Review: MHL416 Move Controller
I’ve got another strange review today, for this controller that advertises itself as an “FPS Controller” that’s compatible with PS4/PS5 games, and sold under some different names in different places, but the build seems to be the same between them. It’s clear that it features all the major buttons from a PS4/PS5 controller, so I figured I’d test it out for compatibility with various games and other devices to see how this thing fared.
The gun itself is fairly obviously shaped like an AR-15 rifle, and is littered with buttons throughout, as well as an analog stick on the bottom of the barrel and a d-pad near the grip and trigger. As far as the buttons themselves, all of them were too hard to press and felt very unresponsive, getting off to a bad start right away. The analog stick felt nice, and it controlled the left thumbstick of the controller, but it was about the only part of this gun that felt like it had any quality to it.
Pretty much the only decent part of this controller.
On to testing functionality on various platforms, we get to another big negative, since after testing with many different things, including PC, mobile devices, PS4, and PS5, this thing only works on PS5, yet it can only play PS4 games on PS5. When connecting to a PC, the controller would appear as a device, but none of the buttons would actually register as a controller in any game, even after trying to reprogram them to other commands or keyboard keys, nothing would work properly, no matter how much remapping I did. There was a similar response on mobile devices.
When connecting to the console it was actually meant for (PS5,) the controller did function and I was able to navigate all the menus properly, but started to realize how stiff all the buttons were pretty quickly. Next, I had to figure out what games to test this with, since it only worked with PS4 games running on the PS5, which narrows the scope of what games I could even test it with.
False advertising. This didn’t work with PC or Xbox.
The packaging mostly advertises that it’s meant for FPS games and some VR games, since it has two colored rings towards the end of the barrel, but I figured it might also work for light gun style games, which leaves very few games that even run on PS4 to test with. The only light gun style games I could test with were The House of the Dead Remake and Gal*Gun Double Peace. Games like Operation Wolf Returns and Blue Estate don’t support the right stick for aiming on PS4, so they couldn’t be tested with this controller. This could potentially also work while streaming the PS3 versions of either the Resident Evil light gun games or the Heavy Fire games from the PS+ streaming service, but this gun was bad enough to begin with, I didn’t even want to try using it with streaming games.
While the games technically did work, there was one major failure with the controller, and it’s the most egregious one of all: the right analog stick was controlled by the gyroscope inside the gun, and it’s one of the weakest and most inaccurate gyros I’ve ever used in a controller. To even get it to work with HOTD Remake, I had to change a lot of in-game settings to use the right stick for aiming, and even after adjusting all of the sensitivity settings, this controller was wildly inaccurate and would get off-track with every single movement I made. The PSVR Aim controller and its gyro works infinitely better for this game.
It was about the same experience with Gal*Gun, with the gyro being so wildly inaccurate that it was essentially unplayable. Playing with other random FPS games I own such as Borderlands or Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the results were mostly the same, but even worse, since those games also had free movement to worry about instead of being on rails.
Testing with PSVR games was similarly terrible, since the rings on the barrel that are supposed to replicate the PS Move tracking didn’t work very well and were losing tracking whenever the barrel was moved to certain angles.
Unfortunately, what could’ve been a pretty interesting experience of having a full sized gyro gun for various platforms turned out to be something that’s full of false advertising and bad information, being almost entirely unusable. Especially since it carries a price tag of over $200 to purchase, you’d be best to steer clear of this under any circumstance if you see a listing online.