text: Elsewhere, however, things aren’t as promising. Take the D-pad. No, please, take it away. Both the standard model and the one in the add-on pack are loose, flimsy-feeling, and too thin to get a decent thumb-roll on when going for a fireball. Your thumb makes too much contact with the plastic of the controller body to get a really fluid motion.
  Contrast with the Xbox Elite pad, where the cross has evolved into a circle, and things are night and day. The DualSense, a really good pad in its own right, and the Xbox One pad both have thicker buttons here, and are better for certain games as a result. A circular D-pad is available in the Fighting Pack of add-ons, but that’s just more expense on top of an already pricey controller.
  The face buttons—the ones you can’t change—suffer a similar fate. They’re clicky enough and don’t take much pressure to bottom out, but you can hear the spring underneath them, and they move slightly within their sockets. They feel a bit cheap, basically, which is not what you want on a pad that costs twice as much as the standard Xbox One model.
  Those tiny screws, once removed, allow the triggers to be popped off, and some packs of add-ons include extended triggers. Otherwise, the ones in the orange pack I was provided do nothing but change the colour. That colour, by the way, fades considerably once it’s applied to the black controller. Taken out of the pack it really dazzles, but once socketed seems dull. A fault of being slightly translucent. You can plug your headset into the controller, and being a PlayStation model there’s the small touchpad at the top too.
  Underneath, there are four additional buttons that can be individually assigned to commands using the Thrustmapper software. Or at least that’s the idea. First, it triggered an alert in my browser that it couldn’t be downloaded securely, then when downloaded and installed, it didn’t work, throwing errors over both the names of new profiles and the configuration of the controller, even though it had been put back into its default state.