Image: Gavin Lane / Nintendo Life
For retroheads looking to show their love for old consoles, there are plenty of retro-styled controllers available for Switch. Usually they’re limited to a livery and an old-school colour scheme on the buttons, though.
They’re often missing modern features, too. With the Warrior Bluetooth Controller, NYXI hopes to appeal to GameCube aficionados as well as people looking for a fully functional Switch pad along the lines of Nintendo’s Pro Controller.
With decent customisation options and some impressive features, this pad is a love letter to the GameCube pad and does an awful lot right. But does it tick enough boxes for enough players? And is it a genuine Pro Controller alternative?
Let’s see what it’s got.
NYXI Warrior Bluetooth Controller: Design
Before NYXI kindly sent over a review sample, we were asked which variant we’d prefer. We went for the classic Indigo Purple, but the pad also comes in Black or Orange versions — no Silver, unfortunately. As you can see from the photos, it’s a pretty good match for the original console.
Look and feel-wise, NYXI has done a decent job of capturing the spirit of the GameCube controller without turning in a total clone. It’s a mite wider than a GC pad, and heavier, weighing in at 241g. It’s a quality-feeling bit of kit, as well it should be given the $69 price tag, but considering the features here, you’re getting a decent bang:buck ratio.
The pad comes with Hall Effect sticks, analogue triggers (which can have their distance shortened independently using the switches on the back, effectively turning them into straight on/off buttons if you like), six-axis gyro, HD rumble, and programmable back buttons and turbo functions. Compared to a Switch Pro Controller, the only thing missing is an NFC reader for your amiibo. Not a bad package.
In the box, you get two USB-A to USB-C cables (one extremely short, used for connecting the GC receiver to a PC — more on that later), a wireless receiver to plug into your ‘Cube’s controller port (styled much much like the one you got with a WaveBird), plus some components to switch in/out as per your preference, including another C-stick that duplicates the form of the left stick, and replacement circular surrounds for the sticks if the octagonal variety isn’t to you liking. Swapping the sticks and surrounds involves twisting them anticlockwise, which takes some doing, but there’s no chance of them popping out on their own.
In addition to all that, you get a backplate to swap in if the programmable buttons on the rear bother you – unlikely to be an issue for regular players, but useful for tournament environments, perhaps. Those back paddles/buttons are nicely, naturally positioned under your middle fingers. If you’re the sort to ignore these extra doohickeys, they’re unobtrusive, but it’s nice to have them.
Otherwise, everything is present and correct where you’d expect it to be. If you’re coming from a GC pad, the face buttons immediately feel very different, as ABXY and the D-pad here use ‘clicky’ microswitches. They’re not particularly loud, but swapping from the OG controller to this modern facsimile, it’s probably the most striking difference.
The Warrior’s rolling D-pad makes smooth changes between directions simple — great for fighting games — although some may prefer the old-school ‘cross’ variety. Either way, it’s an improvement on the original GC D-pad which was curiously undersized; then again, we don’t remember using it much back in the day.
NYXI Warrior Bluetooth Controller: Performance
Before digging out our GameCube, we fired up the Switch. The Warrior quickly paired with it and with the ‘+’ and ‘-‘ buttons, plus screengrab and ‘Home’, it functions almost exactly like a Pro Controller (and is recognised as such). You don’t get Pro Controller levels of battery life, unfortunately, but NYXI’s 10-hour estimate from a single charge was in line with our experience. Compared to Nintendo’s Switch pad, it’s just the layout of ABXY that’s different, and this is this pad’s Achille’s heal.
You see, on firing up Tears of the Kingdom to give it a good workout, hundreds of hours of Hylian muscle memory kicked in and we repeatedly forgot that here ‘Y’ is the top button, with ‘X’ shifting 90 degrees clockwise. Now, this isn’t an insurmountable hurdle — and you could remap the buttons via the Switch’s system menu if you really wanted — but in our time testing the pad, we could never get used to using this face button arrangement while playing our library of Switch games.
Which was a shame given how the sticks, shoulder buttons, and gyro functioned perfectly with every game we tested. For some games it won’t be an issue — and you might adapt quicker to the GC face button layout — but not being able to execute Link’s acrobatic moves instantly felt odd. Mileage may vary, and all that.
Firing up Mario Sunshine in 3D All-Stars to see how it felt to play a genuine GC game on Switch, alas, the analogue triggers don’t function as the official GameCube ones do when connected with an adaptor – the Switch registers the NYXI Warrior as a Pro Controller, remember.
Moving on, it was time to test with original hardware, and the Warrior performed as advertised. Plugging the dongle into one of the GC ports, the pad paired easy enough once we’d found the online video and got both devices blinking rapidly (as opposed to blinking not-quite-so-rapidly). Once connected, we were in business.
We played on an LG OLED TV with our GameCube hooked up via HMDI (using one of EON’s GCHD Mk IIs). Switching between a wired original GC controller and the modern wireless pad, we struggled to perceive a difference in terms of responsiveness. Diehard Melee players would certainly notice, but for anybody happy to take the convenience of a wireless WaveBird over cables, the Warrior feels like a slightly chunkier version of that in the hands. Naturally, it works on first-gen Wiis with GameCube ports too. Gone are the days when a third-party controller put you at a disadvantage. The Warrior is a quality bit of kit.
A versatile one, too; you can also connect it to your PC, either wired via the longer USB cable or wirelessly by using the short lead to connect the dongle to your PC and your pad to that, and Bluetooth is also an option. Steam recognised it as a Pro Controller over Bluetooth, and it works exactly as you’d expect, with decent wireless response that improves when you plug it in. We also connected to an iPhone with RetroArch and it performed as expected.
And that’s the story with the Warrior. It does what is says on the tin, and well. Its only real drawback comes from its faithfulness to a pad we love, but one which feels less relevant than ever these days. For pro Melee players, or for when Nintendo puts GameCube games on NSO, this could be a godsend. Otherwise it’s an excellent pad with one big quirk.
Image: Gavin Lane / Nintendo Life
NYXI Warrior Bluetooth Controller – The Verdict
For anyone looking for a feature-laden Pro Controller alternative with a retro feel, the NYXI Warrior delivers on its promise. It’s a sturdy, great-looking controller which pairs well with Switch and PC, but also brings the goods for GameCube lovers looking for a wireless pad but baulking at secondhand WaveBird prices.
The only real mark against it is the GC-style ABXY arrangement which is incredibly hard to adapt to after so many years. In a way, it’s not the Warrior’s fault — it’s totally true to the GameCube layout — but given the customisation elsewhere on the pad, the ability to switch out the face buttons for a more standard, modern configuration could have made this essential.
As it is, it’s a very good pad with a quirk that could be a dealbreaker if you plan to use it with your Switch.
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