The Backbone is my favorite mobile controller. It’s a solid choice for anyone looking to game on the go, but it’s always been skewed heavily in a Microsoft direction due to its matching Xbox face buttons and heavy Game Pass marketing. Sot was exciting when PlayStation announced it was officially partnering with Backbone to create a PlayStation-centric version of the mobile controller I’ve come to love.
However, now that I have it in my hands, I ask myself, “Is this really what I wanted?” When the controller was launched, both Backbone and PlayStation made it clear that it’s not intended to be a mobile DualSense, but I couldn’t help but be disappointed. It’s a Backbone colored like a DualSense with PlayStation face buttons, but that’s it. The product listing description on the Backbone website says the controller is “inspired by the look and feel of the PS DualSense,” but it only makes up for it in the looks department of that statement.
Despite being “inspired” by the DualSense, the PlayStation Backbone does not have any of the features that have come to define the PS5 generation controller. Normally, I’d say my disappointment stems from misaligned expectations, but after trying a handful of first-party PlayStation 5 games with the PlayStation Backbone, I think there’s a deeper problem at work.
An incomplete package
The DualSense is an excellent controller. At a basic level it is extremely comfortable to hold and has real weight and responsiveness. It’s essentially everything you need in a controller and more thanks to its exclusive features like haptic feedback, adaptive triggers and 3D audio. These are features that every PlayStation 5 exclusive title has taken advantage of in one way or another, giving each title a literally unique feel.
The PlayStation Backbone doesn’t have any of that. It’s a standard gamepad that, while still high-quality, is about as bare-bones as you can get. That wouldn’t normally be a problem if this was an unheard of third-party device, but as it’s an official PlayStation product, the lack of those features is a huge problem if you’re going to be playing PS5 games.
I’ve tried a handful of PS5-exclusive titles with the PlayStation Backbone and didn’t feel right. Things got off to a bad start when I booted Astro’s playrooma game that automatically downloads on every PS5 and, while certainly fun in its own right, essentially serves as a tech demo for the DualSense.
To be blunt, the game is almost unplayable with the PlayStation Backbone. There are missing features everywhere, such as Astro Bot’s 3D audio footprints running through the PS5’s interior. The game comes to a complete halt when faced with one of the “gimmick sections” of the levels that require things like tilting the controller, blowing it to power fans, or using the touchpad with any level of precision.
Astro’s playroom was the only PS5 game unfinished on the PlayStation Backbone, but that’s not to say it was the only one to feel compromised. The next games on my list were Return and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, two games that also rely heavily on the controller features that would be absent on the mobile version. Playing both went as well as you’d expect.
Playing through the problems
The big problem I expected when I got ready to play both Return and tear apart was the fact that both games took advantage of the adaptive triggers, not just to simulate things like resistance or a jammed weapon, but as additional buttons needed to be successful in the games’ combat. Thankfully, they both offer alternate control schemes that map those half and full triggers to different places on the controller, but there’s nothing to say that all PS5 exclusives will be so willing players to remap the triggers to other buttons.
Aside from the lack of adaptive trigger support, it still felt like something was missing from just about every PS5 title I tried: Astro’s playroom, Return, Ratchet and Clank, Ghostwire: Tokyo, Demon Soulsand death loop. They all seemed to have a newfound flatness due to the lack of other DualSense features like 3D audio and haptic feedback. The games can certainly stand on their own without DualSense features (except for Astro’s playroom), but a great sense of the uniqueness of the PlayStation 5 is certainly lost.
It would be a lot to expect a mobile controller to have all the features of the DualSense, but the fact that it doesn’t have one is a pretty big disappointment. Other third-party PS5 controllers like the Scuf Reflex may include exclusive DualSense features, so it doesn’t feel entirely unreasonable to expect an official PlayStation partner to be able to include some as well. This is especially true because the PlayStation Backbone costs $100, $30 more than a new DualSense.
It’s worth pointing out that PS5 games released alongside PS4 versions still play just fine with the PlayStation Backbone, as they need to run on both DualSense and DualShock 4, so they don’t usually rely on features that would not work without DualSense support. This means that if you want to play Horizon: Forbidden West or the long-awaited God of War: Ragnorok along the way you will not encounter any major problems.
The lack of features on the PlayStation Backbone isn’t a complete deal breaker; it’s still a Backbone, one of the best mobile controllers on the market. It just feels completely removed from what makes the PlayStation 5’s controller unique. When used for general mobile gaming (which Backbone seems to be more into) it’s still just about everything you’d want from a controller, but the fact that it’s a PlayStation controller makes it feel like it should have more to it. That’s especially true when you think about the laundry list of innovations that PlayStation has brought with the introduction of the DualSense for gaming controllers.
It’s a great controller, but it’s a bad PlayStation controller.
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