Backbone Pro Review – A Controller That Wants To Be The Controller You Take To Every Device

It’s impossible to ignore mobile gaming, and in a household where the TV is shared, having a Switch or a game on my phone to play has always been important. Over the past month, I’ve been rigorously putting the Backbone Pro to the test to see if it’s not just a daily driver for a mobile controller, but also worth being a controller for my PC, TV, or tablet.

To give a rough overview of the form factor and layout, the Backbone Pro features Xbox face buttons, two asymmetrical control sticks, and all of the other buttons you’d expect, including a screenshot button and a Backbone button used to sometimes bring you back to the home app.

Not Just For Mobile Phones

There’s also the titular ‘backbone,’ the rigid flat bar connecting the left half of the controller with the right, and a USB-C port on the right interior. One of the major benefits of the Backbone Pro though, is that it isn’t just intended to be a controller for your phone, but with some nice Quality of Life options in the app easily pairs with your computer, TV, or any other Bluetooth-enabled device.

As you’d expect of the Backbone, its primary purpose is–or maybe more correctly now, was–to serve as a premium controller to plug into your phone. Whether you’re playing games locally on your phone like Balatro or Infinity Nikki, or streaming the latest games through Xbox Gamepass or Nvidia GeForce Now, this controller is meant to give you a Nintendo Switch-like gaming experience.

One unfortunate part of the Backbone Pro is that there isn’t any kind of “expand and lock” feature. Every time I wanted to get my phone into the device, I have to do a clumsy kind of expanding motion with one hand holding it open, while fumbling with the other hand to align the phone with the USB-C port.

Once it’s in, it’s extremely snug, but it’s a bit of a fight against the controller until then.

While it is a mobile controller, it’s certainly not a cramped controller (which is excellent for someone with larger hands like me). When not connected to a phone it cinches up to be approximately the same width as a standard Xbox Series X|S controller, the major difference being that the buttons for the Xbox controller are closer together, with the grips making an upside-down V shape, whereas the Backbone controls are more parallel to one another.

Another nice touch, especially as mobile phones are losing their headphone port, is that at the base of the left grip there is a headphone port.

Expanded or Unexpanded?

The parallel controls led to an interesting situation for me. While playing with a phone plugged in the spread of the controller made the straight-on halves of the Backbone Pro extremely comfortable to play with. It was easy to nestle the full controller into the palm of my hand. Conversely, the times that I played using the controller as a standalone Bluetooth device, connected to my PC or TV, in its unexpanded form, led to having to have my wrists at an odd angle.

I’d compare this experience to someone using Joy-Cons mounted in the Joy-Con grip. It will certainly work, but it doesn’t feel quite as nice as a traditional controller.

The face buttons have more space to breathe from one another, but not so much that you can’t get at all of them with a well-placed rolling thumb. While all the buttons have a more squishy feel as opposed to a click, the D-pad suffers from this squishiness the most. If you like that fast feedback on your D-pad for fighting games or retro platformers then unfortunately this controller won’t be for you.

The Backbone Software

One of the most impressive aspects of the Backbone Pro was the software in the Backbone app to back it up. Once connected to your phone you can launch the Backbone app. This serves as a hub not only recognizing what games you have on your phone, but also what streaming service libraries have to offer.

Loading up the Home Screen you can view games and apps that you’ve recently opened. It was pretty impressive to see on initial boot Balatro, which I had most recently played, as well as links to the Xbox app and Steam Remote Play.

Interestingly, there were a number of ‘Touch-Only’ games that did appear in my library, like Pokemon TCG Pocket and the New York Times Games app, but other games like Set and Pokemon Go that didn’t appear at all.

For these games that don’t officially support controllers, Backbone has a feature called TouchSync. This lets you map button presses to portions of the screen. For a game with a mobile-only interface you can make it so that pressing the A button will touch the button on the screen creating a bridge between a mobile game that’s touch only, and a mobile game that supports controllers.

I expect that for games like Pokemon Go, that don’t show up in the app at all, there’s a fear that TouchSync could be detected as a cheating tool so the Backbone app errs on the side of caution.

The other fantastic feature of the Backbone Pro controller, when connected to your phone, is that you can swap what device it is paired with by bringing up the controller’s settings. Even to this day I’ve got a separate Xbox controller for my Xbox, one for my Steam Link, and one for the PC just so that I don’t need to spend the few second unpairing and repairing.

With this app functionality, you can toggle between any of these devices with the tap of a button. I was genuinely impressed with just how easy this was. The only downside of this is that you need to have your phone physically connected to the device to access these options.

This also made it incredibly easy to be playing through a game like South of Midnight on my phone while on the couch, and then when the TV became free I could swap inputs from my phone to my TV and pick up immediately where I left off. The combination of Backbone Pro and Xbox Gamepass honestly felt like the future of gaming that services like Google Stadia were trying to achieve, maybe ahead of their time.

Backbone Pro Review | Final Thoughts

It’s clear that the Backbone’s strength, and main focus is still in being a mobile first controller. With the Backbone app you can easily turn your touchscreen phone into a controller-first experience, including the ability to ‘convert’ some games from touch to controller interface.

That being said, as more and more devices become controller compatible, especially with the advent of Xbox’s “This is an Xbox” campaign Backbone seems incredibly ahead of the curve creating a controller that not only syncs up with all Bluetooth devices, but also allows for easy swapping between them all.

If you’ve been waiting for a controller for your phone, this is going to be the one you want to buy. There’s enough smart engineering in here and forethought for the landscape that mobile and cloud gaming is heading in that it’s going to be a pricier purchase now that will pay off time and time again.

The Backbone Pro was reviewed with a copy provided to us by Backbone. All photos were taken during the review.