is Victory Road. Here you face off against eight gym leaders scattered through the region, before challenging the Elite Four for the rank of Champion. Before being able to challenge a gym leader, you have to complete a short gym challenge. I quite like how these challenges have evolved from generation to generation, moving away from just having to fight a given number of trainers before the head honcho steps up. While some of the pre-leader challenges do feel a little lacking, I had a good time with the majority. Your reward for beating each gym is, as you might have guessed, a badge. Like usual, the more badges you have, the more high-levelled Pokemon will obey you. Unlike previous games though, this does include Pokemon you’ve caught yourself. The wording used by the game suggests badge count only impacts the obedience of Pokemon based on the level they were caught. For example, if you have one badge, Pokemon caught up to Level 25 will listen to you. If you catch a Pokemon that’s Level 25 and train it beyond that, it does still listen to you. To put it to an extreme, I trained a Pokemon to Level 100 and it remained disobedient for the remainder of the game, so there are some unseen limits in play. I do like this adjustment as a whole though. With you able to access some high levelled encounters from the start of the game with a wrong turn or three, it does a good job of disincentivising catching and using these in oppose to training your own party.
Next up on the block is Path of Legends. This is a somewhat new aspect to the series where you team up with a companion to challenge larger than life Titan Pokemon for the legendary Herba Mystica spice they just so happen to be guarding. It’s here you connect with Koraidon and Miraidon and see some of their power return as you fell each of the five titans. As you progress, you’re given further movement options while riding them, making the world easier to navigate and unlocking areas you couldn’t access before.
Finally we have Starfall Street, the route where you systematically dismantle the enemy organisation of the games: Team Star. On offer here are five encampments. To take down one of the five leaders, you have to first enter their camp and beat up 30 Pokemon using the new Let’s Go mechanic within a set timeframe. The Let’s Go mechanic lets you send out your Pokemon to fight with others in the overworld without triggering a standard fight. It’s much faster and really useful for some quick training when you’re not in the mood for constant battle transitions.
In isolation these three plots are fine, but where I think they really excel is in encouraging you to move between them in oppose to just focusing on one route over the others. While the stories don’t really intertwine in any meaningful way, the rewards you get for progressing do. At least if you ignore Starfall Street. With the other two, you find yourself either completing gyms to enable you to catch higher level Pokemon, or defeating Titans to enable you to get to new places to then encounter those higher level Pokemon. It’s a simple relationship but it does work well. I just wish Starfall Street really had a place in it. You don’t really get anything meaningful out of this oddball third route, and I struggle to justify its inclusion outside of it being an obligation of the series to have some bad organisation that needs to be stomped out. To its credit, it’s one of the more down to earth teams we’ve seen from the series, and the story behind it was enjoyable. It just didn’t fit into the larger game well in my eyes.
Unfortunately this encouragement to move between plotlines in the open world is somewhat sullied by the lack of Pokemon level scaling throughout your adventure. Now I can understand certain aspects of the game not scaling to your progression if you’re wanting to have an in-game universe that makes sense. The Titan Pokemon might have their own strengths, and Team Star really has no obligation to use weaker or stronger Pokemon to suit your needs. Where I find flaw is in the fact the gyms don’t scale to your level, more so when the leaders themselves talk about how they have stronger and weaker teams on hand. Not to mention your rival continually picks a new team out for however many gym badges you have. It’s a wasted opportunity to make an open world feel more open. While you can somewhat guess what level things will be by their relative position on the map from where you start your adventure, it just feels like it’s missing that added spice of freedom that really makes an open world thrive. I can applaud the effort of letting you challenge any gym, camp, or Titan Pokemon in whatever order you want, but with a lack of level scaling and little in the way of level indication before going in, you can find yourself frustratedly entering areas too early or accidentally skipping over content that should be to your level. It’s as though an odd middle ground was chosen between a linear path and freedom of choice where the strengths of neither are fully realised.
