Axelo BAT PC Game Controller Review

Introduction

Axelo, inc. is an Austin, Texas based, Startup Company. Their first product is the BAT Natural Motion 3D Game Controller. I met one of the founders recently and was shown some demos of the controller in their office. At the end of the day, I took home my own BAT, and what follows is my full review.

The Axelo BAT is a PC and MAC compatible game pad, but its claim to fame is accelerometer based motion sensing control. How well does it work? How compatible is it? In this review we will explore the controller from unboxing to autopsy to configuration, design philosophy, and of course, gaming. As will be traditional with me and hardware reviews, we’ll begin with the unboxing.

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Review Specs:

Product Obtained – Direct from company. Not paid for.

SPECIAL NOTE:

The following article will reference pictures that are not there ( or are taken with a consumer camera for now ). This is not an accidental omission on my part. I am in the process of buying a new camera, but I wanted to get started posting reviews and get the site going without having to wait. Please be patient, and check back often as I will post when I get the camera, and let you know that the images are going to start coming. Thank you for your patience.

The Unboxing

If it were possible for me to convey olfactory sensations via this digital paper, I wouldn’t have to tell you that the premium box holding the BAT not only “feels” nice, it actually smells nice too. It’s like when you first take the wrapping off of the box to something like an Apple product, or a new Sony device. The box tells a story.

So what story are we getting here?

The box for the Axelo BAT is suitably large, windowless, and contains all of the information one expects to see. Unlike the minimalist industrial design of Apple boxes, which usually contain only the white Apple logo and a small sticker belying the secrets within, this box looks like it is made as a concession between the high class of a fine premium collectable, and a retail box. On that, Axelo succeeds very nicely.

On the front, the tale begins: “Natural Movement 3D Game Controller”. This is intriguing. What do they mean? We’ll come to that soon enough. For now, we also learn that the controller has “Backlit LEDs”, a nice feature and should be standard these days, and is rubber coated, so it shouldn’t feel cheap, and that’s fortunate, because this device is not cheap. The direct order price from Axelo is $100 before shipping. This is a serious investment, so let’s open the box and see what we get for it.

Inside

As soon as you begin to pry the box open, you see that the seam splits about a third of the way up the box in a triangle shape . . . like a bat. Under this, a sheet of textured orange cardboard, and behind that, the controller itself, safely nestled into a form fitted and molded plastic holder, coated in what is meant to feel like black velvet. The top of the box has another mold, completing the effect. It feels like the reveal of a new sports car at a major auto show. It makes you ANTICIPATE.

Other contents

Other than the controller, my test unit came with a small, black and white manual. It concisely explains the functions of the controller, but is short on information otherwise. After the mind-blowing effect of the box reveal, this is the first let down.

The Controller

After the precedent set by the box, I have very high hopes for the feel of the controller. Those hopes are not dashed. The rubber coating feels very soft and smooth, but not slippery like many similar coatings. It remains to be seen if it will hold up to daily abuse. After all, we buy controllers to be the interface between us and our games, and we play hard, do we not? We want our investment to still look good months from now.

The “Analog” sticks ( I have always disliked this term. Analog is a misnomer when describing these control inputs. The proper term is “digital proportional” but I guess that doesn’t sound as nice on marketing materials ) have a thicker, stickier coating. Clearly these guys have put a lot of thought into the industrial design and practical features of this device. It truly FEELS ready to play.

Like almost all modern controllers, or game pads, this controller is modeled on the Playstation paradigm, which in turn owes its basic layout to the NES paradigm. As this is a time tested form factor, innovation in layout is discouraged, and that leaves features. Underneath the cool exterior of this sedate, yet beastly BAT is something special, and we’ll get to that below, but if you’re concerned that the BAT will feel wonky compared to a PS3 controller, it will not.

Plugging in

Upon plugging the controller in, you are greeted with a bank of blue and red LED glow. Personally, I would have preferred that they stuck with one color. The buttons are all blue, but the logo and one indicator are red. It’s slightly distracting and represents the second minor let down. Sitting next to my Alienware M17x, also decked in blue LED, it almost looks like it was made as a companion, but the red LEDs distract. My M17x also has configurable LED colors, and for $100, I wish this device did too. Sadly, it does not.

The manual and common sense dictate opening the controller configuration in your OS next. In my case, Windows 7. True to expectation, the controller shows up, and all of the buttons do what they are supposed to do. The main difference here, and the presumable justification for the premium price tag is that “mode” button which switches the controller to something akin to a Wii controller ( or more accurately, an iPhone ).

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The BAT Motion Controller

Does this bat have wings? What is 3D motion control, in regards to the BAT? Axelo is tight lipped on the tech, but I suspect that the controller contains an iPhone-like accelerometer.

