Now with Street Fighter 6 out and people playing it en masse, it seems only fitting to cover yet another excellent piece of gaming hardware from 8BitDo. Specifically, their new arcade stick for Xbox.
Back in 2020, I reviewed 8BitDo’s arcade stick for Switch and PC, and this is effectively a continuation of that. In short, this is a very well built and sturdy arcade stick that works both wired and wirelessly for both the Xbox family of consoles and PC.
More accurately, this stick works on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One consoles, and as such comes with more extras to deal with that.
Things like microphone controls, the ability to switch between stick and gamepad configurations and the suite of Xbox specific buttons unique to that platform. It also has a 3.5mm headphone audio jack for audio passthrough.
This is also an officially licensed Xbox stick, and that means that its PC compatibility is excellent. While the stick is very customizable, the fact that it has the standard button configuration for Windows makes a huge difference.
Talking of customization, you can still use 8BitDo’s very thorough Ultimate Software to customise the input profile, but you can also physically swap out the buttons and use different hardware if you want.
While I’ve mostly played with the stick in its wired configuration, the wireless (2.4g) setup is also very good, and comes with a very solid battery life. However, I would recommend that if you are playing competitively, then you should use it wired up.
I tested the stick out on a bunch of shmups, such as Radiant Silvergun, Strania, Ikaruga and R-Type and it performed very well indeed.
Coming in at $119.99 and released on June 30, pre-orders have already started and the stick is currently listed on Amazon.
Overall, this is yet another excellent gaming peripheral from 8BitDo. If you are after a very versatile, solid and reliable arcade stick for Xbox or PC, then this is an excellent candidate.
Disclosure: 8BitDo sent me this stick for the purposes of this review.
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