Anybody who plays competitive FPS games for long enough will start looking for ways to get the edge up on their competition. Whether it’s tweaking the in-game settings for hours, trying to optimize an Internet connection, looking up strategies online or physically modifying controllers the end-goal is the same — upping your score just a bit so you feel less depressed about being beaten so handily by kids with faster reflexes than you. Kontrol Freek is the foremost company that caters to gamers looking for that extra edge with non-permanent controller modifications like skins and control stick extensions. Does their latest offering for the PS4 deliver on all fronts, or does it barely hold the line? Find out just how freek-y we found our time with the Phantoms after the jump.
I had seen Kontrol Freek’s various stick extenders before on various websites, but never really gave them much thought until they offered to send us a set to try out. Being a fairly competent player of CoD: Ghosts and to a far lesser extent Battlefield 4 on the PS4, I was very interested to see what kind of an edge I could glean from extra long joysticks. The claims on the FPS Freek Phantom’s webpage don’t leave much to the imagination: “improved accuracy”, “40% greater range of motion”, “faster target acquisition”, and “reduced fatigue” ranking among their bold claims.
Build-quality wise they’re certainly decent enough. They snap onto the PS4’s already quite comfortable control sticks firmly, but don’t leave marks when they’re removed. The faces of the sticks are adorned with a skull explicitly meant to evoke Ghosts’ logo and they are wisely also concave so as not to lessen the imminent usability of the DualShock 4. The Phantoms’ faces also have a nice rubbery coating so they feel and respond in much the same way as the default joysticks. So, while the stick extensions are competently manufactured, the real question is: how do they feel in action? The answer, at least for me, is less enthusiastic.
Any tech product, particularly ones that modify others that you are used to in some significant way, have a period in which to need to use them before you become accustomed to their operation. No matter how much I used the Phantoms, though, this learning curve never seemed to end. In spite of the fact that they’re fairly comfortable and that they don’t make you feel like you’re craning your thumbs all of the time like one might expect, I never got to the point where I felt better for having them on my control sticks.
One of the first things you notice when you start using the FPS Freek Phantoms is that you have to really crank up the stick sensitivity settings in the games you play to take advantage of them. With my sensitivity settings more than 50% higher than I normally play at I could roughly feel the “40% greater range of motion” promised on the website, but I don’t really feel like that’s the best thing when playing fast-paced FPS games. If you’re sitting around at the back of maps just barely moving and you really need it to be 40% more difficult to move your sticks around, then this may be the product for you. If you’re like the vast majority of FPS players though and you’re playing more in the mid-to-close range of things, not only will stick extenders like the Phantoms not help you, I’d go so far as to say that they’re more apt to harm your performance by adding an extra few milliseconds to the time it takes to push the sticks to their full range in any given direction.
So, overall I cannot readily recommend the FPS Freek Phantoms or any stick extender for the average competitive FPS player. They really do more or less deliver on their promise of 40% greater range of motion for your control sticks, but unless you’re completely dedicated to the life of a sedentary sniper that 40% is going to kill you a lot more often than it will help you get more kills.