Mobile gaming continues to reach new heights, and so do mobile gaming controllers and accessories. Now PowerA, a manufacturer well known for making officially licensed third-party controllers for consoles, has improved their line of mobile gaming controllers with the Moga XP7-X Plus, which retails for £86.70/$99.99. As a disclaimer, PowerA sent me the product to review. This allowed me to get hands-on to see how this new controller fairs – but also to find out if it’s worth its price tag.
When I first started testing the Moga XP7-X Plus, I wanted to jump into some mobile gaming staples including Call of Duty Mobile, PUBG Mobile, and Apex Legends. Unfortunately when I tried these, the controller wasn’t detected by the games when connected to my phone. This is important to state at the start: the Moga XP7-X Pluswon’t work with many android mobile games. It will work with others, like Asphalt 8: Airborne and Knights of the Old Republic, and there’s a nice list online of games you can play with it, but for the most popular android mobile games you’ll have to keep using the touchscreen controls.
With that out of the way I can say that I really enjoyed using the XP7-X Plus for cloud gaming with cross multiple games, thanks to the controller’s excellent ergonomics and its variety of features.
My time with the XP7-X Plus was mainly spent playing No Man’s Sky, Forza Horizon 5, and Overcooked 2 , with some other games here and there, streamed via the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate app. I played on a Google Pixel 5, which is quite a small phone compared to most handsets nowadays. Although it fit easily in the empty space, it was a bit too small to perfectly line up with the edges, but this didn’t bother me. The XP7-X Plus will fit larger phones like an S22 Ultra, but if you have a case on as well it might start to get fiddly to put the phone in the slot.
It was simple to connect my phone to the controller, just turning it on then holding the Bluetooth button to begin pairing. It was a lot of fun walking around planets in No Man’s Sky in bed at night with audio from my Bluetooth ear buds and using the controller via Bluetooth as well. You can also connect it to your phone using a USB cable and switching the input using the switch on the bottom left of the controller.