Controller maker 8bitdo is back at it again with their indecipherable naming conventions to bring us another controller packed to the absolute gills with features. This controller, coming in a delightful lime green hue, was provided by AKNES for purpose of this review but all thoughts in this are my own. This review is for the 8bitdo Ultimate 2 Wireless controller, which is intended for use on PC and Android, though new firmware updates have added additional functionality. Please don’t get this confused for the Ultimate 2 Bluetooth, with a Nintendo ABXY layout, which is intended for use on the Nintendo Switch and has a significantly slower polling rate.
One thing you’ll immediately notice upon looking at the Ultimate 2 Wireless is that this controller looks almost identical to a great number of 8bitdo’s other controllers. It has the same shape as others from 8bitdo’s Ultimate line since 2022, and it features the same textured grip around the backside of the handles. Build quality wise, you can pick the controller up and shake it without hearing any rattling at all, which helps contribute to a more premium feel.
The Ultimate 2 Wireless has TMR analog sticks, which use magnets and quantum tunneling to detect the position of the stick and relays that information to your gaming platform of choice. TMR sticks are notable for not having parts that rub against one another, like the potentiometers in most gamepads. This means ideally that TMR sticks are more resistant to drift due to components wearing out. Now that we understand the technology behind the sticks, they glide smoothly along an anti-friction ring that has LEDs for some customization. The analog stick’s curve seems to be pretty linear, and I didn’t notice any overt acceleration or deceleration of the stick as it was tilted towards its apex.
The 8bitdo Ultimate 2 Wireless features analog triggers and trigger locks that swap them to digital, allowing you to choose between which mode you may prefer based on the games you enjoy. For those who enjoy Rocket League or racing games, analog triggers that allow precise adjustments to speed is of paramount importance, but gamers who enjoy playing shooters might prefer a digital trigger with snappy response to help their opponents get lead poisoning by shooting the most bullets possible. This controller is one of the rare ones that doesn’t force you to choose between the two, and you can simply flip a switch located on the back next to each trigger to change between types.
While the triggers are switched to analog, they are hall effect, which means that they use a magnetic field to determine how far you’ve pulled the trigger. When the switch is moved to make the triggers digital, the switch slides an assembly with a mouse button style switch that the trigger pushes, making for faster actuations in shooters or for gaming on a Nintendo Switch. The early batches of Ultimate 2s, both Wireless and Bluetooth models, had a loud, satisfying click sound when you had the triggers in digital mode, but this lime green controller seems to be a new version that’s made the clicking quiet, sounding quieter than any of the face buttons.
The face buttons on the Ultimate 2 Wireless are your standard membrane buttons, with similar actuation pressure to what you’d use to press buttons on 8bitdo’s other controllers, such as the Ultimate 2C, but with a slightly more satisfying clicking sound when fully depressed.
8bitdo’s tactile d-pad style makes a return on the Ultimate 2 Wireless, and it feels almost exactly like what it does on their Ultimate 2C line of controllers. The d-pad isn’t one of those clicky ones that makes a lot of noise, but it does have a tactile bump so you’ll know exactly what you’re pressing while you game. Being a membrane style d-pad with a pivot in the center, this is an ideal type of directional pad for motion inputs in fighting games. Due to the click you’ll feel when pushing a direction, you’ll definitely know if you’ve accidentally input a diagonal by a mistake because you’ll feel two “clicks” through your thumb which means that when pressing down on a cardinal direction, you have to roll your finger a little bit to get a diagonal to register.
I found this d-pad excellent for fighting games, and while my preferred control method is still a leverless fight stick, I was able to pull off Mai, Ryu, and Cammy combos with ease. Techniques like holding down-forward and then rolling to a quarter circle back for a combo starter were performed quite easily with the directional pad picking up all of the inputs for at least 1 frame while I rolled my thumb. Playing on this controller was comfortable enough that, when toying around with Under Night In-Birth II, I continued playing on this controller far longer than I expected myself to- I opened the game to test out the d-pad, but wound up playing for a few hours just because it was fun.
With all of the primary features of the 8bitdo Ultimate 2 Wireless out of the way, now is the time to talk about extra features: configurable LEDs, extra buttons, and gyroscope. Using the Ultimate Software v2, which you can download from 8bitdo’s website for free, you can set up different profiles for the titles you play and control the RGB lighting. The controller comes with a few lightning modes out of the box, with one that changes the LEDs based on what buttons you’re pressing, or another that has a “ring of fire” style of LEDs, but thankfully should you not like the lighting out of the box, you can change it quite easily. You can configure the brightness of the RGB lighting without any extra software by simply using a button combination, which is handy in case you find the LEDs much too bright out of the box.
