A professional gamer. A top-ranked esports athlete. A celebrity in competitive shooting circles—I am neither of those things. But can it be according to the controller of my choice? There may be something that is a step above the standard Xbox The pad I use for PC and console my game, quite literally?
The Thrustmaster HEART (which stands for “Hall Effect Accurate Technology”—more on what that means) is designed to deliver greater precision and in-game performance without breaking the bank. Promises to do so, offering accountability. In short, it aims to be an entry-level pro controller.
It may sound like an oxymoron but it makes a certain kind of sense once the heart is in your hand. It’s a pad that features a familiar layout—the one on the Xbox that’s become the default for most games in recent years—along with two programmable paddle buttons on the back—a (mostly) premium. with feel A supple texture on the grips and triggers ensures that fingers are unlikely to slip, the thumbsticks have a satisfactory degree of resistance, and those extra paddles sit comfortably under the middle finger of each hand. Its asymmetrical black and white design is also striking, reinforced by a single LED strip running down each side when in use.
Photo: Thrustmaster
The only things missing that premium feel are an ugly, blobby D-pad, and Xbox function buttons—View, Menu, and Share—that are too small. The D-pad is the worst, which seems counterintuitive to the way the heart takes the slim design. Its rounded tips result in the feeling of no real delineation between its directions, and with no texture on its surface, the thumb slides over it aimlessly. The function buttons, meanwhile, are both small and shallow, giving them an unsteady feel.
Still, the design impresses for the most part, and the Thrustmaster builds around upgraded components compared to standard controllers. However, it sometimes lacks the interchangeable components and finer degrees of customization that Microsoft’s higher end favors. Xbox Elite Or Thrustmaster’s own Eswap X2 Offering, the HEART’s mechanical buttons provide a satisfying clicky pushback with every press, its triggers feel smooth, and its control sticks move under your thumb.
Magnetic attraction
It’s in the thumbsticks where some of the pad’s higher-end technology resides. Most standard controllers determine the position of the stick using potentiometers, where (very simply) a contact pad measures resistance as you move the stick around. The problem is that the friction of the process—thousands of microscopic movements in each play session, each rubbing against the contacts—wears parts down over time. This results in “stick drift”, where your on-screen character or objective can drift at will. Heart, by contrast, uses magnets, with the position of the stick determining (again, very simply) the direction by which electrons are pushed onto a sensor.
It is hall effect The acronym was named for the physicist Edwin Hall who invented it, and while he probably didn’t anticipate its use for better video game controllers in 1879, the key takeaway is that the process is frictionless. That doesn’t mean components don’t degrade over time, but that their position can be measured much more accurately in the first place—thrustmaster says they can be tracked to within 0.01 degrees of movement. can But does this really translate to better performance in the game?
