Review: PowerA Lumectra Controller's Potential is Dimmed by Preventable Measures

This summer, PowerA released a colorful controller for the Nintendo Switch under their Lumectra LED brand. The official name is Enhanced Wireless Controller for Nintendo Switch with Lumectra - Black LED, but I will refer to it as “Lumectra Controller” going forward.

In short, this is a PowerA controller for the Switch that offers RGB lighting that you can customize to make it feel more “gamer.” Thank you to PowerA for providing me a sample to review, although all thoughts below are my own. If you want to purchase your own, you can do so from PowerA’s online store (affiliate link) or various retailers including GameStop (affiliate link).

First, I want to cover the standard features that come with the Lumectra Controller. It is officially licensed with Nintendo and is compatible with all Nintendo Switch consoles, comes with a 10-foot USB-C cable to recharge the battery, includes motion control, and like other PowerA controllers has two programmable buttons on the back of the controller. So far, everything is fairly standard.

Unfortunately, like other PowerA Enhanced Wireless Controllers, the Lumectra Controller is missing HD rumble, IR camera support, and NFC for Amiibo use. Honestly, I can forgive those last two items.

The lack of any kind of rumble is frustrating though. Some games require rumble for different features and so all of a sudden you can’t use the Lumectra Controller for those games. Especially considering that this is an officially licensed controller, it’s baffling how this controller lacks rumble.

What sets the Lumectra Controller apart from other PowerA controllers? It’s the Lumectra LED lighting. You can program four different lighting zones with three lighting modes (Solid, Breathing, Cycle), and 24 different colors (six shades each of green, red, blue, and yellow) to allow for “thousands of color combinations.”

Aside from aesthetics, something that was nice about the inclusion of the LEDs is the added weight. A lot of PowerA’s other controllers have felt too lightweight to me due to no rumble system or anything else to help it feel substantial. The lighting system does add some heft which makes it feel better in my hands.

In addition, the Lumectra Controller does have a battery saving mode that turns the lights off after five minutes of inactivity which is really nice in my opinion. If you don’t care about that though, you can disable it if you desire.

Sadly, there are some problems with the lighting system. First, it has proved easy for my kids to accidentally enter the LED edit mode while playing a game. This is a problem because that means that my child suddenly can’t control anything in the game they are playing since the buttons are instead editing the lights on the controller.

The button to program the back buttons is usually not a problem with its placement, but apparently having a button directly below it is far more accessible while gaming than it probably should be. Second, the user manual that comes with the controller (or at least the manual that came with mine) is mostly unhelpful.

It has enough information to tell you roughly how to program the back buttons and the lights, but it doesn’t explain any of the more complex buttons for programming lights. It doesn’t explain how many zones there are, what the zones are, how many shades of each color there are, etc.

This created a horribly frustrating experience. Thankfully, the user manual that you can download from PowerA’s website is more comprehensive and provides more detailed explanations of everything! If you are struggling with programming the LEDs, go download that user manual and see if it helps.

At the end of the day, the Lumectra Controller feels decent to hold, looks sleek with its black shell, can be personalized via programmable LEDs and back buttons, and does cost less than the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller (MSRP is $59.99).

However, it does lack the key feature of rumble which greatly diminishes its value and comes with a terrible manual meaning you have to put in a bit more effort to find a useful manual to enjoy the programmable lighting.

It feels so close to being a “really good” or even “great” controller, but for now I would say it’s “fine.”