a must-have controller for pros

Leverless fight sticks have gained a lot of traction over the past few years, and veteran esports competitors with decades of arcade stick experience have been switching over to all-button controllers. The Victrix Pro KO Leverless Fight Stick has been designed with high-level competitors like this in mind, creating a controller that can be customized and fine-tuned within a matter of minutes.

Victrix (owned by Turtle Beach) is known for its premium fight sticks that unsurprisingly come with expensive price tags. However, the leverless market is not the same as it was only a couple of years ago. Nowadays, players have more options than ever before when it comes to picking the best PC controller, which makes it harder to stand out from the crowd. Priced at $249.99 / £229.99, the Pro KO provides you with options never before seen on a leverless controller, but will you actually benefit from these additions?

Specs

Features

When compared to cheaper leverless controllers from the likes of Sehawei and Mayflash, the Pro KO’s feature set appears to be largely the same. Functionally speaking, there isn’t much to separate the Pro KO from its competitors: RGB lighting, multiple SODC (Simultaneous Opposing Cardinal Directions) options, and high-quality switches for the buttons are fairly commonplace. It’s the finer details of the Pro KO that focus the device towards competitive players that make this leverless controller shine.

Cheap leverless controllers usually only support PC and a handful of previous generation consoles, whereas the Pro KO comes in two varieties depending on your console of choice. While this won’t cause any issues if you only intend to play at home, having support for the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X|S is essential when it comes to competitive play. Just like the Razer Kitsune, which also features a similar price, albeit without the additional buttons, leverless controllers with support for current generation consoles always come at a premium.

The standout feature of the Pro KO is its customizability, making it possible to add four more buttons to the fight stick. You can also reassign any button to any input, including shortcut commands within your favorite fighting games. Everything you need to customize your controller has been built directly into the device, a feature we’ve seen in arcade sticks but never in a device as slim as the Pro KO. Included within the fight stick is a switch puller tool, similar to what you might receive with a gaming keyboard, as well as four buttons, complete with Cherry MX Speed Silver RGB switches.

With games such as Street Fighter 6 featuring multiple mechanics tied up in button combinations, some players prefer assigning dedicated buttons to each command. This simply wasn’t possible using traditional fight stick layouts, as every button has already been assigned. Some professional players have gone as far as to mod their fight sticks, but this involves drilling into your controller and replacing the PCB to support more buttons. The Pro KO unlocks this potential for aspiring professional players, allowing you to decide whether you need extra buttons.

The Pro KO also comes with a 3m braided USB-C cable, and you won’t have to worry about random drop-outs from your cable disconnecting as it’s securely attached using a locking mechanism. Following the competitive design philosophy, there’s also a tournament lock switch that disables the fight stick’s smaller buttons, such as Start and Select. This ensures you’ll never lose a round or match based on an accidental button press.

Design

The Pro KO’s layout deviates from the norm with its placement of the four extra buttons, placing three around the jump button, and the last positioned towards the left of the movement keys. Victrix says legendary fighting game champion Yusuke Momochi helped optimize the placement of these buttons, and it’s handy to have them available if you have gaming tasks you can assign to them.

I tried out the most common layout professional Street Fighter 6 players use, gaining access to a shortcut for Drive Parry and Drive Impact. It’s clear from the get-go that these shortcuts are useful in the heat of battle, and they’re positioned in spots where you won’t have any problems accidentally hitting them.

Meanwhile, the Pro KO’s removable top plate is made from aluminum, reminiscent of the feeling of a MacBook Pro. Similar to a MacBook Pro, the Pro KO is fairly boring to look at, with the only markings on the plate being the Victrix logo and button labels. The Pro KO’s premium build quality is what separates it from the competition, considering most of the cheaper controllers out there opt for plastic rather than metal.

As a premium brand within the gaming space, Victrix is known for its understated designs on its fight sticks. In a somewhat strange move, the buttons on the Pro KO also feature RGB lighting if you want that typical gamer aesthetic. While this can look nice with certain color schemes, it’s down to the user not to opt for anything tasteless like the horrible light show mode preset. Given that the entire fight stick is customizable, though, there’s a chance these button labels won’t be relevant to you when you start moving things around. The RGB light rings surrounding each button can also be individually customized using the Victrix Control Hub software, more on that later.

Now that I’ve seen the Pro KO’s RGB lighting, I now understand why Razer decided to keep it limited to a single strip of light along the edges of the Kitsune. The stock version of the Razer Kitsune looks similar to the Pro KO, though I prefer the classier Kitsune in this respect. The Pro KO’s lighting can be customized with random colors and brightness settings to make it look silly, whereas you’ll be hard-pressed to make the Kitsune look anything but stylish.

