As soon as we saw the joystick we thought it looked like one of the old Microsoft Sidewinder Joysticks of yesteryear. It is pretty large and will require ample desk space to put to good use, but even so it feels sturdy enough and its build quality for £21 is actually quite good.

The joystick is primarily designed for flight sim games, so this will limit its appeal to some, however we decided to test the joystick on Flatout 2, which is a racing game and with flying the Helicopters and Planes in BF2.

Everything started off quite well, but we noticed once the drivers were installed that our Logitech G-15 keyboard display stopped working properly.

We had to download the latest driver which seemed to cure this problem, but during testing we then had a Blue Screen of death. Could this be the drivers again or was it the fact that we did not manually restart the computer after the driver was installed? Who knows, but we are not confidant with the Drivers that Genius provide.

During our games the joystick was relatively responsive and had a nice feel to it, though its size will hamper those with smaller hands. There are tons of buttons to customise, in total you have 10 buttons, a hat switch and vibration feedback.

You don’t need to calibrate the joystick as the joystick does this itself but we accidently moved the slide buttons at the base of the joystick (which we believe control the x and y axis of the joystick) and as a result of us not remembering where the switches went, we had a right game of getting the calibration to work properly, we could not turn right within the games we played and in the end we gave up in frustration.

Of course this may not happen to you but the manual does not provide any info on the slide buttons at the base, so you are in limbo as to where to position them correctly.