Turtle Beach Stealth Pivot Wireless Smart Controller review

When the opportunity to have a look at the Turtle Beach Stealth Pivot, the first thing that came out of a friend’s mouth was was disbelief at how nobody else had thought of the pivot gimmick before. Well, they may well have done, but I certainly can’t remember seeing something so innovative and clever implemented this well in a controller. Back in the days of the 16 bit consoles, and even the PlayStation and Saturn era there seemed to be tons of gimmickry afoot in the world of joypads and sticks, none of which really seemed to stick (ahem) the landing. Remember that weird twisty Namco one, or the SNES pads that had so many buttons and switches that they looked like they had been designed by a little kid high on Smarties and Kia Ora? You had to be there I suppose.

Anyway I digress. The Turtle Beach Stealth Pivot is the latest evolution of the “Stealth” line of hardware, coming hot on the heels of the ace Stealth Ultra. This one has the crazy new pivot system which means that the analogue sticks can be fully flipped over at will – on the fly, no less – to create myriad possibilities of how you wish to play your games. One minute it functions as a conventional twin stick job, the next you can make it into what is essentially a spin on the wonderful Sega Saturn layout, with a joypad and two rows of three buttons. I love fighting games and years of practice has actually meant I can play them, if needed, with a joypad if a stick isn’t convenient at that moment in time. I have comfortably put in 100 hours on the Steam Deck iteration of Street Fighter 6, so am an old pro at this. If I am laying in bed playing on a console, it isn’t always an opportune time comfort wise to pull out a chunky arcade stick, so this little thing is proving to be quite the boon in the Smith household.

The Turtle Beach Stealth Pivot looks and feels premium. Expensive. And yes, it will set you back the thick end of £120. But for that pricepoint you get genuine innovation and little flourishes that make you smile and feel like you made the right decision dropping the bucks on it. There is built in software within the damn thing itself, which allows you to customise your layout using a cool little screen on the front, which lights up pleasingly, kind of like an ultra-modern take on the Dreamcast VMU. You can save profiles that are cycled through using the bumpers. You can even adjust things like mic/headset volume, and assign different functions to the customisable buttons on the back, and alter the throw on the triggers to make them faster to smash.

Everything is responsive and comfortable, with anti-drift tech in play on the sticks, a superb D-Pad, and zero latency detected in any of the situations in which I used it. I tested it on a few different devices. It hooks up to a PC or a docked Steam Deck using a Bluetooth dongle, which is easy to set up almost instantly. On Xbox there is no wireless functionality sadly, meaning a USB-C lead is required. I was pleased to find that it also worked a treat on my Android mobile phone, and it will also connect to smart tellies.

There is a 20 hour battery life in wireless mode too, which is sensational, quite frankly. The lack of wireless on Xbox is perhaps one of only two gripes with this device, the other being the Control Center app and the way certain features work. An app on Windows or Android that allows you to update firmware, alter the colour of your LED lights, map and tinker with the controls and buttons and even allow multimedia notifications from your blower to pop up on the l’il screen, the only downer of what is essentially a great idea is that it forces you to reconnect to the app every time you turn the thing on if you want to benefit from its full functionality. That said, with the plethora of profiles you can save and on-the-fly switching, it won’t be that often most people will need it. And to be honest, I am perfectly happy whilst playing a game to ignore notifications popping up on my phone.

Other than these small issues, I cannot criticise this great piece of business from Turtle Beach – and would happily pick up a PlayStation compatible version given the chance. The pivot system is absolutely brilliant and implemented in such an unobtrusive and intuitive fashion that you do wonder why other people aren’t doing it. This is one of the best controllers on the market and my go-to for all things Xbox and PC related.