Tencent.

TL;DR Don't make a track pad based controller a combo deal for Dark Souls 3. I'm sure it's fine for other games.

Alright. This is an interesting controller, sure. I love the idea of being able to fully customize each button and every aspect of the controller. In theory this sounds absolutely perfect to play any steam game I could possibly imagine.

However--Now maybe it's just me--but this device (Which I specifically got for Dark Souls 3) is terrible to use. The D-pad is some sort of touch screen, along with the camera controls which flick around awkwardly more than mario in an ice level. There are two buttons on the back which I disabled, because on default they simply were shortcuts for buttons that I couldn't figure out exactly where they were in the controller unless I looked down.

For Dark Souls, this is the most unwieldy controller I've ever used. I was using an XBOX 360 controller to play the first two games, and just for a moment, lets compare the two:

The D-pad on the 360 is a physical button, so you know what you're pushing without having to look down. The steam controller is touch activated with the ability to turn that off in settings. But when I turned that setting off, it's just a disk that my thumbs can't tell the difference between up and right because the disk is a lot larger that it's suppose to be because you're supposed to be able to type with it as the left half of a keyboard.

The other disk on the right is where the rest of the keyboard is used to type things out with. That's cool if you want to, say, text your friends in between turns of a Civilization like game or something you can pause in. Dark Souls is not a game you want to have text chat in. It's too fast past to open up the menu and type, "Thanks!" when the game itself already has an emote system and wooden carvings that say, "Thank you," when you use them. The only time you need a keyboard in the game is naming your character. And you can use a keyboard for that or maybe say, an analog stick.

Lets talk about the touch pad... disk... thing on the right. In place of a camera control analog stick, it's essentially a touch pad pulled off of a laptop and it controls the mouse. I'm not sure why Steam thinks this is a good combination for Dark Souls considering the past two games have had TERRIBLE keyboard and mouse control unless you get a patch to fix up a couple essential features.

The buttons on the controller feel weirdly placed. Maybe it's because every controller I've ever used had them on the top right where the new touch pad... disk... thing is currently. There are also two extra buttons on the back for the grips. I don't mind those but the default control was drink an estus/use item on the right grip, and dodge-roll on the left. This was a little weird considering (X) is use item and is on the left and dodge is on right on the (B) button. This was easily changed in the controller menu, which I found as I played, there wasn't a good way to lock on to anything since there wasn't a camera control stick I could press down on. You can press down on the track pad... disk... thing on the right to open up a hotkey menu to do a bunch of things that looks handy but got me killed more than anything as I tried to lock on to an enemy and strafe around him when I realized I had selected to use my estus and run into a wall with my shield lowered.

Maybe they'll release a new controller chassis that has the option for track pad replacement and analog stick customization options. I really want to like this controller and I hope there are other games it works well with, but in my honest opinion... It's not good for Dark Souls.