MOGA Pro Controller Review

The Xbox 360 controller is the greatest controller ever made. Its better than all its contemporaries and all its predecessors. The MOGA Pro does its best job trying to emulate the 360 controller, and its a good thing, a really good thing.

What is the MOGA Pro you ask? Well, its a full controller for use with Android devices to emulate the console experience. It syncs via Bluetooth and provides dual analog control for many of the platforms popular games. As most people know, one of the the biggest hurdles to tablet gaming overtaking console gaming is the clumsy nature of touch controls in traditional games. First Person Shooters, Third Person Shooters, Platformors, Character Action Games, basically anything that is set in a fully rendered 3D environment, needs a control scheme that is not just buttons on a screen.

The MOGA pocket, which was released last year, is a handy way to fix this problem. It’s not really comfortable and the buttons feel cheap, but it gets the job done. The Pro version of the MOGA is wonderful and an improvement in everyway. Its light, comfortable, feels like a 3rd Party Xbox 360 controller and has tight, responsive analog controls to go with its perfect buttons. The D-pad has the same cross layout that all Nintendo controllers have, so in that aspect its better than the 360’s gamepad. The last thing that really makes the Pro controller shine is its rechargeable Lithium Ion battery.
As you can tell I really like the MOGA Pro, and it could be a turning point for mobile and Tablet gaming. Hell, the controller even has a built in clamp to hold and display your cell phone as you play. As much as I like this little thing, I can say with some degree of certainty that its marvelous potential will probably be squandered.

The MOGA Pivot App that can be downloaded from the Google Play store provides a shortcut for MOGA owners to find all of the games their new toy is compatible with. There are some legit classics in the catalog too. Doom, Grand Theft Auto III/Vice City, Jet Set Radio, Sonic CD, and Pacman were flagship titles in their heyday, but a platform cannot thrive solely on classic ports. I’m gonna love playing through Jet Set Radio on my lunch breaks but what I really want is a triple A title on my phone or tablet. That’s not going to happen any time soon if ever.

The MOGA potentially gives companies like Activision, EA, or Ubisoft an outlet to do direct same day releases of their console games on a handheld with enough power to handle the port. Even if its not a direct port, why is there no Call of Duty, Madden, Battlefield, or Assassin’s Creed game on Android? I’m sure it has todo with storage limitations, compatibility and pricing structures, but I understand that Android development is open and cheap and with an install base of 500 million devices worldwide with nearly half of those running Icecream Sandwich or higher, moving your flagship titles to onr of the most popular platforms in the world seems like a no brainer.

With the MOGA bridging the interface gap, the market is ripe for cross promotion and dynamite marketing opportunities. This can work well for Power-A, or it can work extremely well for Power-A. After five minutes of playing through Gameloft’s Modern Combat 4, on a Galaxy Tab 2 7 inch, I really wanted more and better games to play on it. While MC4 is totally passable and is clearly a rip-off of the Modern Warfare series, being able to detach the shooter experience from my TV, and take it anywhere is intriguing. Since I have my phone or tablet with me anyway, tucking that controller under the seat in my car or the glovebox on the trip to work seems doable and almost exciting.

Like any service, without games you want to play, it runs the risk of dying. I mentioned Gameloft, and they have taken an interesting approach to mobile gaming and brought the MOGA with them. Where the big publishers are dropping the ball, Gameloft is picking it up and making direct analogs of some of console gaming’s biggest hits. Modern Combat is basically Modern Warfare, Asphalt is Need for Speed, Gangstar is GTA, Dungeon Hunter is Diablo, NFL Pro is Madden, and N.O.V.A. is Halo. All of these games are compatible with MOGA and are seemingly trying to transfer the experience from the big-boy systems.
I played through all of Modern Combat 4 and had a wonderful time blasting away the enemies. The only tech problem I had with the controller was when the battery started to die. Once it was low on juice, it had trouble staying synced to the tablet. But a recharge of both devices fixed the problem immediately.

My only real hard-nosed complaint about the Pro controller is the rubber grips on the side. This is a very Power-A thing to do. Putting the grips probably looks good on a shelf or can be advertised as “soft, comfortable, non-slip grips” but they are not comfortable and make the controller look cheap. This opinion is not only present against the MOGA but basically every 3rd party controller ever made since the Nintendo 64.

$50 for a controller that allows you to play off-brand games may seem steep, but this MOGA could have really long legs. As someone that is going own a smartphone anyway, $50 is a small fee to make hundreds of hours of games actually playable on the device I am tethered to for at least 2 years.

Verdict: The MOGA Pro is really cool and sadly positioned to be widely ignored.