Background

This review is of a Razer Wildcat Controller, which was supplied by Razer for review purposes.

Pre-warning. The rating you see with this review has some caveats depending on the type of gamer you are. If you're in a hurry to get to the conclusions, feel free to jump to the "Summing Up" section of the review.

I’m an odd sort. I started my gaming career in earnest with a mix of PC and Commodore hardware, before switching to consoles in the 90’s. I still gamed occasionally on my PC, but for the most part the convenience and ease of consoles, plus the (back then) ubiquitous drunken video game sessions with mates meant they were my primary source of gaming material.

However, even that still didn’t stop me. I found myself falling into an odd pattern. Some game styles I used console for, in other cases I used a PC. In some weird way, that still carries through to today. Even though I came back to the PC for good thanks to Star Citizen in late 2012, I still had a PS4 up until last year and still have access to an Xbox One (belongs to my wife) and a PS3 (too many SingStar songs purchased to get rid of that).

Why am I talking to you about my rather boring gaming hardware history? Well, it has an influence on the review today since try as I might, although where possible now I game on my PC, there are still certain types of games that to me just feel more comfortable with a controller in hand, so even though I’m a PC gamer these days, I still feel like an odd hybrid.

So, until relatively recently, I was gaming on my PC on an Xbox One controller, then an NVIDIA Shield controller and now I’ve been playing with the Razer Wildcat for about a week. This isn’t always the case, I use a HOTAS for flight/space flight games, mouse and keyboard for FPS and strategy games, but then there are a bunch of other games where a controller just makes me feel more at home. Case in point, two games I’ve been playing recently: Assassin’s Creed Syndicate and Project Cars.

Let’s start to take a look at the Wildcat then.

The Spiel

The Razer tagline that you see everywhere there is mention of the Wildcat is that it’s “Designed for E-Sports”. Personally, I’m a bit old to get the whole e-sports thing, but apparently Tom “Ogre2” Ryan (who is a 6 times national champion at Halo) likes the Wildcat. The main draw for me is the programmable buttons. We’ll see how they hold up later.