Greenalink reviews: The Thrustmaster eSwap S Pro

My first review on a piece of hardware.

This product was provided to me from Thrustmaster to see how well it performs at high level grind for a good run whether its speedrunning or long sessions.

The Eswap S Pro is a tad cutdown version of the Eswap X Pro with less swappable slots and less rear map buttons. However, the ace in the hole is the new D-Pad which is notably different to the Eswap X Pro version. Because of this feature, I played a fair amount of 2D games to get a good impression.

Front

Back

The D-Pad is a plus shape type like the Xbox One style and not the circular style as seen on Xbox 360 and Xbox Series models, I grew up getting used to the circular style on the 360 controller that I was a small minority who really liked the D-pad for that system. So, when I got to try out the Eswap S's plus shaped D-pad, it was really comfy, it almost felt like it was gel squidgy yet really solid when moving my thumb from left to right. You get to hear the clicks when a new direction is pressed inside the controller. I tried out a few long sessions with the D-pad starting off with trying to get a 1 credit clear run on an arcade game called Midnight Resistance, now this game is mostly holding right and probably left at some points and my left thumb was fine after 3 hours of attempts.  

Midnight Resistance, played with Thrustmaster's Eswap S Pro.

LB + RB used to rotate gun.

The face buttons (A B X Y) while not exclusive to the Eswap S are all flat shaped with very short travel distance as if you were clicking a mouse, this doesn't sound like much but faster reactions to press inputs can make a significant difference.  

Trigger locks is a feature that has been seen on various pro controllers for the system including the official Elite series. The ones I have work ok but there were rare occasions that the Right Trigger will activate an input for a frame or two that would cause my gun to fire a single bullet for 1-2 seconds in Halo Infinite despite not even touching it. A quick fix was to unlock the trigger and then re-lock them just to make sure, it didn't happen all of the time but it makes me wonder if this problem occurs on other trigger lock controllers. 

The triggers are shaped differently too that it's better to place your fingers along the grove of the triggers and not touching the edge, that part feels more rough than the official Xbox controllers, so try and get used to that if you can.

Slipstream 16 minute run of me holding RT with the Thrustmaster eSwap S pro.

Then comes the rear buttons known as M1 and M2. The Eswap S only has 2 mappable buttons compared to the Eswap X which has 4 mappable buttons, this decision is questionable, probably done to make the Eswap X more worth for the money but on the flipside, you can probably get away with 2 map buttons for single player games.

Front side controller, showing 2 swappable slots on Left Stick & Right Stick

Rear side controller, showing the hair trigger locks and 2 mappable buttons.

I played a game called The Surge, a souls-like game set in the future with construction robots as the theme. When mapping the Right Stick Button to M2, it felt like a convenient Z-Trigger style lock-on when focusing on an enemy as my right thumb was still hovering over the ABXY buttons. A simpler example of having only two M buttons is mapping the D-pad Left and D-Pad right as a way to change weapons, this works in various games, most notably Shadow Complex.

Lid opened.

Bird's eye view. Includes controller and USB type C

The controller while $40 cheaper than the Eswap X, it has some notable caveats over the competitive model which may want you to save some money and get the premium version instead.

The Eswap S only has 2 swappable slots instead of 3 as seen on the Eswap X, the left stick and right stick slots are swappable but the D-pad is fixed in place, I think this is unfortunate for two reasons:

1) While the D-Pad is phrased for having good diagonals, it is placed in an awkward position for playing fighting games when swift and/or complex motions are involved. To put it into context, a lot of (professional) fighting game players from mid to high level have been using the standard PS4 controller as the console of choice is for the majority of tournaments is the Playstation 4.

The controller is probably still ok for Dragon Ball FighterZ thanks to being exclusively Quarter Circle Forward/Quarter Circle Backward motions and other fighting games at a casual lower level. I'll be surprised if one can go far in tournaments using this controller though.

2) To follow it up, the Eswap X can alter the D-Pad and left stick placement to make it feel like either a Playstation style layout or an Xbox style layout. The Eswap S is strictly an Xbox layout which can be a deal breaker for some. However, if you are a person who doesn't like the Playstation layout at all, it's a non-issue.

The other disadvantage over the X is that some games have a huge execution benefit with four rear buttons instead of two.

A modern FPS game I play called Halo Infinite takes full advantage of 4 rear buttons by mapping each D-pad command to a M button ranging from:

AI Scan to highlight dropped weapons

Marking to send information to teammates such as locating power weapons or tagging enemies.

Grenade swapping to... swap grenade types

and Drop weapon for the high level strat of dropping a weapon to reduce cooldown time after a melee attack.

