CRKD Atom Keychain Controller Review | TheSixthAxis

As we head towards the festive season, it’s time to start thinking about gifts for your gamer friends and family. The tricky thing is, this is increasingly not the cheapest hobby, and a stocking filler or work-based Secret Santa is not the place to wheel out a £70 copy of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. Enter the CRKD Atom Wireless Controller. At £19.99, it’s a lovely piece of gaming novelty, and while it might look like a keyring, this is actually a fully functioning controller… with some caveats.

Connecting via Bluetooth, the CRKD Atom Wireless controller is compatible with the Nintendo Switch, as well as PC, Mobile and smart TV gaming. With CRKD hoping that gamers will be prompted to collect them all, it also comes in a variety of colours, though our review unit was delivered in arguably the best colourway: an original SNES-aping grey body and multi-coloured four-button layout.

But colours aren’t the first thing that you’re going to notice about the Atom. This controller is so small it makes the Game Boy Micro look chunky, the USB-C port for charging looking almost comically large on its shell. Compared to a Joy-Con held horizontally, it’s around the same thickness and height, but loses an inch from the length. That means it easily fits entirely in the palm of an adult hand, with any gaming you intend to do with it requiring you to lightly hold it between your finger tips.

There’s plenty of inputs crammed into its diminutive shell, with the face of the controller including a full-size cross-style D-pad. Alongside that, there’s four diminutive ABXY buttons in Nintendo’s layout, a CRKD logo-emblazoned Home button, and both a ‘+’ and ‘-‘ button as well. Lurking around the top edge, there’s a decently-sized L and R button, and then the tiniest ZL and ZR buttons you’ve ever seen. If you’ve struggled with these on the top edge of the Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Con, prepare to be amazed.

There’s a clear and obvious omission here, and that’s the complete and utter lack of analogue sticks. Many modern games simply won’t function without at least one, and their absence means that this the CRKD Atom isn’t a straightforward recommendation. Instead, it comes down to those dang caveats.

One of the key use-cases for the CRKD Atom is finding yourself suddenly able to play a game, but lacking a controller to do so. I’m thinking that you’ve popped round to a friend’s house, but it turns out they don’t have a second, third or fourth controller. Or you’re on your lunch break and you hop onto your work PC to play something via the cloud. You can whip this out of your pocket and be gaming before you can say “lunchtime Mario Kart”, but what kind of Mario Kart will it be?

Fortunately, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe plays happily with a D-Pad, and with one of these in your pocket you’re perfectly equipped to fling Toad around a few corners. I was still able to trounce the AI with the Atom, though I soon noticed the cramp that the small stature of the controller causes. It’s liveable, in a lunch break kind of way, but it’s not day-long gaming session. I don’t think that’s what it’s aiming for though.

The obvious idea for the Atom is that you’re going to be playing retro titles via the Nintendo Switch’s steadily growing library of NES, SNES and other 8 and 16-bit titles, and it’s absolutely perfect for some on-the-fly retro action. Of course, the Nintendo Switch already has the capability for two players via its only included Joy-Cons, so that limits the Atom’s use case a fair bit, but they’re definitely neither as cute or as cool, and sometimes you will want the reassuring digital inputs of a D-pad.

The Atom feels relatively solid, despite its small size, though the shoulder buttons are a tiny bit loose, allowing for some rattling if you give it a hearty shake. The face buttons and the D-Pad are absolutely perfect though, and you feel fully in control of whatever flavour of Mario you’ve got in front of you.

That’s assuming that you’re actually going to use it. The CRKD Atom is nice just as a piece of gaming memorabilia, and you can hang it from your rucksack or keys via the included strap so you can show your gaming colours to everyone. If you live somewhere like the rain-soaked British Isles, the Atom definitely isn’t waterproof, so that’s worth thinking about, but that doesn’t diminish just how lovely and nostalgic it is.

The CRKD Atom is the perfect Christmas gift for the gamer in your life. Cute, nostalgic and actually functional, everyone should have one of these on their keyring.

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