Revoltec Fightpad Advanced gaming keypad review

Written by Stuyo

Thursday, 04 September 2008

 

Page 3 – Tests

Buttons

Despite our concerns about the design (both visual and ergonomic), along with the fact that buttons look way too "plastic", everything changed the moment we started out favorite games and put our left hand not on the good old keyboard but on the much keypad. For starters visual design is nonessential since the eyes are on the monitor. The central buttons are well designed, placed right where you'd expect to find them, and their sloped design sure adds to the easy and comfortable interaction. The place of the "Jump" button is well chosen and its use is rather intuitive – right where your thumb is used to press "Space". The "reload" button (М17) is also very useful - small, but easy to be found and pressed when needed, due to it being round and slightly higher than the others, and his position is roughly on the path of your thumb, made when bending your fingers over the WASD. Most confusion here creates the "S" replacement button, being too small it needs some time to get used to.

Buttons М11-13 are on easy to reach places while using WASD, and as whole their use as replacements for ALT, SHIFT and CTRL is quite successful. Besides you get three more buttons on the other side, tat are just as easily reached with your index finger.

Worries about the sound buttons were dispersed – indeed they are in the wrong place, but being so small and low it's unlikely to press them even by accident. Beneath them are the М18-20 buttons, reaching which without lifting your hand from the central block is some challenge.

Now few words for the F1-6/F7-12 and М1-10/1-0. The availability of that amount of buttons, especially with integrated second profile, is truly useful in games that have lots of functions and are predisposed to use of macros. These buttons are placed in the standard place for them. The "F" have decent size, but the М1-10 are to some degree small. It's nice to have ten buttons above the WASD block, yet with this size you need to look at them and for ingame use requiring their frequent use, that is problematic. In our opinion they would be better replaced with 6 or 8 buttons with the size of the "F" ones and should have a separator in the middle, thus giving you 2 blocks with 3 or 4 buttons each. That would facilitate their use by a lot, considering the dual use profiles with combination with CTRL, ALT or SHIFT. The other thing is that they are a tad far from the central block and reaching them requires moving your hand off the central block.

As for the Escape and Fn, the first is in its right place and the second isn't in the way of anything on the side. Fn is the button with which to switch the different macro profiles for the buttons (it's toggle, it doesn't allow only temporary activation while its pressed).

Shape

S-shaped Revoltec Fightpad Advanced isn't something unusual for this type of products, question is how comfy is it? We begin with the surfaces: the wrist pad is quite comfy and the rubber surface is essential – otherwise your hand will constantly slip. The middle part of the keypad has slight inclination downwards – that allows more natural finger positioning that will not tire them in the long run. Here to the comfort adds the inclination of the WASD buttons too, as whole your fingers feel naturally while working with them. And lastly - the top surface. It is curved in a manner allowing easy reach to the buttons, still the "F" ones are not that accessible. The use of the М1-10 buttons from the place point of view is just fine, but there is the size issue.

Software

The Revoltec Fightpad Advanced software has two main functions – all the "М" buttons are not set by default. Only the buttons related to WASD-QЕ, Jump=Space, "F" and ESC are. Each and every other button has to be set. And we could set anything from single presses to macro combos. Major advantage is also that with macro combination we can set both the time for a key being pressed and the time between presses. As functionality the software is on the level,but as design it definitely needs work – attempts to make it colourful actually made it ugly. Good thing is they included a picture of the keypad in order to ease the setting up:

Application

We separated the applications of Revoltec Fightpad Advanced to 3 main groups, that in our opinion is mostly fit: FPS, MMORPG и Tactical (Teal) 3D Action.

In Shooters you use mainly WASD +/- anything from 1 to let's say up to 6 buttons. Here Fightpad due to its excellently designed central block is quite comfy, you'll experience trouble only should you want to walk backwards.

MMORPG – here you frequently use about 20 buttons besides the directional ones, and lot's of macro functions too. Directional control isn't critical, like in FPS and here the big amount of buttons that can be combined with two profiles along with CTRL/ALT/SHIFT does make a difference. There are enough buttons for all your spells and skills, and even more than enough for all the macros you need.

Tactical actions – we see this category as kind of a mix from the above two, since there is critically important directional control, combined with vast variety of actions and need of macro functions. Well, this is the weak spot in our eyes – despite the keypad being comfy for gaming, if you need lots of buttons using the above row of them is a challenge, and needs much practice getting used to.