Review on 🎮 Enhance Your Xbox One Racing Experience with the Thrustmaster Ferrari 458 Spider Racing Wheel by Alan Estell

So this review is just my first impression. I can revise higher or lower later. A little background first: I've been dabbling with steering wheel options for racing games, and Forza Horizon 2 in particular, for a while, and I'm definitely intrigued by the much more expensive options. I'm happy to spend a lot of money on good gaming accessories if I know I like them. For reference, after realizing how much more I play drums with Rock Band than any other instrument (and have already replaced a standard drum kit once), I purchased an ION drum kit. But while I was interested in the steering wheel, I just wasn't sure if it would really "overwhelm" me. I've always been happy riding with standard controllers. While $100 is certainly not trivial, it seemed to me a good entry-level price for this type of accessory. I'm not going to get exactly the same level of performance out of the bike, but I felt like it would at least let me know if I cared enough about playing it to warrant an upgrade at some point. So. Out of the box: Ridiculously easy to set up. Attached to the table, connected. Xbox One and Forza recognized it immediately and I was *almost* ready to go. However, this is *almost* my first major gripe with this controller. I set up a passkey for my account and it requires a joystick/keyboard to log in. The steering wheel tries to be clever and disguise the thumb as an "engine start" button. The result makes it difficult to use and virtually useless. I had several failed password attempts before having to boot up a normal controller to enter it. To be honest, I'd rather forego the slick aesthetic in favor of a more comfortable panel. intuitive feel of being able to press the gas pedal and steer the vehicle with the steering wheel. It also takes a lot more getting used to. Where I've taught myself to switch throttle/brake as needed over years of normal controller-based driving, I found it VERY easy to go overboard with this controller. The first thing to do was to switch off. Aside from an issue with the steering wheel, I found it very responsive. Although this attack is a little annoying. Almost immediately I discovered that the wheel had a small but significant "dead" area in the center. This makes fine tuning of the steering extremely difficult. Are you trying to dodge an oncoming car to score some bad miss points? Much luck. While thumb control is almost instantaneous, with this wheel I've often found myself either not moving the car left/right at all, or oversteering when I wanted to make a small correction. The best way I can describe it is that some older cars have somewhat soft steering. It's a quirk that I'll have to get used to and I can't stress enough that I wasn't expecting perfect performance from a product that is essentially entry-level. I suspect that soft steering is just the nature of the bungee braking system and I expect that more expensive motorized bikes will NOT have that dead center feel. At the risk of this review sounding negative, it's not, I intend it. Stupid thumb controls and a small dead zone in the steering wheel are the only two complaints I have at the moment. Still, I found the steering wheel to be a lot of fun and really add a new dimension to the game. For the occasional racing game fanatic, or for those like me who aren't sure they're really going to get anything. Steering wheel accessory I think this is a fantastic product and I am not disappointed.