X52 Pro USB Flight Control System

i really like flying games, rogue squadron for gamecube was my favorite, so when Star Wars Squadrons came out i had to get it, and of course a flight stick. i was hesitant to spend this much on a flight stick, but i wanted the throttle with it and reviews seemed to point to this being one of the best without going really crazy on price for a casual user. i can say it did not take long before it was obvious this is worth the money. the build quality is great, it fits perfectly in your hands and can adjust for larger/smaller hands. there are buttons and joysticks everywhere on this, they are all lit so you can easily see them and they are all positioned perfectly to reach and use. you can spend hours customizing the buttons for a game but when you get it right its so smooth and give you a huge advantage over people fiddling with keyboards and controllers. it also just looks and feels amazingly cool, you will likely exclaim aloud how amazing it is several times, even while alone. perfectly adjusting your speed to come up behind a TIE fighter, then flip up the safety and blast it with missiles and strafe it into a fiery ball just feels so much more satisfying and easier to do. if i had to complain i would mention that while this has suction cups, depending on your desk, etc. this can be hard to hold in place when youre in a dogfight making hard turns. the instructions are just a paper with a link to drivers. theres no real introduction to how to set up or use the stick. for the most part you can just plug it in and play but there is a tiny app that has some options you can change. in fact for squadrons you need to change an option or you cant bind to one of the buttons on throttle.

This is a solidly built, and fully featured HOTAS that works as expected on Win 10. The programming software allowed me to set up 80 different commands and macros for CFS3, and there are still more buttons and dials left unassigned. The only issue was that the stick would frequently get hung up in the center. This has been reported by many others with a variety of root causes and fixes being speculated on. The tweak that fixed it for me was to bind a pair of adjacent coils on the outer spring to each other with 2 twist ties on opposite sides. This reduced the force on the sliding cup and cone just enough to prevent it becoming bound together without losing the self-centering function.

Can not say enough about it! Amazing customizable features, very intuitive layout. Easily attaches to hotas desk mounts. Strong spring on the stick, all the buttons can be customized to your color liking as well.

I found the joystick tends to bind in some directions occasionally. Other than that it works well for Elite Dangerous.

I bought this a few months ago to use for Microsoft flight sim 20 and for DCS. I used it on a gaming laptop with the newest windows 11. When I plugged in the HOTAS I was a little upset to see that the software didn’t work with windows 11 and only the older versions and they haven’t put out an update for it yet. There are work around a for this. Regardless though it still does work and works pretty well without the updated drivers. The only issue you’ll find is some lack of customization in keybinds and the throttle portion of the HOTAS will not light up. Either way I used it pretty seamlessly on DCS and MSFS20. For a beginner setup I think it’s a great buy. You get a ton of buttons and controls that allows you to get pretty immersed in the game without dropping $500+ on the more premium setups. Some of the pretty big YouTubers who play flight sims have started on this setup as well and still recommend it before going premium. It comes with suction cups that stick very securely to your desk and they worked very well. Once they’re down they’re gonna stay there. I had to move my setup so I removed the suction cups and I did find that once they were removed they did pop up a few times since there was no easy way to remove them in the first place without getting a fingernail under one edge and breaking the seal which did deform the edge a little. The joystick is pretty solid but the motion does feel a little “budget” the spring tension can feel weak thus resulting in some drift which can be altered and fixed in game through the axis sensitivity etc. overall I probably have about 35 hours on it and I would recommend it for a beginner budget setup again without jumping into the premium setups. If you’re just getting into flight sims and don’t want one of those all in one joysticks then this would be a good rout for you.