Halo Infinite Ranked in action before 2022, wasn't played with Eswap S Pro.
Just giving you an idea on gameplay context with extra commands such as Marking, Grenade Swapping and A.I scan (yellow flash), showing two map buttons isn't enough for this.

With only two rear buttons, I went for AI Scan and Grenade swapping as those were my two most frequent commands, but it really needs at least one more because Marking plays a huge role throughout the match for intel without sounding obnoxious on the mic.

One thing I've noticed that felt odd initially at first is the placement of the Start/Options button, they were placed much higher and further away from the X button. The official Xbox controllers have the start button very close to the X button. This is more of a learning curve for me whenever I have to pause the game to execute a save & quit warp or something else like retrying the level but this can be remedied by mapping Start as a rear map button on games that I played fine on the official controllers so it's not all too bad.

This controller is compatible with the MiSTer FPGA although do note that the 2 rear mapping buttons only function to existing buttons that were mapped (so M1 that is mapped to A will be treated as A and not M1 only) and cannot be treated as their own buttons when it comes to mapping commands on many of its retro cores.

 Button mapping. 

If there was one thing I would like to see in the future through 'advanced settings' perhaps is mapping the buttons to a certain direction of the left or right stick.

This might be a bit tricky to program when using the controller's mapping feature alone because it currently only maps 'click' based inputs ranging from ABXY to Left/Right stick buttons but there are very few games where single commands were mapped to a direction of the right stick.

For example: In the Azure Striker Gunvolt games, the special skills are mapped to one of the four directions on the right stick. Moving the stick up activates the 1st special skill slot, moving the stick right activates the 2nd special skill slot. 3rd for down and 4th for left.

You can use the keyboard by pressing F1, F2, F3 and F4 which is naturally awkward to use.

The current solution right now is to map a keyboard button to a Left/Right stick button by running a Keyboard to Controller App on the PC and then map Left/Right stick button to a rear map button.

Example:

(Keyboard > Controller > Map Button)

F1 > LSB > M1

F2 > RSB > M2

The ideal solution:

RS 'holding up' > M1

RS 'holding right' > M2

This might be hard to do properly unless you have some sort of Advanced settings on ThrustmapperX app.

Note: On top right part of the image shows special skills that can be pulled off by using the Right Stick. Stick directions cannot be mapped to M1 and M2 buttons. So I had to use Antimicro to map a Keyboard input to LSB/RSB and then map a stick button to either M1 or M2.

Lastly the sticks, they are strong to keep in place but not too hard to pull them out and replace, I like how they slide back in flawlessly like a cube filling in the missing gap. The thrustmapperx app has an easy navigation system to track data on analogue sticks' deadzone/sensitivity curve, trigger % factor, currently mapped buttons and the ability to save presets which will be very handy for trial-and-error purposes on testing analogue sensitive games like trying to get movement after moving a fraction of a millimetre on the stick. I can't say too much on the sticks other than the bowl area of the stick feels bigger than the official Xbox sticks which is nice for my slightly medium sized thumbs.

Trigger locks options is a must for speedrunners and FPS players to input the RT/LT commands as soon as possible. You can adjust the values to make them a tad more sensitive but not too sensitive.

In short does it excel for long sessions? Yes, I can see this as a reliable controller with quality-of-life execution improvements on face buttons to convenient stick replacements whenever one of them has a drift problem, as you don't need to open up the controller and solder in the no drift pcb by Helder Gametech.

If you want to take full advantage of the rear buttons to perform extra commands instead of using the D-Pad then go for the eSwap X button but if your game doesn't need that, then this model is fine to use. Price can be debatable compared to other brands around this price but what they don't have is swappable parts to replace or customise with ease to make your own controller not only looking good but function to play good too. 

The eSwap S only comes with the two mini sticks attached but removable by default making it a near 'Switch Lite' experience as you rarely want to swap the sticks out, so buying extra sticks is the only way  to either change colour or to replace a drift stick. 

This is best for:

Single player speedrunning on the PC where controller is good to use for many 2D platformers and 3D action/adventure games.

This is okay for:

Some First-Person Shooting games that benefit aim assist and require fewer extra commands to map to rear buttons.

This is probably not okay for:

Fighting games at a high level mainly because the nice D-pad is placed in an awkward position. Only use it for casual play.

People who play wireless as this controller is wired only with USB type C.

Controller provided by Thrustmaster.

Thrustmaster's Eswap S Pro controller product page:
https://www.thrustmaster.com/products/eswap-s-pro-controller/