11 out of 11 people found this review helpful.
Great starter wheel!
Date of Review: Jul 28, 2007
The Bottom Line: When your trying to work out if a wheels for you, this is a great quality device to decide with, but the design flaws mean you need to be careful.
The wheel:
It's got 6 buttons on the front, which is enough for most conceivable functions, 2 paddle shifters (located behind the wheel) for changing gear, an up-down stick on the right (however can be moved to either side) and 2 pedals - brake and accelerator - both a spring loaded, but the brake has 2 springs making it feel heavier and more like a brake pedal.
The wheel is surfaced in a rubbery material, which tends to come off after several hours of sweaty driving. The wheel also feels a little small in comparison to a real cars.
The wheel features force feedback which relays information through the wheel allowing you to accurately gauge if the car is "getting loose" as the wheel gets lighter etc - it sounds like a gimmick, but its just as important (if not more so) than the sound of the car once you get used to it, allowing you to predict slides before they become noticable. Most modern driving games have support for force feedback such as GTR, LFS, Test Drive Unlimited etc.
The wheel gives good feedback, however it's motion is read by an optical sensor (rather than the typical gear system), this is a problem as after time the optical sensor can get dirty, and misread the motion of the wheel. The pedals are also on flimsy mounts, and as they constantly re-calibrate if you use the pedals alot they can mis-read what is and isn't full throttle, which can mean you can push the pedal to the floor and still only get 70% throttle. This is only apparent in the "Rev. A" versions, not the newer "Rev. B" versions however.
The wheel is a nice "starter" wheel if you enjoy your driving games on the PC, however don't want to spend #150 ($300) on a proper sim racing setup, like the Logitech G25.
