Review: Turtle Beach VelocityOne Flightstick
Time to turn and burn! Turtle Beach has unleashed the next device in their newly-minted VelocityOne series with the VelocityOne Flightstick; a device more geared for action flight than airliner simulation. This makes games like Ace Combat 7 and Top Gun: Maverick missions from Microsoft Flight Simulator more immersive than ever. With its compact design, solid build, and incredibly precise control function, the VelocityOne Flightstick is a love letter to flight game fans everywhere.
Let’s start with design; This thing is built incredibly well and feels like a device worth the price tag. The contoured stick feels comfortable and the rubber coating allows for a solid grip, meaning users will be able to utilize the trim wheel accurately with no slip.
Left-handed gamers will love that the device is ambidextrous, so there’s no need to adjust to the right-handed way of controlling flight sticks, but Turtle Beach thought of that when designing the VelocityOne Flightstick. The eight base buttons are programmable, which means players can set the button functions to whatever they feel most comfortable with. In addition, the wrist rest is reversible, so players will be able to play comfortably for long periods of time, no matter which hand is dominant.
At first glance, the device can look intimidating because of the 27 programmable buttons, but the key word here is programmable because the device can be set up to create a custom control scheme that is most familiar and easy to use as gamers like.
Next up is the display. The VelocityOne Flightstick features an OLED display built into the top of the stick that allows gamers to finetune the controls via the configuration menus. The menu choices are easily navigated using the trim wheel mounted just below the display, and the custom settings are even stored in the device via the onboard memory.
Need even more customization? Pro-Aim Focus Mode allows users to adjust stick sensitivity. With everything considered, users have complete control of their flight experience.
What would a Turtle Beach device be without the option to plug in a headset? We utilized multiple wired Turtle Beach and Roccat devices, we found that all of the staple features, such as Superhuman Hearing, balance, EQ features and more all worked just as well as if we were plugged into any other device. Even with all of the VelocityOne Flightstick features enabled, there was no loss of performance or interference with either the device or headset.
In our testing with both PC and Xbox, we found performance to be identical; meaning awesome. Flight games feel obsolete without the VelocityOne Flightstick. There is no shortage of flight stick choices out there but couldn’t get enough of this device. It simply stands head and shoulders above the rest.
Areas of opportunity? We found only one. The caps for the throttle and flap levers can be swapped and we found that they pop off a little easier than we’d like. In testing, we found that the throttle cap popped off a couple of times when adjusting. Other than that, our experience with the VelocityOne Flightstick was incredible.
The VelocityOne Flightstick is a must-own for flight game enthusiasts. It simply brings a level of immersion that is not possible with traditional controllers, or other flightsticks for that matter. It’s a device that is obviously a labor of love from Turtle Beach, and it shows.
The Turtle Beach VelocityOne Flightstick is available at an MSRP of $129.99.
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