The Turtle Beach VelocityOne flightstick offers a bunch of features and new design ideas, and is a stellar mid-range option.
One-minute review
Flight sim peripherals are expensive. Thrustmaster’s Warthog HOTAS is the gold standard at north of $400 and Logitech’s cheaper X56 is still more than $200. Turtle Beach wants to undercut them both with this HOTAS-flightstick hybrid and, like a veteran Tom Cruise attempting some bit of cinematic aerial derring-do, it pulls it off in style.
There are 27 programmable buttons nestled around the joystick, laid out sensibly in an ambidextrous design that makes it easy to dial in useful mappings whichever hand you operate it with. The feel of those buttons isn’t uniformly ‘premium’, with some noticeably wobblier or flimsier than others, but something had to give if Turtle Beach was going to deliver all this for $120.
It’s not a traditional HOTAS, and purists might not get on with using the throttles and flightstick all on the device. For beginner virtual pilots and space-conscious aviators who don’t want to jam up all their USB slots with flight peripherals though, the VelocityOne absolutely sticks the landing and is a top PC controller or Xbox controller for flight enthusiastsPrice and availability
$122.99 / £119.99 / AU$250
Significantly cheaper than Thrustmaster and Logitech HOTAS
Available in the US and UK
The Turtle Beach VelocityOne flightstick represents great value for money and that all begins with the design foundation Turtle Beach put in place to combine HOTAS inputs with a regular flightstick. Somebody in the headset-strewn corridors of Turtle Beach HQ can pat themselves on the back for that one.
Slapping all the combined inputs of both peripherals onto one unit obviously makes it easier to hit a lower price point than the big players in flight sim controllers.
There aren’t outright cut corners when it comes to build quality, but you can feel where some cost-saving switches and button caps have been drafted in to keep things affordable. That does mean that those after a no-compromise, truly premium control experience will find more to like in Thrustmaster’s incredibly weighty and well-constructed Warthog HOTAS. For everyone else, it’s a steal at this price point. Turtle Beach VelocityOne flightstick: SpecsTurtle Beach VelocityOne flightstick: Design & features
There’s a striking but sensible design to this unit, which works like a hybrid of a HOTAS and a flightstick. It’s laid out symmetrically, with banks of input buttons in two neat rows on either side of the stick.