The Autopsy

So like any self-respecting tech geek, out comes the screwdriver, and then the screws.

There are seven small screws, of standard Philips variety, rather than hex or something equally annoying. So getting inside the device is not daunting. Prying the two halves apart, we see that there is a flexible cable connecting twin CBs leading to the 2^nd row of top buttons. These come out easily and are quite sturdy.

Next I survey the main side, with the main board. The main CB is screwed in place, no problem there. Underneath it are not one but two rather large motors with the requisite half weights. Each motor is securely wrapped in rubber and seated into the controller body. This is to prevent undue vibration or noise. Nice.

Once the screws are out, it’s a gentle matter of prying the board out and gently getting the front top button CBs out of their respective slots before the whole thing is free of the plastic. Now we can take a closer look.

The Accelerometer

Just as I suspected, right there on the board, just to the right side is a solid state accelerometer, not unlike the one in an iPhone.

What does this mean? Well, for one, it’s not going to feel like playing the Wii. The Wii uses an LED sensor bar to augment its motion sensing, and can render a rock stable “image” of the location, attitude, and relative distance of the device. By nature, the “3D motion” control of this device is limited to its ability to detect movement in an X and Y axis, and that’s it. Is that enough? Let’s find out.

Gaming in 3D

Remember when I said that there would be let downs? So far we have only covered the minor ones. Now I have to come to the big one. You bought a game pad, you paid almost as much for it alone as you would for a used Wii, and much more than any other game pad. You expect it to be usable in any game you have right?

That expectation is justified, for the price, but shattered the moment you try to play a game. Batman: Arkham Asylum? Nope. Bioshock 2? No, try again. Company of Heroes? Half Life 2? Fallout 3? Crysis? This thing did say it has a First Person Shooter mode, didn’t it? Well, because there is no driver to install, there is no configuration utility to use, so unless a game magically already knows about the BAT, you are out of luck, and even then the controller is not configurable. You are stuck with how it works.

Wait, no configuration utility?

As of this writing, Axelo has no plans to include any software to allow their controller to be configured to work with traditionally game pad friendly games. They offered up a small selection of games which are BAT ready: Trackmania Nations ( a free download, and an ok game, but hardly a AAA title ), Need for Speed Underground 2 ( which is not the newest NFS in the series, and the BAT is not compatible with Shift ) and Battlestations: Pacific. All three of these underwhelming choices are older games. That’s it. I’m told that the BAT will support games made on the Unity platform. In my own testing, I threw together a game and compiled it, but the support is pretty sketchy. Only one button worked, and even in the configuration screen, it didn’t recognize most of the buttons. That and there are few/no commercial Unity games ( yet ) isn’t really a strong selling point. I’m glad that the support is COMING, but again, it should already BE there.

So for now, unless you own and really want to play one of these three games with this controller you will be unable to use the controller if you buy it now.

The 3D Motion Control

But you might ask “What about the motion control? How well does it work?” After all, that is supposed to be the main selling point here, right?

To start, I load up the Windows Controller Set Up screen again. I switch the controller to “motion” mode and move around a little bit. True to advertising, the crosshair on the screen moves around too, but it’s far from a 1:1 feel. It feels more like “if I move just a little to the right, the cross hair manically flings itself to the right, with some up and down motion as well.” It just doesn’t FEEL solid. I have famously steady hands. I was even featured wielding a Genesis controller on LIVE national TV 20 years ago. I’m not the issue here. So that’s already a strike, but am I over-reacting? Will games smooth it out, and feel better?

The short answer is no. In each of the games I tested, the general idea of the motion control “worked” but it did not feel “on center”, and was a bit slow to react. I attribute this to both lack of native support and configuration in the games themselves, and in the funky way in which the controller handles sensitivity settings. You press left and right on the thumb pad to change settings, and there is only a handful.

By comparison; the “steering with the phone” controls of Need for Speed Underground on the iPhone felt exponentially faster, more “on center” and more stable by comparison, and this is with a game you have to tilt the entire screen to play.

One more aspect to this problem is the lack of Z-Axis awareness. Both The Wii Motion Plus and Natal have this, meaning that the game not only knows your motion, but your LOCATION relative to the emitter. This is an important aspect for many games, and without it, all we really have is X and Y movement, and no rotation support either, which the Wii controller also has.

Buttons vs. Tilting

If you leave aside the "3D" movement, which is honestly of limited value in a controller designed to be held firmly and have many buttons utilized at once, compared to say the Wii controller and game set which were developed with this control scheme in mind, one will most likely be playing the majority of games on the device the old fashioned way, meaning with the "analog" sticks. This is why the Wii controller is designed the way it is. Nintendo INVENTED the thumb-pad/buttons paradigm, they obviously knew that a PS3 form factor would not work in this play style, and thus they designed the Wii remote to be wielded freely but still allow the user to push the buttons firmly. With the BAT controller tilted to its extreme angles, most of the buttons are unreachable from a normal holding position, and thus; the control scheme falls apart.

