Customer Ratings & Reviews

There’s a lot of love about this controller and I really wanted to, but it is missing one show-stopping feature for my Switch needs: It does NOT have a built-in NFC reader making it incompatible with Nintendo Amiibo. This fact is not mentioned anywhere on the product packaging or the user manual. Let’s talk a bit more about this otherwise excellent controller. As an officially licensed product, you’d be forgiven for mistaking the Afterglow Wave with the official Nintendo Pro controller. The Nintendo Pro Controller provides a stickier grip and includes a slightly higher curve to the hand grips while the Afterglow uses less of an angle and loses some of its grip because of the LED light channels that run the length of the handgrips. It’s also not as thick as the official controller making me curious exactly how much bulk an NFC scanner adds to the equation. There are also two additional programmable buttons on the rear of the Afterglow grips which I found my middle fingers pressing more often than I would have expected. While the joysticks and controller buttons are identical to the official controller the Afterglow reverses the Home and the Plus button on the right-hand side of the controller and does the same on the left hand side as well which to me is a terrible design choice. The Nintendo Switch is 7 years old at this point and muscle memory is a huge factor for gaming. For those of us who have used the Pro controller from the beginning changing up the buttons for what I can see serves no actual purpose is just plain on mean and spiteful. The addition of a Function button to be able to control the RGB patterns is a nice touch, but I especially appreciate the use of the RGB pattens when the device is charging. Nintendo’s controller includes a tiny orange button at the top which you really have to look for to know if the controller is charging. For the Afterglow Wave I love that the the entire front is lit up in Red when it’s charging and then shifts to Green when it’s complete. I’m about two years into my current Nintendo Pro controller (having replaced it twice already) so it’s difficult for me to tell if the Afterglow Wave controller buttons are better or just new but they certainly feel more stiff than my current controller which I think is a good thing. Overall a crisp set of buttons to mash is always appreciated but my main games are the Zelda series and having spent a fortune on collecting every single Zelda Amiibo and using them daily in the game, not having NFC support in the controller is a show stopper for me. If you don’t need NFC support this controller would definitely be on my list of recommendations for any Switch users in your life.

Pretty good controller, lights are awesome & smoth play

It’s a decent controller little pricy though feels good, hard to understand how to map the back buttons and tgey are really the only reson I’d suggest getting this over the official pro controller granted the switch 2 now has a official pro with back buttons however $30 more so in that regard fair price. But it being closer to normal pro it’s harder because yes no back buttons but you get amibo reader on pro not this only useful if you really play breath of the wild or tears so overall if you dont care about amibo suport id say good buy if you do yes you lose back buttons but pro granted i did call out new pro having both but add that $30 extra for best of both