SteelSeries Aeon Pro Review

Design

• Quality feel in-hand
• Heavier, but sturdy finish
• Familiar layout and pleasant extras

The Aeon Pro feels like a quality controller in hand, with some smooth plastics and a lovely textured grip that spans virtually every part of where you actually touch the controller.

At 310g, it feels quite heavy in hand, especially against both the Wolverine V3 Pro and my trusty Scuf Instinct Pro I’ve been using for years. With this in mind, the ergonomics are familiar, and I didn’t find it tiresome to use for extended periods with Xbox or PC.

The button layout on the faceplate is a standard Xbox configuration, with diagonally opposed thumbsticks and a D-Pad between them, with the usual ABXY buttons in the top right corner.

Around the back and the top, you’ll also find a handy assortment of paddles, triggers and shoulder buttons as we’ve come to expect from these pro controllers, which are easy to access, as well as a switch for locking the triggers. 

The main face buttons and bumpers benefit from tactile microswitches for a brisk and snappy feel under the fingers, while the triggers are cleverly analogue and can work like a top gaming keyboard with Hall effect and rapid trigger pulls.

In keeping with this controller’s pro nature, the Aeon Pro also benefits from magnetically swappable thumbsticks, although there isn’t as wide a selection as with the Xbox Elite Controller 2.

You get two shorter concave thumbsticks by default, with a spare domed and taller concave one in the controller’s box that sits neatly into the dock. The Elite Controller 2 provides a lot more in the way of additional thumbsticks, and swappable paddles and D-Pad, too.

That said, the decision for the paddles and D-Pad not to be swappable is deliberate on SteelSeries’ part. The paddles aren’t detachable on the basis that removable ones can be loose, while the brand didn’t see much appetite for a swappable D-Pad in its own research.

The top side of the Aeon Pro also has the customary USB-C port for charging, while the front features an Xbox button and a small OLED screen. Screens on controllers are becoming more commonplace for on-the-fly settings changes and such, and this SteelSeries choice is no different. You can choose different genre-specific profiles plus button mapping, the feel of the controller’s haptics and even more besides.

Performance

• Clever connectivity
• Solid battery life with swappable cells
• Immense gaming performance

The Aeon Pro has a neat trick up its sleeve when it comes to connectivity. As opposed to running with a wireless receiver for Xbox or PC use, the brains of the operation is the controller’s charging dock. 

That might seem like an odd statement, but it provides USB-C hookups for both Xbox and PC, and the ability to switch between them on the dock. SteelSeries says that it’s patent pending, and that Microsoft said this clever tech made it the most difficult peripheral the brand has had to certify for use with Xbox consoles.

It means pairing and such is very easy, especially if you have an Xbox console and PC within easy reach for a USB-C cable to be hooked up to the dock. It can also connect via Bluetooth for use with mobile devices.

The dock also has a spot for a rechargeable battery, as the Aeon Pro runs swappable batteries that are identical to those found in its run of Arctis wireless headsets for ease of use, with up to 16 hours of runtime per battery for a total of 32 hours. This is generally competitive against rivals, sitting in the middle of the 20 hours you’ll get out of the Wolverine V3 Pro and the 40 hours out of the Elite Controller 2.

This is a good thing if you’ve already got some of those batteries from a headset such as the SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless or SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Omni, although it means this controller won’t work with any other AA batteries or third-party docks you may already have. With how clever the Aeon Pro’s own dock is, though, you probably won’t be using a third-party one with this controller anyway.

SteelSeries has bundled all sorts of other oomph into the Wolverine V3 Pro, packing in hall-effect sticks to prevent drift and offer more responsive and accurate placement than normal analogue sticks. You also get the benefit of snappy microswitches for ABXY, the rear paddles and the D-Pad for some very clicky and speedy inputs.

All of this combines to mean the Aeon Pro packs some punch. Having lockable triggers and microswitches inside the paddles and buttons meant inputs felt seriously quick, which was useful in quick-draw scenarios in Call of Duty, and even in some playing GTA Online and Hitman III when I got into a spot of bother, too.

The vibrations here are strong and well-placed, which helped me when playing the likes of Forza Horizon 6, where it gave me an excellent sense of where my car was placed on the road, and where other cars were when in racing scenarios. On PC, the strong rumble also helped emphasise the seriousness of crashes in BeamNG Drive, one of my favourite vehicle sims where it’s fun to pelt a car at a wall.

The Aeon Pro works via SteelSeries’ comprehensive GG software, where it’s possible to do everything from button mapping to dead zones for the sticks and triggers, plus you can even enable rapid trigger, as you could on a keyboard, for instantaneous actuation and reset points. You can also configure an array of presets, which can be re-ordered in the sidebar – the top eight then get sent to the controller and can be chosen on the OLED screen.

Should you buy it?