One of my favourite new features for Scarlet and Violet quite surprisingly comes from the multiplayer components. For the first time in series history, you’re able to open your world in its entirety to up to three friends locally or online. Through the Union Circle you can invite people using a code to just hang out and go about their day with no real restrictions on what they can do. You can progress your story, beat up gyms, and have quick and easy access to trading with those present. Where things get a little weird is in how Pokemon are spawned in for those playing on different versions. When I first went online, I had assumed that if a Violet player was hosting, every person in the Union Circle would only see Violet Pokemon spawn. This wasn’t the case though, with my primary Scarlet save seeing the standard Scarlet spawns. It happened by coincidence when hunting for a shiny Pokemon with a friend that I started to see their Violet Pokemon spawn in. It turns out that no matter who the host is, Pokemon will spawn for each player appropriate to their game, with everybody able to interact with the Pokemon once they’re spawned in. It’s an incredibly odd system but it did end up leading to some fun as we travelled across the region together in search of spots to spawn each other the Pokemon we were missing to complete our Pokedex. This is about as close we’ve seen to an official Pokemon MMO, and while it might be fairly small in scope, we really did have a blast. The in-game camera also let us pull poses and customise our profiles to commemorate the good times.
You can also share picnics with friends, this feature expanding and streamlining the camps from Sword and Shield, as well as integrating a few other features commonly seen elsewhere. When you go for a picnic, you’ll set down a picnic table and send out all the Pokemon in your party to play. You can throw a ball for them to chase around and give them a wash, but the most impactful features come from sandwich making and the new breeding mechanics. The breeding is simple to explain. There’s a basket at the foot of the table, and if you have Pokemon that can breed in your party, you might just find an egg there waiting for you. It’s incredibly convenient to have a traveling daycare with you, and really easy to get what you want by just clearing out your party and leaving in the two Pokemon you want to breed. Instead of eggs being generated after a number of steps, they’re now generated using real time. Without any bonuses, this can take up to a few minutes for just one egg. It sounds worse than the daycare couples of old, but there is a saving grace: sandwiches.
Sandwiches do everything. With the right combination of ingredients you can boost encounter rates for one type of Pokemon, make it easier to catch Pokemon, get more experience, find eggs quicker, and even find more shiny Pokemon. The bonuses you get from eating a sandwich last for 30 minutes, which is often more than enough time to accomplish what you set out to. With Sparkling Power 3, the power that boosts your chances of finding shiny Pokemon, I come away with up to three Pokemon at a time. Going back to breeding, Egg Power 2 boosts the rate eggs appear drastically, with me usually coming out with 60 or so eggs from 30 minutes of periodic checking. It’s a flexible and relatively fun system that can be explored with friends. Assembling a sandwich with four pairs of hands is hectic in all the right ways, with everybody able to contribute ingredients and walk away with the same bonuses; it’s really handy for those recipes that might rely on rarer ingredients.
Picnics aren’t the only evolution we’ve seen since Sword and Shield though, with Tera Raids improving on the raid battles that were introduced in Galar. Much is the same here. You have a team of four people against one large Pokemon with an inflated health bar. What’s different this time is that the raid Pokemon is terastalised, this being the new battle twist for Scarlet and Violet. Though it has its intricacies, the important part is that it changes a Pokemon’s defensive typing, and adds an additional type to its offensive typing. What this means for raiding is a certain level of intricacy in planning what’s best to take down a threat in finding what can hit its new defensive type hard without being taken out by the Pokemon’s standard moveset. The raids feel much more dynamic with there being no set turn order, and the additional options in being able to cheer are definitely appreciated in helping keep team members alive. I was also positively surprised at how much a challenge the hardest difficulty can be, and I’m looking forward to future events with even harder opponents.
When all is said and done and the plots have converged and reached their conclusion, you might wonder what’s left for you in the great region of Paldea. In previous titles we’ve seen battle facilities, additional storylines, and even whole regions in the case of Gold and Silver. Paldea is much less fortunate, with less to do than even Sword and Shield’s base game. Once the curtain has fallen you have the region to explore as you wish, but there isn’t really anything new to do with it. To my resounding disappointment there isn’t even an iteration of the Battle Tower on show, which is to my knowledge a first since its introduction in Pokemon Crystal. In its place you have a reskinned gym leader rebattle rotation in the form of a four-battle tournament that can be replayed. There’s no real competitive aspect here and very little in the way of farmable replayability. I recently went back to Pokemon Omega Ruby and spent hours in Battle Maison customising a competitive team to account for as many of its hijinks as possible. It was a great time that I was hoping to replicate in these new games, but all I’m left with in terms of content is catching Pokemon and participating in online raids to farm for rare items. I enjoy it now, with a chunk of my time being spent shiny hunting, but I just can’t see the longevity here without Game Freak announcing a significant update sooner rather than later.
