Steam Controller (2nd Generation) Review: Trackpads and Gyro Make It the Best Pad for Steam, at $99
Valve's new Steam Controller pairs TMR sticks with haptic trackpads, gyro and a charging Puck dongle. We look at whether it beats a standard gamepad for PC games, including mouse-driven ones.
The verdict
The new Steam Controller is the best gamepad we know of for mouse-heavy PC games, and its gyro plus TMR sticks make it a strong shooter pad too. It has no adaptive triggers, plain plastic, a square shape that suits large hands, and it leans on the Steam client. At $99, buy it if you play on a PC or SteamOS. Otherwise a cheaper pad does the job.
Best forPC and SteamOS players who want mouse-style control from the couch
What we liked
- Large haptic trackpads make strategy and menu-heavy games playable from a sofa
- Gyro with Grip Sense gives mouse-like aim without stick drift
- TMR sticks and a removable battery with standard screws make it repairable
- The Puck dock is a 2.4 GHz receiver and charger, and pairs up to four pads
What we did not
- No adaptive triggers, no speaker and no 3.5mm headphone jack
- Hard plastic with a slippery finish feels cheap beside a DualSense at the same price
- The square shape pinches the fingers of players with smaller hands
- Binding setup is deep, and non-Steam games must be added to Steam by hand
A standard gamepad gives up the second you open a strategy game. You can't click what you can't point at, and a stick is a slow way to point. Valve's answer, as in 2015, is a pair of trackpads. This time they are good enough to change the answer to "do I need a mouse on the couch?"
The trackpads are the whole case
The 2026 pad keeps two trackpads under the sticks. Reviewers describe them as larger and flatter than the originals and as haptic, so a click feels like a click. Boiling Steam's round-up of reviews quotes one reviewer calling them a "lifesaver" for interface navigation and mouse-style aiming, and the Linus Tech Tips reviewer showed Anno, a game that is hard to play on a pad, working on a couch.
That is the use case: city builders, 4X games, point-and-click titles and desktop navigation. For those, this controller is better than any normal gamepad, and it is not close. If your library is mostly sports and racing games, this advantage is wasted on you, and you can stop reading.
Gyro and TMR sticks for the rest
For shooters, the controller adds a 6-axis gyro with Grip Sense, which turns the motion sensor on when you hold the pad. Reviewers rate the stick-plus-gyro combination as formidable once learned, and say it helps even in games with no native gyro support, through Steam Input. The sticks use TMR (tunnel magnetoresistance) sensors, which resist drift and use less power than older designs. Four rear buttons cover the usual paddle jobs.
Compared with the Xbox Wireless Controller, you are paying $99 for options an Xbox pad lacks. Compared with the Sony DualSense Edge, you get a stronger PC feature set but no adaptive triggers.
Specs
- Sticks
- Two TMR (tunnel magnetoresistance) sticks
- Trackpads
- Two large, flat, haptic trackpads
- Motion
- 6-axis gyro with Grip Sense
- Rear buttons
- 4
- Battery
- 35 hours rated, removable
- Wireless
- 2.4 GHz via Puck dock (about 21.6 ms latency), or Bluetooth
- Multi-controller
- Puck supports up to 4 controllers
- Price
- $99
