Nacon Pro Compact Colorlight Xbox controller review

When I was younger, transparent controllers were all the rage, offering a view of the peripheral’s internal mechanisms doing their thing while you played your favorite games. While it doesn’t quite fill me with excitement like the controllers of old, the new Nacon Pro Compact Colorlight for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC, is a great throwback to those times. It’s mainly aimed at younger players, but its price and customizability elevate it above flashy gimmick status.

The Pro Compact Colorlight comes packed with an impressive array of features for its €54.90 price tag on Nacon’s store — it’s also available on Amazon for $49.99 / £51.32 / €45.81. Along with the obvious aesthetical touches, the Colorlight is a wired peripheral with all of the standard buttons you’d expect to see on an Xbox controller, including a share button. Once connected to your console or PC, downloading the Pro Compact app from the Microsoft Store also allows you to change the button configurations, trigger sensitivity, stick settings, and more.

Being part of Nacon’s Pro Compact range, the Colorlight is 15% smaller than your average Xbox controller. Whether it’s because I have long fingers or I have become far too accustomed to bulky controllers, I’ve struggled to find the Pro Compact Colorlight comfortable when playing fast-paced games. It’s nice when used with slower games like Baldur’s Gate 3, but as soon as gameplay gets to the pace found in something like The Finals, I’m hitting all of the wrong buttons as I clumsily fumble around the controller — the position of the View and Menu buttons are particularly difficult to adjust to since they’re located right at the top of the controller. My seven-year-old son, however, has had far better success with it, and the more compact size has proved better for him than a conventional controller. The size, LED lighting, and transparent shell make the Colorlight a fantastic controller to consider if you’re looking to kit out a younger player, or you just have smaller hands.

While it’s not as comfortable for me to hold and it lacks any kind of textured grips, the buttons are responsive, the toggles are smooth, and the additional settings found in the Pro Compact app on Xbox offer enough customization options to set the controller to my specific tastes. The app isn’t as robust as my favorite third-party controller, Nacon’s Revolution X, and you can’t set up multiple profiles, but it offers far more tweaking options than most third-party controllers. Within the app, you can update your controller, remap each of its buttons, adjust the response curve and dead zones of each toggle, set the response level of each trigger, and of course, play around with the LED settings.

The most eye-catching feature of the Colorlight is the six LEDs on the inside of its body, which you can have set to separate solid colors, mix them up, or have it flashing like a disco if you so wish. The addition of a backlight adjusting slider is a welcome feature, and if you find the lights being on is just annoying, you can always turn them off via a handy button on the rear of the controller.

Should you buy the Nacon Pro Compact Colorlight Xbox controller?

Pros:

• Looks awesome
• Great for players with smaller hands
• Surprisingly customisable

Cons:

• Not great for gamers with larger hands
• Looks won’t be for everyone

Although the Nacon Pro Compact Colorlight isn’t a perfect fit for me personally (and the un-detachable 3-metre USB cable messes with my gaming setup), it’s a robust and responsive controller for its price range.

Well-positioned for younger audiences but offering enough customization options via its app to appeal to seasoned players, the Colorlight is well worth your consideration if you’re a gamer in the market for a new controller (assuming your hands aren’t on the larger side like mine). It’s also nice to see the price tag reflect the controller’s practicality instead of just gimmicks.

Nacon supplied a review unit of the Compact Pro Colorlight for this review