Everyone’s looking for an edge, and in gaming, that can come down to the tech and peripherals you surround yourself with. Thrustmaster are one of the most reliable and long-running peripheral-makers in the game, and control has always been their calling card. Their all-new HEART Controller pulls together a raft of their knowledge, with Hall Effect analogue sticks and mechanical buttons designed to make this the fastest, most precise weapon in your arsenal.
The Thrustmaster HEART Controller – H.E.A.R.T. standing for Hall Effect Accurate Technology here – is a USB-A wired controller for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC. There’s a lovely braided wired cable which connects to the controller via a standard USB-C port. It boasts the traditional Microsoft asymmetrical stick layout, and it’s a wholly plastic build, appearing in black and white, with an RGB lighting strip running across the middle. It looks smart, if a little understated.
In the hand, it’s a lighter offering than the official Xbox controller, though that’s not that surprising with no onboard batteries to contend with. The hand grips are a touch more angular at the end, and noticeably so when you pick it up, but once they’re resting in the palm of your hand they’re as comfortable as you’d hope.
The analogue sticks are the stars of the show, though. Hall Effect sticks use magnets to track movement rather than physical connections that can wear out and cause drift. You can tell Thrustmaster’s expertise here, and they feel tight and incredibly responsive in use. I’ve played a heap of Overwatch 2 and Marvel Rivals with them, and you feel empowered by these sticks, firing off salvos with pinpoint accuracy. Well, as much accuracy as your thumbs can muster, anyway.
The mechanical face buttons and cross-shaped D-Pad are also excellent, with a great tactile feel and reassuring click when used. The Y button on our review unit seemed to take a little while to bed in, but I’ve had no issues with it at all in the thirty to forty hours since.
Now onto the weaker elements: the shoulder buttons and triggers. Both of these inputs feel cheap in comparison to those on the front of the HEART Controller. Some of that comes down to the light plastic that they’re made out of, but equally, the shoulder buttons, and particularly the one on the right, feels, and sounds, cheap. The triggers are certainly as responsive as you’d want, but I really missed the ability to lock them out for playing FPS titles like you can with recent controllers like the Turtle Beach Stealth Ultra Pro – admittedly a significantly more expensive controller.
There are two additional buttons on the rear, and you can program these on the fly using the mapping button on the controller. They sit really nicely under the fingers, and I just like the way they feel. In fact, they’re much better to press than those found on Thrustmaster’s pricier eSwap X2.
The Mapping and RGB light buttons, though, are in the worst place possible. They sit above the Menu and Option buttons on the front of the controller and by doing so, they’re just where you expect to find the Menu and Option buttons. Every time I wanted to use either of the menu buttons, I found myself changing the lighting colour, or doing nothing at all. These absolutely needed to be placed somewhere else, and it seems unbelievable that no one else had the same issues with them during testing. I did mostly learn to live with it, but having to think about which one is the right button isn’t good for staying immersed in your game.
You can really tinker with the setup here though, whether on the fly – you can map the buttons and cycle through a small number of RGB lighting options via the buttons on the controller – or in the ThrustmapperX Software which is available on both PC and Xbox.
At £90, the Thrustmaster has to truly sell itself as being an upgrade over your regular Xbox controller, and though the analogue sticks, face buttons and rear buttons are well designed and feel great, the triggers and shoulder buttons just didn’t do it for me. In terms of competition, you’re one step away from Microsoft’s Elite 2 Core controller, but while it certainly feels more premium in your hand, there continue to be significant question marks about its reliability. I don’t think you’ll have any of those problems with the HEART Controller. If you want a wired controller for the reduced latency, that’s definitely a key selling point here, but if your budget will stretch to it, the Thrustmaster eSwap X2 is a far superior product, and you can now buy HALL Effect stick modules for it as well.