Corsair Novablade Pro Fighting Game Controller Review – Tournament Ready
Corsair is the latest company to enter the fighting game controller space and they have certainly come out of the gate strong with the Novablade Pro. This is one of most feature packed leverless controllers on the market, complete with wireless functionality right out of the box, and eight customizable buttons (three on the surface of the controller and five on the side). It’s also a looker with a bunch of really cool lighting modes to play around with, and an easily removable and customizable faceplate to round out the highlights. At a very competitive and reasonable price of $250, it makes the question of the best leverless controller a bit more difficult to answer.
Let’s start with how the controller actually feels – in terms of size and weight, it's most immediately comparable to the Victrix Pro KO with the exact same size at 13.35” x 9.23” x 0.80”, but it is about double the weight at around 4.0 lbs. Of course, it’s not a huge difference, and even if it is the heaviest leverless controller I’ve used, it still felt super convenient to carry around in my backpack as I walked over to my local tournament and carried it around as I waited to play.
There are a total of 15 buttons on the face of the controller, which is three more than a standard leverless controller, giving you three buttons on the face to map however you see fit. You might want to put the L3 button above the left, down, and right buttons to give you a quick reset or record button in training mode; or maybe map L2 to one of the buttons next to your either of your thumbs and give yourself an easily reachable button for parries in Street Fighter 6, just as a few examples. It’s easy to map them to whatever you need in case, like me, you find yourself accidentally hitting them in a pinch.
The buttons have a really nice feel to them as well – they sound quieter than standard arcade buttons, but still loud enough to be able to hear the rhythm of a combo as you tap it out. If you really want to get into the weeds, the Novablade Pro also lets you customize the actuation points of the buttons as well. So if you want a move to come out the instant you come in contact with a button, you can set it to a 0.1 mm actuation point. Or if you find that too sensitive, you can set it higher, all the way up to the full 4.0mm, which will make it less likely to accidentally press a button if your finger lightly brushes against one.
Along with that, there’s a rapid fire switch that resets a button’s input to neutral as soon as it starts traveling upwards, allowing for even faster presses of a button than what would normally be possible. If I’m being completely honest, these features weren’t super noticeable for me in games like Street Fighter 6 or Tekken 8, but for other games that reward you with extra damage the more you mash on a button, I could see it giving a bit of an advantage.
One of the cooler features of the Novablade Pro is that it allows you to very quickly customize how the controller handles simultaneous opposite cardinal direction button presses, otherwise known as SOCD. Being able to press and hold up and down or left and right at the same time is a unique feature of a leverless controller, and there are a number of different ways those inputs can be sent to the game you’re playing. The Novablade Pro allows you to easily cycle through all of those options; from the default method of having no input sent when SOCD buttons are pressed. Inputs like “giving up” the priority so you can hold down and back to block low but also press up to leap backwards if there’s an opening in your opponents pressure; giving the first button pressed the priority; giving the last button pressed the priority; or just sending both inputs and let the game’s own programming decide what to do with the two simultaneous button inputs – these are the unique advantages afforded by this type of controller.
There are use cases for all of these, and the option to be able to easily switch between them depending on what game you’re playing is pretty sweet. Some of these, however, are genuine cheats in competitive play and will get you disqualified in an actual tournament if you’re caught using them. Fortunately there is a Game Mode toggle that immediately sets the controller to a default tournament-legal setting.
All of these features are very easily navigated thanks to the five buttons on the right side of the controller, which themselves are mappable as well. It can be easy to accidentally hit these buttons when picking up or passing the controller along, thus inadvertently messing up your settings, but the convenience of being able to easily adjust these functions is certainly worth the occasional and easily fixable button press.
The Novablade also has some of the best lighting effects of any leverless controller I’ve played. There are six onboard lighting effects to toggle between, with my favorite being the one that lights up both the individual button and the color ring around the controller whenever you press a button.
The big competitive advantage of the Novablade Pro though is its wireless functionality, something that most of its competitors lack. By popping off the aluminum faceplate, you can set the controller to bluetooth mode for PCs, or you can set it to low latency wireless mode and connect the included dongle to either a PS4, PS5, or PC.