Cords and Motion Make Me Sick

In a controller of this price class, the lack of wireless support is a tragic omission. For a "motion" sensitive controller, this is a huge crutch. Cords are heavy, and impart a gravity penalty to the precision of the thing overall. Based on inspection of the device, I'm guessing that there was room for a battery. All other motion based devices are wireless, as it should be. This is something that needs to happen in the next iteration of the device; however, if it has to increase the price any more, you might as well buy a brand new Wii.

Moving Out

The final verdict on the motion control? It’s a cute gimmick, but lack of general support, cost, performance, and the weight of the cord just take too much away from the experience.

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Integrity Check\

As this is a brand new paradigm in product reviews, I will take a moment to explain the logic behind it in each of my early reviews.

This is how it works:

For my site, my keystone paradigm is “Integrity”. It governs everything that I do. I do not “scoop”, I do not “spy”, nor will I purchase stolen hardware, or less serious but still crappy behavior such as copying content, posting something on my site as if it was my content, with a “via-“ link. There is no via ANYthing on my site. 100% of all of my content is generated by me. Period.

On that same token, I have certain standards for vendors. It has been my long experience that vendors will treat their reviewers equal to how they treat their customers. The only difference between a professional reviewer and an end user is that reviewers don’t pay for the product. However, we still, or at least, I still expect a certain degree of support, communication, acceptance of feedback, and level of behavioral conduct.

As part of this process, I will detail my dealings with each company from first contact, product acquisition, support, and follow up. Exceptional companies will gain a lot of credit here, and the poorly run, greedy, or otherwise “less thans” will be outed.

Axelo

Initial Contact – Without revealing names, my initial contact with Axelo was through a social networking site. I was offered the opportunity to evaluate the hardware and visited the company in person to do so. I was advised ahead of time what games were working with the device. I installed one of them, and tested it on the spot on my Alienware M17x. The controller worked, and I took it home with the box. It was not an unopened unit. I do not know whether it is considered a retail product or if mine was pre-production. I was told that no drivers were forthcoming, and they seemed very evasive about future compatibility.

Follow up - Subsequently I showed a very early version of this review to my contact via email, and never received any response. For a product placed at twice the average for competition, with a meager 30 day warranty that died shortly after and no response at all to my driver concerns, I have to admit that I am highly weary of this company.

Verdict - If they dropped the price to at least $59, bumped the warranty to at least one year, and addressed the driver issue, I would change my recommendation. As it stands, the lack of responsibility and maturity on the part of the company stands as a testament to its product and even these changes probably won't change my hesitancy to recommend this controller.

Conclusion

In this extensive review, we have looked at the Axelo BAT Natural Motion 3D Game Controller from Box to cable, and everything inside. We’ve looked at it from a purely aesthetic viewpoint ( which you shall learn is extremely important to me ) and on this front, the BAT is an EPIC win. However, this win is tempered tragically by the exceedingly high cost of entry, performance issues and the equally disappointing lack of game support, and sketchy support from the company that makes it.

Extremely Extreme

The Axelo BAT is the personification of Extremes. At once it is extremely beautiful, aesthetically pleasing, sturdy, and comes in a classy box. However, this is offset by the extreme lack of functionality to most gamers. For that, the BAT is extremely frustrating.

I have had the BAT in my possession for a little more than two months. For what it says it will do, it does it. Of that little more can be said. In that time, no new games have been announced for support, and the price has not decreased. I must also say that my BAT has mysteriously stopped working. I must note that the warranty is only 30 days. For something this expensive, I would expect a one year warranty, especially from an unknown startup company.

Can I recommend the Axelo BAT? If you are looking for a very pretty, very sturdy controller to show off motion control gaming to friends, and don’t mind spending $100 plus shipping to do it, sure go ahead. If you don’t fit into that one category, pass for now.

The BAT is the type of product I really want to like. It’s beautiful; it has a beautiful box, and a unique premise. Where it falls completely flat is in execution. Until and unless a LOT more games support it, I cannot in any good conscience recommend this device to anyone and even then, the technical limitations of its accelerometer based control scheme make development specific to this controller unattractive. I do not really foresee a lot of development support for 3D motion gaming on the PC until one of the major makers sets a standard, and if anything, a PC version of Kinect will be the most likely to be forthcoming. In that, this poor BAT just doesn’t have the sonar to navigate the complex caves of the PC gaming market, and will most likely run smack into a wall.

Look for my full review of Microsoft’s Kinect later this year.