Complaining about touch controls is a sure-fire way for a game critic to immediately date themselves. When I was in high school back in the mid-00s, I mastered the art of typing T9 in my pocket. If you handed me a flip phone right now I bet I could still send a perfect 160 character text message without looking at the screen. Ask me to play Fortnite on my Google Pixel 4 though, and I’m going to look like I’ve never used my hands before.
I’m honestly jealous of kids that are growing up now with so many great games at their literal fingertips. As mobile has evolved into a respectable platform for real games over the last decade, my interest has only grown. Unfortunately, I simply don’t have the dexterity or muscle memory to play games with touch controls effectively the way the youths can. I often opt for the Razer Kishi because it basically turns my phone into a Switch, but I don’t always have it with me when I’m out and about and looking for a quick game to play — which is typically when I want to be playing games on my phone.
I’ve dabbled with quite a few of Game Pass’s touch-enabled games as more of a meme than anything else. I dared myself to play Celeste with touch controls, and as I expected, it was a total nightmare. I’ve had much better luck with strategy and story-driven games that don’t require quick inputs, like Slay the Spire and Spiritfarer, but when it comes to platformers, action games, and god forbid fighting games, I just can’t use the touch controls to save my life. A recent game of Overcooked! 2 nearly ended three friendships when they found out I was playing on my phone. That’s how useless I am with touch controls.
Ever the glutton for punishment, I booted up Hades on my phone this weekend just so I could remind myself how pathetic I am, only to discover that the touch controls are not only totally usable, they actually might be my preferred way to play.
There’s a couple of really smart things that Hades does that make the touch controls feel a lot better than they do in other games. First of all, the layout and customization options are incredibly clever. Rather than spacing out all the buttons equidistantly on the right side of the screen, Hades uses a radial layout with X, the attack button, right in the center. When you customize the controls, you can rotate that dial to reposition the other face button, RT and RB, and R3 into an orientation that feels natural for you. The layout prioritizes the inputs that are most commonly used so that they’re the easiest to access. This setup dramatically flattened the learning curve for me and I feel like I had all the muscle memory I needed locked down in just a single run.
There’s also an option for simple controls that changes the layout to better mirror that of an Xbox controller. While I can see the appeal of sticking to what’s familiar, the standard layout is a custom setup that just feels like a better match for this specific game. This is a handmade, tested layout created for Hades, and it’s clear that this was created to be the optimal touch control scheme.
The other really smart thing Hades does is it grants a tremendous amount of forgiveness to your button presses. You likely won’t notice it happening, but the touch controls do a great job of figuring out what you meant to press when you miss an input. The attack button has a lot more range than the dash or throw button, but each input seems to have a custom field where it recognizes misclicks. It cuts down on the frustration that comes from not having a tactile interface and strong haptic feedback, and it consistently made me feel like the game knew what I meant to do even when I didn’t do it properly.
I haven’t played everything on Game Pass and I imagine there might be other games with touch controls as sophisticated as this, but considering that Hades is already one of the best games ever made, I’m seriously impressed by how great it feels to play on mobile. The experience only got better when I switched to my tablet. With just a little adjustment to the position of the buttons, I had an awesome time playing Hades on the big screen with touch controls on either side. If you’re a touch novice like myself, you really ought to give Hades on Game Pass a try.