PowerA Advantage Plus Wired Controller Review

PowerA is a well-known brand for third party controllers, especially for Xbox users. The “Xbox certified” tag gives you an impression that it would be a premium controller, or an upgrade to the stock Xbox Series controllers. That’s what I thought too. So I bought one to try it out myself. I chose the Advantage Plus Wired from PowerA’s massive lineup of controllers because it seems to have a lot of PowerA’s signature features without costing an arm and a leg.

And BOY has this been a disappointment. Let me tell you why I say so in this review.

The PowerA Advantage Plus Wired comes in a simple box. In the box we find :

• The controller itself
• a 10ft long USB-A to USB-C cable
• a Product manual

From PowerA website and from my own testing

• Layout: Xbox
• Connectivity: Wired only
• Compatibility: XBOX Series X|S, XBOX One, Windows
• Sticks: Hall Effect
• Triggers: Membrane analog triggers, Impulse Triggers
• Extra Buttons: 2 mappable back buttons
• Battery: N/A (wired only)
• Vibration: Dual Asymmetric rumble motor, Trigger vibrations
• Connection: 250Hz
• Colors: Several designs at similar prices
• Software: PowerA Gamer HQ PC App
• Price: $40-$48, can be found for as low as $30 during sales depending on variant and region

The design of the PowerA Advantage Plus is quite nice. From a distance, it looks fabulous. Up close, it loses some of it’s charm because you can see clear as day that the design is just printed onto the faceplate. But it still looks quite nice.

It is an unremarkable Xbox controller shape. Nothing particularly special about it’s shape. It’s a comfortable shape to hold and the handles are flared. Speaking of grip, the rear half of the handles have a texture made up of the PowerA logo (kind of like the grip pattern in the Sony PS5 DualSense controller) This provides ample grip during gameplay, but if your hands tend to get sweaty or are oily, it kind has micro-slippages as a result of the cheap plastic being used. This doesn’t mean the controller will slip out of your hands but… it gives an unpleasant feeling to me.

The buttons are all placed in good spots and are comfortable to reach and press. Even the extra programmable back buttons.

A major deviation from Xbox’s own controllers in the D-Pad. The D-Pad here is a cross style rather than the disc style D-Pad that we get in the Xbox controllers. More on this later in the review.

The build quality is… meh. While there is no creaking or sharp edges, the plastics used here feel incredibly cheap and the entire build feels like a toy. It feels very light and hollow. Doesn’t give a premium feeling at all. The standard Xbox controller feels better than this (Mostly because it has batteries inside it)

The Advantage Plus Wired controller comes with Hall Effect sticks. This is one of the major reasons I picked this controller over other cheaper variants.

The performance however is quite lackluster. Since it’s primarily designed for Xbox, the Advantage Plus Wired has only 250Hz polling rate and the stick resolution isn’t the best either. It’s not unusable by any means, and it performs just fine, but there are better options in the market today for this price. There’s also a tiny bit of internal deadzone which cannot be disabled by any means. In the PC app, it says that the deadzone is zero when it clearly isn’t in reality. I would like my Hall Effect sticks to be deadzone free.

One really cool feature that drew me to this controller is the stick height adjustment mechanism. When you twist the stick clockwise, it pops up a level, increasing its height. This makes it easier to get finer control over the stick. There are a total of three levels for each stick. I’ve been using the right stick at the medium height. Gotta give them credit where credit is due, this is very cool. I see an advantage here that if you like using taller sticks for fps games and shorter sticks for casual platformers, you don’t need to carry the extra stick around with you.

There isn’t an anti-friction ring or any other mechanism, so the sticks feel a little scratchy at the outer edge of their movement range after just a day of using this controller. This is not a good thing.

ABXY BUTTONS

The ABXY buttons in the PowerA Advantage Plus Wired are unapologetically membrane. They’re somewhat tactile but they feel quite cheap and mushy. In my testing, the controller has very little latency. But because of how mushy and slow the buttons feel, I found myself thinking that there is noticeable latency in the controller. I was shocked because this is a wired controller, but turns out that was just the buttons feeling bad.

They’re fine. They could be better. I don’t think these will last a long time.

D-PAD

The D-Pad is possibly the weakest feature of this controller. It’s a membrane D-pad, and it is very mushy feeling. I mean, there’s some tactile feedback but… the tactile feedback doesn’t actually line up with the button input. This means you have to press through AFTER the tactile feedback ends and this feels positively awful.

Also, the diagonal inputs are horribly inconsistent. Or rather, they’re consistently bad. In the video, you’ll see what I mean. Pressing the diagonal doesn’t even register a single direction at times. And it has lead to misinputs or missed inputs at least 50% of my time using this controller. Truly a level of bad that I haven’t seen in a long time.

SHOULDER BUMPERS

The shoulder buttons are fine. They do feel quite cheap and plastic-ey, but they perform fine. They use mechanical buttons that are quite loud. Not much else to say here really. The PowerA logo texture is present here too. This gives it a good amount of grip.

TRIGGERS

The PowerA Advantage Plus Wired features impulse triggers, like the Xbox controllers. The triggers themselves are not hall effect, and are regular potentiometer based triggers. The usage experience is alright. Not impressive but not terrible by any means. The trigger vibration is a little flat and doesn’t have the same dynamicity as first party xbox controllers. It lacks that oomph, if that makes sense.

There’s a little bit of initial and end deadzone in the triggers, but it’s not too much and it doesn’t affect gameplay much. The travel distance on the triggers could have been a little more but this is also not too bad.

EXTRA BUTTONS

The programmable back buttons are a nice addition. You can’t set any macros or keyboard inputs, but you can set the back buttons to act as other buttons on the controller itself.

HAPTICS

The controller has a pair of asymmetric rumble motors in the handles and a pair of impulse triggers. The haptic experience is mediocre. Nothing particularly special.

CONCLUSION

The PowerA Advantage Plus Wired is probably not the controller you’re looking for. Aesthetically, it is quite pretty. But other than that… It doesn’t really have anything going for it.

I would rather recommend going for something like the GameSir G7 SE or G7 HE instead of this controller in this price category.