HexGaming Rival - Review

After a generation of premium peripherals expanding the range of features and options to look for in a controller, the well has gone dry for PS5 players. With no sanctioned third-party controllers, players who want features outside the DualSense’s standard loadout still have one place they can turn: Specialty gamepad modders, who add and/or replace parts to make custom versions of the DualSense.

HexGaming’s customizable DualSense model, the Rival, adds rear buttons and replaceable thumbsticks, plus a handful of other optional features and tons of cosmetic options to your specifications. For a controller that’s been chopped up and reassembled, it looks and feels incredibly well-made, and its added features feel right at home with the DualSense’s standard offerings. Picking up a custom DualSense is a big step – It’s much more expensive than your average controller – but HexGaming’s modifications rise to meet the DualSense’s high bar for quality.

HexGaming Rival – Design & Features

Despite its new name, the Rival is a modified version of the original DualSense, so much of its design feels identical to the original… Because it is. The basic shape and button layout is the same. It has the same long handles and that big clicky pad in the center. Despite the fact that HexGaming replaces the PS logo with its own round home button, you wouldn’t mistake the Rival for anything other than a DualSense.

The Rival has a few core upgrades that come with every controller. It has replaceable analog sticks, and comes with three different lengths, all of which seem to be taller than the standard DualSense model. HexGaming’s sticks are held on magnetically, which makes it easy to pull them off and switch options without any risk of the sticks flying off during intense play.

There’s also a large rear panel strapped to the back of the Rival, which affixes two wing-like rear buttons that curve into place right under your middle fingers. They’re comfortable, with a nice tactile click, and easy to pull. The large panel that houses the buttons, however, can crowd your hands a bit, depending on your grip.

You can map almost any button to the rear buttons – only the PlayStation button and Touchpad are off-limits. Pairing is easy, but takes a little bit of time: You have to hold a button to turn on pairing mode, then hold the rear button and the button you’re mapping for a few seconds, then turn off pairing mode. It’s quick enough so that you won’t hesitate to remap buttons at the start of a new game, but you might think twice about changing them on the fly mid-session.

Beyond the core “Rival” upgrades, you can customize almost every part of the DualSense in some way or another. In a made-to-order build, you can replace the face buttons, d-pad, menu buttons, bumpers, triggers, touchpad, front panel, rear panel, and more. Most of these replacements are primarily cosmetic: Instead of Sony’s standard clear-on-white face and d-pad buttons, you can get shiny chrome red or matte purple (like mine). While they are mostly for show, it’s worth noting that the changes do alter the feel of the controller a bit. If you get a controller face and/or touchpad with a pattern, for example, it’s printed on shiny, smooth plastic panels, rather than the smooth matte material on the standard DualSense.

There are also a couple of optional upgrades that offer more substantial changes. There’s a black textured rear panel, which adds a rubberized back with paint-drip pattern bumps along the backs of the handles. The biggest optional feature is “FastShots,” a permanently installed low-profile trigger lock for the bumpers and triggers that significantly limits the travel on all four buttons. According to HexGaming, L1 and R1 bottom out at 0.5mm, down from 1.2mm. L2 and R2 are cut more dramatically, 7mm to 2mm. The difference between the two is stark, especially on the triggers: On a normal DualSense, the triggers press all the way down to the base of their housing: With FastShots, there’s a tactile click, but the button barely moves. Likewise, the bumpers have a more pronounced tactile click when you press them, but they move significantly less.

As with AimControllers’ modified DualSense, which has a similar optional feature, FastShots has pros and cons that skew heavily toward competitive players. Reducing travel cuts down on the time it takes to push the bumpers and pull the triggers, which is great in a high-reflex shooter. On the other hand, removing travel cuts out some of the unique immersive features of the DualSense’s smart triggers; specifically, you lose the capacity to feel any resistance when pulling down the triggers. It enhances your competitive experiences, but at the expense of your single-player ones.

There’s one crucial DualSense component that doesn’t come with HexGaming Rival – a charging cable. Finding a USB-C charging cable isn’t exactly a hardship given how many devices use USB-C. (Fun Fact: I charged it with my Macbook Air charger one time). Still, given the Rival’s hefty price tag, it feels a little chincy to leave out a cord that you’ll need to keep your controller running.

HexGaming Rival – Gaming

Setting aside the pros and cons of trigger locks for just a moment, every facet of the Rival mod works incredibly well. While the smooth plastic panels and matte buttons don’t feel exactly like a DualSense, the experience is fundamentally the same. (That’s a very good thing). The build quality of the controller holds up, and none of the modded parts feel cheap or flimsy. The rear buttons have a quick pull, which makes them great for snappy, reflexive inputs like rolling in Demon’s Souls, or aiming down sights in Destiny 2. And, as with most rear buttons, they’re very comfortable. I find them especially useful when you need to hold a button for an extended period of time, like when fixing generators in Dead by Daylight.

FastShots is one of the most comfortable, well-implemented trigger-locks I’ve used. They successfully cut down on the time and distance of each trigger pull and bumper press. (Though that’s a given, really). The tactile clicks of the bumpers and triggers compensate for the lack of travel, which effectively hides the “jammed” sensation you feel with most locked buttons. While it prevents trigger resistance, it doesn’t impede the smart triggers’ precision rumble and other immersive features, allowing single-player games like Returnal to retain most of their controller-based immersive quirks.

The smaller gameplay-relevant touches also feel good in-game. If you’ve ever held a DualSense and wished that its microscopic textured grip was larger and more pronounced, the rubberized grip really makes it feel stable in your grasp, even with sweaty hands. The replaceable analog sticks are easy to swap quickly, even on the fly. As someone with short fingers, I don’t really need longer sticks so they weren’t that appealing to me, but I admit that having actual adjustable sticks beats buying stick extenders or other makeshift add-ons that compromise how the stick feels just to add length.