#STEAM CONTROLLER UPGRADE#
#STEAM CONTROLLER SOFTWARE#
#STEAM CONTROLLER TV#

#STEAM CONTROLLER UPGRADE#

It was easy to swipe circles around the trackpad to select with towers to build, and equally easy to highlight towers, bring up the menu again, and upgrade them with the same menu. It’s a tower defense game with a simple pop-up radial menu. Building a ship in Kerbal felt much like playing FTL: I could do it, but it was slow and frustrating.

#STEAM CONTROLLER TV#

Kerbal Space Program was a good representation of a mouse-driven game, but I unfortunately found it unplayable on a TV the UI was too small to be readable, and there were far too many menus and tabs to navigate with the trackpad.

#STEAM CONTROLLER SOFTWARE#

It is possible to replicate this behavior through software configuration, but it’s not the same as the physical sensation.Ī large chunk of your Steam library will require a custom configuration. I think any strategy game with numerous keyboard hotkeys would be even worse.Īlso, for controlling a character in third-person, the trackpad isn’t as convenient as an analog stick, because there’s no rim to press the stick against and rotate. This kind of clunky forced mapping is never going to equal smart game design built around the capabilities of a controller. I checked out a number of community profiles before modifying one to my own liking, but all involved mapping a number of important keyboard commands to the D-Pad directions and ABXY, with one of the rear paddles serving as a ‘shift’ key for four more inputs. I think it could’ve also worked well emulating keyboard and mouse.ĭungeon Defenders 2 was a miserable experience to get working properly.

Galak-Z played quite well with the Steam Controller using standard gamepad mode and felt just as good as using a standard gamepad. The controller was working, but I would’ve played better, more quickly, and had more fun using a mouse. The entire time I was playing, I could never shake the dissatisfaction with the inherently fumbly nature of this experience. I spent at least an hour of total playtime paused, very slowly doling out orders. I’d often try and fail to highlight crewmembers and doors over and over again, as the action of pressing a button would just slightly jitter my cursor off of them. I got faster and more accurate.īut my entire playthrough (all the way to the final boss!) took easily twice as long as it would’ve if I had a mouse. Gradually I started adjusting to the community controller profile I’d selected and using more hotkeys to alleviate my pointing. I was clumsy at first, often overshooting things on the screen and doing everything by mouse pointer. The deliberate roguelike let me pause and take my time to order my crew around, click on elements of the UI, target enemy ships, and open and close doors the way I would using a mouse. FTL gave me my best experience using the trackpad as a mouse.

Steam controller