Trip Report: Razer Wolverine V3 Tournament Edition (Patreon)

Hey y’all, I have a quick bit here about Razer’s new controller, thought I’d jot down some thoughts about it for ya. A handful of us were talking about it on the Discord last week and I figured I’d give it a shot. It’s the “Razer Wolverine V3 Tournament Edition,” to be exact. The “Tournament Edition” there signifies that this is a wired controller. For twice the money, you can get the Wolverine V3 Pro, which is pretty much the same thing but is wireless and comes with its own highspeed dongle. The wired controller, at $99.99, was already kind of pushing it, price-wise, so the idea of spending $200 on a potentially funky controller from the minds behind Razer Synapse just… didn’t seem like a good idea.

Also, one of the more interesting features to me is a “tournament mode” on the controller that enables a 1000Hz polling rate, and this only works when the controller is wired anyway.

Speaking of Razer Synapse: Good news for all you Razer Synapse haters (which includes just about everyone I’ve ever known who has encountered it in any form), this controller has its own separate app for configuration. That said, the Razer Controller Setup for Xbox app, which despite saying Xbox right in the name is, in fact, a Windows Store app, isn’t great. It’s primarily there so you can configure the six (!) additional buttons on the controller. That’s right, this thing has four back buttons and it also has two additional shoulder buttons! I don’t know that I’ve seen this before. The tiny buttons are essentially between the bumper and trigger, but further to the center of the controller. So it doesn’t interfere with the placement of the other shoulder buttons, but they’re also a little further away, making them good for buttons you don’t have to rely on constantly. It’s a neat idea that I haven’t seen much of, and they’re maybe the first buttons I’ve seen on a weirdo controller that made me think “hey, what if official controllers had these?”

The Wolverine V3 feels small in my hands, and that was a little frustrating out of the box. I do have largish hands, but most “normal” console controllers feel fine. This feels a little tight, but also I found that my fingers rested just right on the back buttons. So, overall, not a huge issue. Interestingly, the buttons and D-pad on this thing are all clicky. They feel and sound like mouse buttons when pressed. Even when you lock the triggers to make them short-throw, “normal” buttons, they begin to click like a mouse. It gives the controller an interesting tactile feel that I appreciated while playing shooters, but felt weird in fighting games. That said, I don’t especially love the feel of the D-pad on it in the first place. It’s feels like a concave little disc with a hint of a cross raised up on it. Not awful, and the clicky nature of it means you know when you’re pressing something, but rolling it around for, say, quarter-circles and such doesn’t feel awesome.

The analogs are hall effect sticks, which is great if you hate drift. The only other hall effect sticks I have are in the Gulikit KK2 Pro, which has extremely loose sticks on it. The Wolverine V3’s sticks feel about on-par with an Xbox Series X controller, which makes sense since this is marketed as an Xbox/PC controller in the first place.

It’s not bad! Like I said, a little small in the hand and the D-pad isn’t amazing, but it’s got a good, responsive feel to it. HOWEVER…

I think the software and configuration side of Razer’s controller almost renders the whole thing pointless. The software is mainly for setting what you want the six extra buttons to do, though it also has some deadzone settings and will allow you to filter your diagonal inputs to more of a circular field of movement. I’m not actually sure where this would come in handy. It defaults to “standard” over “circular” and I didn’t notice a difference.

OK, sorry, the downside: you can only assign the extra buttons to single controller inputs. This means, for example, I couldn’t set one of the extra shoulder buttons to hit LB and RB at the same time, which is the input for using your equipment in Call of Duty. Is also won’t let you put keyboard buttons onto the gamepad, so if you had, say, a push-to-talk button that you wanted to put on a back button? Sorry, no. I think this is absolute ass and basically nullifies all of the configs I thought of as I was first connecting the controller to my PC. Considering this has been a complaint on several of Razer’s previous controllers, I think it’s safe to say that they aren’t interested in fixing this. In light of this… why would anyone need six extra buttons on a controller if you can’t bind them freely? It all just seems like kind of a waste with the way it’s currently restricted.

It’s a shame, those shoulder buttons are really neat and the overall feel of the controller is pretty nice! If you’re in the market for back buttons and you play on an Xbox, this is cheaper than the “core” version of the Xbox Elite controller and it’s a tight little package that maintains the basic button layout of an Xbox controller, so you’ll feel right at home. But if you’re on a PC and hoping to build wild layouts that combine keyboard and controller… ya can’t. Weak. You can, at least, map these buttons as shift keys that quickly alter the controller’s sensitivity, which might be handy if you’re a sniper or something but I’ve never really found much use for such a thing, personally.

To that end I might say the Gulikit KK3 MAX—available for around $80—is worth some further investigation. While I’ve only tried the KK2, the 3 seems to have the same featureset along with “maglev super haptic mode,” which just sounds silly. It also has a bonkers macro mode that’ll let you record up to 10 minutes of inputs and play them back at will. I’m not sure what you’d actually use that for, but it sounds kind of nefarious?

As for me, I’m probably going to stick with the DualSense Edge, which I like a lot, but find very difficult to actually recommend at its $200 price point.