There’s extra buttons with two being on top of the controller next to the shoulder buttons and triggers in the style of the Ultimate 2C line, plus there’s two buttons on the back of the controller. These buttons can be set up by using the square button on the front of the controller, and all you have to do is hold the extra button, the button you want it to be, and then press square to successfully map it to whichever extra button you were holding down.
You can also assign these buttons in the Ultimate Software v2, similar to the lighting, which you may want to use that software to adjust the dead zone of the analog sticks or triggers anyway. You can activate turbo quickly with the star button on the face of the controller too, which is always helpful for button mashing quick time events.
Finally, the 8bitdo Ultimate 2 Wireless has a gyroscope built in, but it was originally accessed in a bit of a goofy way. The Ultimate Software you’d download from 8bitdo’s website would let you output the gyro as virtual right or left analog stick movement, which works well enough, but there was always a small dead zone that couldn’t seem to be reduced which reduced my accuracy. This isn’t my preferred way to use a gyroscope in a controller, but sometimes outputting gyro to right stick is necessary in games that don’t allow simultaneous mouse and controller input, like Monster Hunter Rise or Fallout 4, for example.
The more superior method, in my opinion, is to use 8bitdo’s software to update the firmware on the controller (which, as of writing, firmware 1.06 is the latest and has this capability.) This allows you to start the controller in d-input mode, which exposes the controller’s gyroscope, extra buttons, and analog triggers to Steam which now has full customization support for this controller. The fact that 8bitdo added the capability for this controller to connect to the Switch after launch is pretty incredible, and you can connect it by holding the Home and Y buttons simultaneously to turn on the controller with the 2.4GHz dongle connected to your Nintendo Switch or Switch 2 (it can’t wake up the console, however).
If you’re gaming on Steam, you can hold the Home and B buttons to wake up the controller in D-input mode, which will allow Steam to use the gyroscope and analog triggers together and even assign your extra buttons on a per-game basis. Considering this is a $60 controller, that’s a lot of value even if it’s mostly stemming from Valve’s platform. As far as the gyro is concerned, I think 8bitdo has finally caught up too many of its competitors, if not exceeded a great number of them. Obviously, gyro-focused controllers like the Alpakka will still reign supreme, but 8bitdo’s gyroscope support in the Ultimate 2 Wireless is fantastically done.
The Wireless, possibly due in part to its 1,000Hz polling rate, responds quickly and accurately even when used as a mouse to control my desktop cursor, and when testing in Aim Labs, the controller’s ability to recenter after shooting all over the place left me impressed. The accuracy of the Ultimate 2 Wireless’s gyroscope feels on par with official Switch Pro and Dualsense controllers, but it lacks the jitter and “skipping” that the Ultimate 2C had, making this a phenomenal competitor to other full controllers in the market with a gyroscope. The gyro on this controller, after the firmware has been updated, has a responsiveness and accuracy that I have really only seen in overclocked Dualsense controllers.
Of course, the one issue with 8bitdo’s implementation of gyro is that they never really seem to compensate for the controller’s vibration feature, so if you’re an active gyro user it may be necessary to turn down or disable this controller’s rumble feature unless you really find your reticule bouncing up and down to be immersive or something. Nintendo and Sony’s official controllers have some kind of compensation for the rumble when used in conjunction with their gyroscope but apparently 8bitdo hasn’t cracked that code yet, so treat the gyro and vibration as mutually exclusive features, for now. These added features provide a ton of value to the Ultimate 2 Wireless, and while the gyro to right or left stick that their software allows works just fine, it’s really nice to be able to use full gyroscope to mouse output when gaming on PC for the best accuracy. Even if you don’t like using gyro, being able to customize the additional buttons on this controller on a per-game basis with Steam is pretty nice.
That being said, I’ve found the 8bitdo Ultimate 2 Wireless to be a lean, mean, and especially green competitor in a very competitive controller space. Having trigger locks, which allow the user to decide if you want analog or digital triggers, is a huge upgrade, and four extra mappable buttons give the controller an edge in customizability. The analog sticks are snappy, linear, and responsive, and coupled with the controller’s 1,000Hz polling rate makes for a great experience whether you’re playing an adventure game or a shooter. Add all of that on top of the fact that this controller is now fully supported in Steam, allowing you to get the best of both worlds when it comes to gyroscopes and triggers without buying a DualSense Edge, and you have a very strong competitor for a large number of enthusiasts out there, outperforming basically every other 8bitdo controller to date.