The last major positive aspect I wanted to mention is the game’s soundtrack. As something I often overlook in reviews, I feel a lot of games fall into the category of having background music that just sits in the background. It’s there, but you don’t really notice it. And that’s not a bad thing. It adds flavour and doesn’t need to stand out, but that isn’t the music of Scarlet and Violet. This music is an absolute series-high, and I encourage you to give it a listen if you haven’t already. From the overworld to the battle themes, everything feels so alive and fitting. I don’t know how much more I can really say on the subject, but I did at least want to give it a mention for how much of a positive impact it had on my overall experience.
And then we have the elephant in the room. Or the Donphan I guess. Performance and visuals. I feel like I barely need to address this point since it’s perhaps what the games are most well known for at this point, but it is definitely not good. The framerate shifts between 30fps at its best and around 20fps at its worst. This part isn’t ideal, but it’s not as bad as games like Arc of Alchemist that actually made me feel nauseous. If it were just this performance as a negative point, I don’t think there’d be half the uproar there currently is. But that isn’t where it ends. The games look bland, the textures are low quality and clearly tiled in many areas, animations run as low as 2fps for NPCs and environmental features. Perhaps the worst offender is the aggressive pop-in of both scenery and NPCs, including the interactable Pokemon in the open world. While the shiny hunter in me can appreciate a quick way to spawn and despawn Pokemon, it doesn’t make for a good experience, especially with Pokemon appropriately scaled in the overworld. I can’t count the times I’ve run into a tiny Floette seconds after it appeared as a speck on my screen. On top of this you have a slurry of bugs that can range from amusing graphical glitch to performance slow-downs and ultimately game crashes. I do want to stress that as a fan of the series, these aspects haven’t been enough to put me off playing. In the week I’ve been playing I have completed the Pokedex, spending around 90 hours playing Scarlet and a further 10 on Violet. My own tolerance to this kind of thing should be no excuse however, and a company like Game Freak should be held to higher standards. Pokemon Scarlet and Violet as a whole are another step in the right direction, but at this point I find myself saying that for every new entry we see. It is a step in the right direction but by no stretch is this the quality of game we should be seeing for a series like Pokemon.
With some luck we’ll see patches in the coming weeks and months to correct the bugs and smooth over the performance, but whether you’ll enjoy this game will in my opinion come down to your tolerance to such things. I can genuinely say this is the most fun I’ve had with Pokemon in recent years, but whether you’re as willing to accept its flaws as I can is a matter entirely unto itself.
Since the first batch of orders came in, the Steam Deck has been a hit. Offering the handheld PC gaming dream for the price of a Switch, Valve did what no other company could and (eventually) delivered on an experience previously reserved for the big-budget enthusiasts able to throw money to the likes of GPD and AYA. With decks now in hand, the focus shifts to getting the experience possible, and a natural starting point is a dock.
With the announcement of Steam Decks being readily available also came the release of Valve’s official docking station. Coming in at £80, it gives you three USB 3.1 ports, a gigabit ethernet port, and two outputs in a HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.4 port. It’s got everything you’d need, but to Valve’s credit, it isn’t your only option. The Steam Deck plays nicely with third party docks, with the company going so far as to assure you of such on the official site. If you don’t need two outputs, or if you’re just wanting something a bit cheaper, there’s options out there, and one of those options is what I have with me today.
Ivoler is a brand I have never heard of, but I can say they got their dock right. In all honesty, there isn’t much to get wrong. Taking a number of design cues from the official product, you have a relatively familiar look that features a cradle for the console, with a non-detachable cable coming from the back of the dock to act as the point of connection to the Deck. You have much of the same offerings as the official dock, with three USBs, a gigabit ethernet port, and a HDMI 2.0 port. It should be noted the USB ports are USB 3.0, and not 3.1, which is a slight downgrade, but not a killer. The HDMI output is capable of 4K at 60Hz, but I’d be surprised if you were really wanting that kind of performance out of the Deck. It’s nice to have the option if you happen to be using it as a secondary PC and wanting to watch things in high quality though.
