Turtle Beach Stealth Ultra Review: the most elite controller for Xbox and PC gaming
Better than the Xbox Elite Series 2
Pros
✅ 📐 Fantastic design that combines the best of the Xbox and PS5 DualSense controllers
✅ 📺 Full-color LCD screen lets you customize all your controller settings on-the-fly
✅ 🔘 Microswitches reduce latency and make every button satisfyingly clicky
✅ ♾️ Resilient hall-effect thumbsticks and triggers promise to be drift-resistant
Cons
❌ ⛓️ Limited phone-connected notifications
❌ 🎚️ Hard to-reach left menu button makes popping mini-maps and inventory screens a pain
❌ 💵 $200 is the steepest price for just an Xbox controller
❌ 😵 PC connection requires reconnecting the wireless dongle every time
🏆 Review score: 4.5 out of 5
The Shortcut Review
The Turtle Beach Stealth Ultra is my new favorite controller period. It looks like the PS5 DualSense–Xbox hybrid controller I’ve always dreamed of. The marquee LCD screen is more than a gimmick and it lets me customize every aspect of the controller on the fly. The Stealth Ultra also feels like the ultimate Xbox controller even over the Xbox Elite Series 2 thanks to its upgraded hall-effect thumbsticks and microswitch-equipped buttons. The controller is just a joy to hold thanks to its slightly larger size and wonderfully textured grips.
Of course, there are some flaws to the Stealth Ultra like its lack of swappable parts, the terrible positioning of the left menu button, and middling battery life. But overall, the Turtle Beach Stealth Ultra is worthy of its hefty $200 price point. It’s a controller you can feel is a cut above the rest once you start playing with it.
Full Review
🪞 The fairest controller of them all. The $200 Stealth Ultra is Turtle Beach’s first premium controller for the Xbox and it’s one of the first wireless third-party controllers for Microsoft’s console as well. It features a lot of bells and whistles: a built-in screen, hall-effect thumbsticks, clicky micro switch buttons, customizable triggers, and dual vibration motors.
🎮 The perfect hybrid controller. This is unmistakably an Xbox controller with its asymmetrical thumbstick layout and XYAB button cluster. But at the same time, the placement of the screen and its overall shape gives the Stealth Ultra the silhouette of a PS5 DualSense. It’s also a little wider than your average Xbox Core or Elite Series 2 Controller with larger handles. It’s also curved slightly more into a crescent like a classic Sega Genesis controller (for you other ancient millennial gamers).
📺 Put a screen on it. The most noteworthy thing about this controller is its built-in screen, which almost looks like the touch panel on a PS5 Dual Sense controller, but instead of being a piece of colored plastic, it’s an interactive full-color LCD screen. Alas, this convenient on-controller screen isn’t touch-sensitive, which would have made it even better.
It’s a handsome controller that’s the perfect blend between an Xbox and a PlayStation controller
The screen on the Stealth Ultra might not be touch-sensitive, but it offers plenty of practical uses. You can completely set up this controller using the screen alone and adjust things like RGB lighting, thumbstick dead zones and sensitivity, back button assignments, and audio tunning – all settings you would typically need to change in an application.
💬 Apps on board. Speaking of apps, you can also sync this controller to your phone and have notifications appear on the Stealth Ultra. During testing, it became a somewhat handy feature. I was able to look down and see why my iPhone 15 Pro Max just buzzed, though the actual information it displays is pretty limited. Only a few lines of text show up and there’s no way to respond to notifications from the controller. It’s a neat feature to not have to reach over to your phone to see a text or an alert from an app, but there isn’t much utility beyond that unfortunately.
😌 The feel-good controller of the year. Turtle Beach’s premium controller feels fantastic to hold. It feels perfectly solid and robust. The sides of the controller are lined with a soft-touch material but it feels more like cloth, which makes this controller so pleasant to hold. The texture is so nice that sometimes I just run my finger across the sides to just feel the finish on it even when I’m not playing. It feels so nice to hold that it has become my preferred controller over all my other Xbox options.
The controller is just a joy to hold thanks to its slightly larger size and wonderfully textured grips.
🧰 Fully loaded. On top of the screen, the Stealth Ultra is loaded with some premium parts including hall-effect thumbsticks and microswitch buttons. The Hall-effect thumbsticks are designed not to wear out and introduce thumbstick drift as you’ve probably heard so much about with the dreaded Joy-Con drift on the Nintendo Switch.
⚡ Greased lightning. The microswitches under each of the buttons – including the thumbsticks and bumpers – are wonderfully snappy and clicky over the mushy buttons on the default Xbox Series X controller. Plus the microswitches have a shorter actuation point for more instantaneous feedback to reduce latency.
