Do I look good in silver and black?
First looks at the XFX Gear Gamepad are impressive. I’ve found Logitech’s effort of late to look and feels a bit cheap for the money you pay, so it’s a pleasant change to get my hands on something that looks like a bit of thought has gone into the basic looks. With a chunky, rugged look in rubberised non-slip black plastic, finished off with a matt silver topping, this is a pad you can happily leave on display. Similarly, the receiving dongle that slots into a spare USB port is slim and stylish and takes up little desktop space.
The dongle itself lights up the XFX logo on the front when plugged in, but the cable is cripplingly short, being just over 50cm. If you’ve got your PC situated anywhere other than on your desk, the cable isn’t long enough to get the dongle up on your desktop. I was initially worried over this from a reception point of view, but my worries proved unfounded as I didn’t hit a single snag during use… but more of that in a minute.
Having a closer look at the pad, we’ve got the usual stuff you’d expect nowadays. On the left there’s a D-Pad and then in the middle we’ve got two mini joysticks with a push-in button under each one too. On the right there are the usual diamond pattern of four buttons and on the shoulders there are a further two buttons per shoulder. Add in the standard select and start buttons, along with a macro button, mode button and turbo button and that’s the pad covered.
Superbly, XFX have chosen not to call the buttons A or B, or to give them funky colours or little shapes on them. Sticking to the bog standard convention of using simple numbers makes configuring the pad in a game dead easy. All you have to do is look at the pad and you know which button number 8 is as it’s written on it! You see, keeping things simple like this is what manufacturers should do all the time. Setting up and configuring hardware should be a doddle, it shouldn’t be a challenge and XFX have made sure it isn’t.