The choice of material for this specific variant is aluminium, and feels incredibly sturdy and really quite premium. Aesthetically it looks great on a desk, and even if you’re not always using the Deck docked, it’s great to have a place where the handheld can just sit on the desk without it being in the way. For this premium finish, you’re looking at paying £50, which is a fairly decent saving on the official product. If you’re looking for something more budget, ivoler also offer a plastic dock that lacks an ethernet port, and a HDMI 1.4 port (capable of 4K/30 at max) at a much more budget £30.
Functionally the dock does what it says on the tin. You pop your Steam Deck in place, plug it in, and then either leave it to charge or play away on an external monitor. It’s compact to the point where you can realistically include this in a portable setup if you want to play on a bigger screen on the go. I have a portable gaming monitor and this goes perfectly with it when I’m popping into my parents’ house. There’s very little to fault here, but I would have liked to see a detachable cable connecting to the Deck in oppose to the one that’s built into the dock. Having such an integral part being non-replaceable just seems like a waste when it could’ve been a smaller USB C to USB C.
At £50 I wouldn’t necessarily call this a budget pick, but it’s a nice middle ground between the official offering and ivoler’s cheaper variant. It’s a clean design that I’m happy to have sat on my desk, and if you’re in the market for a dock, I can tell you this one works great.
Nintendo’s hybrid console has been a hit since it launched back in 2017. Featuring a tablet design with detachable controllers for quick and easy multiplayer gameplay on the go, it’s become the go-to for many for couch co-op and rooftop parties. But what do you do when your Joy Cons run dry? Nintendo expects me to walk all the way to my Switch console and slide in the controllers, it’s preposterous. And if you have more than the two provided Joy Cons for the additional multiplayer possibilities? For those too lazy to approach their Switch dock or just have too many friends for their own good, Retroflag are here with a solution. A stylish solution at that.
Now Retroflag are no strangers to the stylishly faithful Nintendo-themed accessory market. I’ve personally looked at their Game Boy themed Raspberry Pi handheld, as well as their brilliant NES cartridge SSD enclosures. Both lived up to the hype and even now I look on both happily. They’ve carved out a great name for themselves in terms of making something that looks great, and is genuinely functional. I’ll say in this instance they’ve definitely nailed the theming as always, but outside of the somewhat contrived use case listed above I’m struggling to see exactly what their market is.
To avoid further beating around the bush, this is a product that does as it advertises and very little more. I can’t call that a bad thing when the idea itself is so simple. You slide your Joy Cons in the side of the Famicom-themed device, and they charge. While the controllers are charging, the power switch and reset button light up to show the status of their respective Joy Con; when the light goes out it’s fully charged. I’m a little sad to see the power switch doesn’t actually function as a power switch, but they did make up for this somewhat by having a functional cartridge slot along with eject slider. The cartridges themselves open like GBA cartridges by sliding the front face down, and act as storage for up to four Switch games. I like it a lot, even if it does mean I will in fact have to approach my Switch after all if I want to use the Joy Con dock to its fullest potential.
Thematically they really did nail it. In both size and weight you’re looking at something close to Nintendo’s mini console series. Were it not for the Joy Cons sticking on the side, you might genuinely mistake it for one of them too. There’s nothing particularly standout of gaudy here either, outside of the red indicator lights mentioned earlier. You plug a USB C cable in the back of the unit and it just works. It’s a genuine challenge to pick apart and find flaws in such a simple product executed well.
Is this dock for you though? If you happen to have more Joy Cons than you do Switches to be able to store them in, I can see some utility here. For what is probably the majority of Switch owners who only own the two bundled Joy Cons, it’s hard to recommend it just for the lack of real use. It’s not so much the dock’s fault as it is the problem it’s trying to address. It’s something I’d be happy to receive as a gift and have on hand, but perhaps not something I’d buy myself. Retroflag did a great job, I just kind of wish it addressed a bigger issue. Even if this just fitting in another port to be able to charge a Pro Controller too.
Scarlet Works 