↪️ Custom shortcuts. There are also four back buttons positioned horizontally across the controller’s grips and spine. They’re tucked nicely out of the way, unlike the vertically arranged back buttons on the Elite Series 2 controller – but you can still easily reach them. Best of all, you can map these buttons on-the-fly, and with 10 different profiles, you can have different arrangements for multiple games.
🎯 Precision aim. My favorite function for the back buttons was the Pro-Aim Focus Mode, which temporarily lowers the sensitivity on your aiming thumbstick in games. It works similarly to a DPI clutch on FPS-focused gaming mice and it’s handy when you need to lower your stick sensitivity while trying to take some accurate sniper shots. You can also customize how much Pro-Aim alters your sensitivity with the controller’s onboard menus.
➕ Weird but great D-Pad. The D-Pad on the Stealth Ultra might look peculiar, but the microswitches underneath each cardinal direction produce a satisfying click with each press. Its domed center also makes it easy to pull off quarter and full-circle turns in fighting games like Tekken 8 and Street Fighter 6.
🤷🏻♂️ Where are the goods? For a premium controller, the only thing the Stealth Ultra lacks is swappable parts. In the box, this controller only comes with two sets of rubber caps to either give the thumbstick’s concave tips more texture and surface area or switch them to studded dome caps. The only other physical customization you can make on the Stealth Ultra’s controls is to shorten the trigger pulls. Those two options seem a bit lacking when other controllers of the same price come with thumbstick extensions, swappable D-pads, and other modules.
🤸🏻 Out of reach. Aside from that, the left menu button is the only thing I despise about the Turtle Beach Stealth Ultra. It’s hard to press since it’s jammed up next to the left thumbstick, so you either have to awkwardly reach over that said thumbstick or extend your right thumb over the whole controller to press it. I would have much rather had both menu buttons set underneath the screen’s bottom corner even if it would have made the already busy center of the controller even busier.
The Turtle Beach Stealth Ultra is truly the most customizable controller I’ve tested
🕊️Wire-free is the way to be. The Turtle Beach Stealth Ultra is notable for being one of the first third-party controllers that connect wirelessly to the Xbox. You can even use the controller to turn your Xbox remotely, which is a feature that was recently limited to just official controllers. Microsoft also recently began opening up its wireless licensing to external companies, so you can expect more wireless controllers like this to start coming out of the woodwork.
📶 BYOD (bring your own dongle). That said, it’s not as completely wireless integrated as an official Xbox controller. You still need to plug in a USB wireless dongle – either directly to the Xbox or with a long cable leading to the charging dock – and use up one of the Xbox Series X/S’ few ports.
🤦♂️ Frustrating and repetitive. Unfortunately, this controller is more annoying to use wirelessly with a PC. You have to press the pairing button on the dongle and reconnect the wireless controller every time you turn it on. Thankfully it comes with a long USB-C cable you can plug into the charging dock, so you can position it within easy reach instead of having to reach around your PC’s port every time.
Of course, you can also connect the Stealth Ultra to your PC, as well as Android and iOS devices over Bluetooth, so it’s a wireless controller for almost all platforms.
🎧 Audio Master. As with most Xbox controllers, this one comes with a 3.5mm jack so you can plug in a gaming headset directly into the controller. What sets the Stealth Ultra apart is you also get all of Turtle Beach’s audio customization.
The headlining Signature Sound mode helps clean up the audio and make it crisper, but you can also dive into the equalizer settings to fine-tune the audio levels to your liking. Alternatively, if you’re wholly focused on being competitive and want to hear footsteps in games like Modern Warfare then there’s the Superhuman Hearing preset.
Again, like every other feature on this controller, you can customize it all on the controller’s built-in screen and save it to one of 10 available profiles.
🪫Half-Life. Turtle Beach claims the Stealth Ultra offers up to 30 hours of battery life, but in my experience, I was only able to squeeze up 10-15 hours of gameplay from its controller. Of course, the battery life here is heavily reliant on the brightness of the built-in screen and RGB, not to mention how strong you have your left and right rumble set to. One major power draw on the controller is its LCD screen and the fact that it’s always on. I wish there was a setting to set the display to sleep after several minutes of inactivity.
⚡ Quick charging time. Thankfully, the controller charges back to full in just two hours when dropped onto its convenient charging dock or hardwired to USB-C.
Should you buy the Turtle Beach Stealth Ultra controller?
Yes, if…
✅ 🎮 You want the ultimate controller for Xbox, PC, and mobile
✅ 😌 You want the most amazingly tactile buttons
✅ 👯 You want multiple button layout profiles for multiple games
✅ 🎯 You need a controller that will last the test of time without thumbstick drift
No, if…
❌ 🖥️ You primarily play games on PC
❌ 💲 You don’t want a controller that costs half a console
❌ 🪫 You need a controller that lasts for marathon gaming sessions
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam.
This fucking piece of shit does NOT connect to any iOS device for mobile gaming, only the useless notification.