Believe: The Xbox Elite Really DOES Break Easy

Look up a list of great controllers for PC gaming and Microsoft’s Elite 2 will come up more often than not. And those articles are correct: it’s a great controller. That is, it’s a great controller with one giant caveat.

From the moment I cracked it open, I felt I was playing with something special. Heavy, sturdy to the touch, and easily customisable, it felt like a really decent piece of kit. And it was. Until it wasn’t.

That is to say that during a not especially chaotic game of Super Monkey Ball on Monday, the analogue stick in our Elite decided to stick in the top corner and that was it. It no longer worked. We’d had it exactly two months.

Now I’m not going to say it was kept in a glass case and never used, but we look after our hardware. There was no reason to think it should have broken so easily.

And here’s the embarrassing thing: I’d been warned. Get past the recommendation on the first page and you’ll find page after comment after comment talking about the build quality of the Elite controller. It’s not that I didn’t believe them, I did. It’s just I presumed – like so many things on the internet – that it was blown out of proportion. What’s to say CheetoFingers69 looked after his controller the way I intended to?

Did AngryGamerXxX really have his RB button stop working, or did he throw it across the room in a fit of rage? Did nothing happen and he just blamed the controller for his own mistake?

I ignored the warnings. And I’m here today to say when it comes to the Elite controller, you shouldn’t ignore the warnings.

Elite 2 – Don’t Ignore the Warnings

The fact that when you search the Elite controller, you see a number of people talking about how they’ve had multiple break on them says how good this controller is on paper. Other controllers offer more customisability or features, but nothing quite comes close to how the Elite feels. It brings everything together into about the greatest package going.

Until you throw a 20-year-old Gamecube game at it anyway.

I will not be buying another. Thankfully it was exchanged without any hassle. When I handed it over to the woman at Argos, she smiled and said “ah, another one”. This is not an uncommon issue.

I got a Turtle Beach Stealth Ultra instead, and will write up a review of that in the near future.

In the meantime, if you’re considering buying an Elite, I would caution you against it. This isn’t a comment section overreaction. It isn’t only some unique cases, amplified by people only posting when they have something to say. It’s a tremendous controller that is far to expensive to break within just a couple of months. It’s a disappointment. It would be regardless, but the potential is huge.

The “premium” controller is something that genuinely seems to have taken off in the last few years. For the most part, the devices on offer are anything but. It can’t be good for Microsoft, for Xbox or for this area of peripheral accessories to have the biggest entry be so shoddy.