Performance

Swapping out buttons on the Pro KO is an incredibly simple process. The fight stick has four security clips at the back of the device, and once you set these to the unlock position, the top cover can be pulled away to reveal the spare parts. Using the switch puller, it takes less than a minute to remove each button from the fight stick.

The Pro KO features hot swappable switches, as opposed to Sanwa buttons that many arcade sticks are known to use. Sanwa parts used to be the gold standard for arcade sticks, but keyboard switches have evolved in leaps and bounds over the past decade, creating a range of options to suit your exact preference. Another advantage of using keyboard switches is that it’s cheaper to replace a button if it happens to break, with most switches costing under a dollar. Even if you don’t see yourself as the type of person to experiment with new switches, this is a massive deal when it comes to the device’s repairability, as this process can be performed by anyone.

I found the Cherry MX Speed Silver switches included with the Pro KO to be great for fighting games. They strike the right balance of being both satisfying to hit and sensitive enough that you won’t blame the controller for not responding to your commands. I replaced the Cherry switches with Gazzew U4T Thocky tactile switches to see how they fared in comparison, and this resulted in a considerably squishier experience. No matter what switch you use, the buttons on the Pro KO get quite noisy when hammering in combos, so you’ll need to take that into account if you’re around any light sleepers.

Software

The Victrix Control Hub software allows you to fine-tune the Pro KO to your liking. You’re able to update the device’s firmware, run diagnostics to ensure all your buttons are working correctly, and configure the fight stick. The software lets you reassign any button to any command to create the controller scheme layout you’ve always wanted. This could allow you to create setups that go against competitive rule sets, so we recommend checking to see what is tournament-legal beforehand.

For example, Capcom’s rule set for Street Fighter 6 states you cannot have two inputs assigned as the same attack command. While you’re prohibited from setting this up in-game, you can force-customize the Pro KO to circumvent these rules. More importantly, you have the option to change the Pro KO’s SODC mode, ensuring you have a fight stick that can play both modern and classic fighting games without any issues.

As for the lighting, you can tweak each button to have its own color, speed, and brightness value. You can also switch between four lighting profiles, a helpful feature when hopping between fighting games as you’re able to use the lighting zones to help map your buttons. Lastly, the software lets you adjust your controller’s audio settings to mute your headset’s microphone, as well as adjust the game and chat audio balance.

Victrix has clearly given a lot of thought to how people will use the Pro KO, and that becomes even more apparent when you learn that most of its features can be accessed without ever installing the software. The only thing you can’t do without the software is change the lighting on the fight stick, but almost everything else can be accomplished using audio, lighting, and function buttons. This is fantastic for professional players, as you’re able to maintain the Pro KO’s full feature set without needing a computer.

Price

The Pro KO price is $249.99 / £249.99, placing it at the higher end of leverless controllers. There’s a night and day difference in build quality and functionality between the Pro KO and its competitors from the likes of Sehawei and Mayflash, though, so it’s not a surprise to see why there’s such a wide price disparity. In addition to the support for current generation consoles, the Pro KO’s user-friendliness makes it easy to customize without having to search for tutorials made by the fighting game community.

Alternatives

Razer Kitsune

In a clash of the heavyweight leverless fight sticks, the Razer Kitsune stands opposite the Pro KO as its main competitor. The Kitsune doesn’t officially support replacing the hot-swappable switches like the Pro KO, nor does it offer any customization options when it comes to remapping buttons. They’re both great options if you’re looking to compete against the best players around, just keep in mind that the Kitsune isn’t as versatile as the Pro KO.

Read our Razer Kitsune review here.

Verdict

The Victrix Pro KO Leverless Fight Stick brings together the best elements of top-tier arcade sticks and all-button controllers, making it easy for newbies to dabble into areas that were previously locked off to ordinary people. The process of adding buttons to the Pro KO is dead simple, and the fact that all the components are stored within the controller itself, in spite of its sleek build, is remarkable.

There are leverless controllers with similar features to the Pro KO at half the price. However, you won’t find the same level of thoughtfulness when it comes to catering to competitive players. From the lightweight and slim design that makes it easy to carry, to the built-in tools in case you need to swap out a broken switch, Victrix has thought of everything a professional player needs on the road.

If you’re looking for the best of the best right now, the only off-putting factor of the Pro KO is the price. That said, you won’t find a leverless controller that supports current generation consoles out of the box without paying a hefty fee. The Razer Kitsune is the Pro KO’s only rival at this price point, so the decision between the two leverless controllers comes down to how much you will benefit from the extra buttons. For our money, we’d rather have the extra features offered by the Pro KO, even if that means paying slightly more for the privilege.