A professional gamer. A top-ranked esports athlete. A renowned figure in competitive shooter circles—I’m none of these things. But could that be down to my choice of controller? Could something that’s a step up from the standard Xbox pad I use for PC and console alike up my game, quite literally?
The Thrustmaster H.E.A.R.T. (a rather tortured acronym, standing for “Hall Effect AccuRate Technology”—more on what that means shortly) promises to do just that, offering greater accuracy and responsiveness to deliver improved in-game performance, without breaking the bank. In essence, it aims to be an entry-level pro controller.
That might sound like an oxymoron but it makes a certain kind of sense once the H.E.A.R.T. is in your hands. This is a pad that offers a familiar layout—the same one as on Xbox, which has become all but the default for most games in recent years, plus two programmable paddle buttons at the rear—with a (mostly) premium feel. A gentle texture on the grips and triggers ensures fingers aren’t likely to slip, thumbsticks have a satisfying degree of resistance, and those additional paddles sit comfortably under the middle finger on each hand. Its asymmetric black-and-white design is striking too, bolstered by a single LED strip partitioning each side when in use.
Photograph: Thrustmaster
The only detractors to that premium feel are an ugly, blobby D-pad, and Xbox function buttons—view, menu, and share—that are far too small. The D-pad is the worst, seeming at odds with the otherwise sleek design approach the H.E.A.R.T. takes. Its rounded tips result in a feeling of no real delineation between its directions, and with no texturing to its surface, the thumb slides aimlessly over it. The function buttons, meanwhile, are both tiny and shallow, making them feel insubstantial.
Still, the design impresses for the most part, and Thrustmaster builds it all around upgraded parts compared to standard controllers. While it doesn’t have the sometimes daunting array of swappable components and meticulous degrees of customization that the higher end likes of Microsoft’s Xbox Elite or Thrustmaster’s own Eswap X2 offer, the H.E.A.R.T.’s mechanical buttons deliver a satisfyingly clicky pushback to every press, its triggers feels smooth, and its control sticks glide under your thumbs.
Magnetic Attraction
It’s in the thumbsticks where some of the higher-end tech of the pad lives. Most standard controllers determine a stick’s position using potentiometers, where (very simply) a contact pad measures resistance as you move the stick around. The problem is that the friction of the process—thousands of micro-movements in every play session, each one rubbing against the contacts—wears components down over time. This results in “stick drift”, where your on-screen character or aim might wander of its own accord. The H.E.A.R.T., in contrast, uses magnets, with the stick’s position determined (again, very simply) by which direction electrons are pushed over a sensor.
This is the Hall Effect of the acronym, named for physicist Edwin Hall who discovered it, and while he probably didn’t anticipate its application to better video game controllers back in 1879, the key takeaway is that the process is frictionless. That means not only that components don’t degrade over time, but that their position can be measured far more precisely in the first place—Thrustmaster says they can be tracked to within 0.01 degrees of movement. But does that really translate to improved performance in-game?