🎮 Venom Travel Kit | Review | A Cool Piece Of Kit For Use With XBOX ONE and XBOX ONE ELITE Controllers 🎮 @VenomGamingUK

Product link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Venom-Project-xCloud-Mobile-Gaming

Rating: ICE COOL

Available on Amazon and priced at £19.99, the Venom Travel Kit is a handy, robust and practical package designed with the upcoming Project XCloud in mind. 

For me personally, however, it was surprisingly useful beyond this and actually opened a doorway into a different realm of gaming.

For your money, you receive:

• A sturdy controller carry-case (with a flexible mesh pocket to hold spare batteries and cables etc.)
• Mobile phone controller clamp
• 2-metre USB charging cable
• Rechargeable battery pack
• A pair of Venom-branded textured thumb grips.
• Some Venom branded decals

The case is surprisingly robust and tastefully designed, perfect for situations where you take your controller to a friends or would throw it into a travel-case for hotel stays or weekends away whilst the thumb grips are more of a bonus inclusion that I took advantage of, mainly just to jazz up my controller a bit.

The battery pack is handy, especially if, like me, you are currently using standard AA batteries for your controller. 

I estimated that I got around 6-8 hours playtime out of the controller on standard XBOX games such as Farcry 5 with the rumble function being used, the battery lasts slightly longer when used on mobile games as the rumble function isn’t as heavily utilised. 

A word of warning though, that green charging light is brighter than an industrial mining torch and can get distracting, especially when playing at night where your neighbours may mistake the green, illuminating flashes as a sign of alien abduction.

The real treat here is the phone clip, it snaps on snugly to the controller and is designed so that all ports, buttons and lights are still usable and visible, yet the clip never feels in the way of your hands. It is adjustable and folds away, although is in fact so tight that feels a little tough to remove so I just got in the habit of keeping it permanently on the controller so that I could switch between console and mobile gaming more easily. 

The physical sliding movement of the phone clamp is smooth and the device overall feels both flexible, designed for repeat usage and doesn’t feel cheap or fragile. Good.

I have to admit, when I received this for review, as I don’t yet have access to project xCloud and don’t tend to play games on mobile, I wasn’t sure how - despite its solid design – it would appeal to me personally. 

I’ve missed a lot of fun-looking iOS games over the years as I just hate getting my stupid dude-fingers smudging their way all over the screen and getting in the way of the action. 

Touch-screen games of any form have always just seemed cumbersome to me. After installing a monthly trial of Apple Arcade specifically for the purposes of this review and booting up Beyond a Steel Sky, however, the benefits of this kit were revealed to me. 

As someone who has a partner that is as hips deep into gaming as I am and, more specifically, pumps hours into Animal Crossing on a daily basis, this new Venom setup is a great way that I can get some gaming done without having to play a console in a different room. 

It’s been great over the last few days trying out games that have passed me by with full controller support, comfortably mobile-gaming as my partner plays next to me, she – picking turnips and the like whilst I take Robert Foster on his journey through Union City.

When we are able to safely visit friends, I know that the carry-case will get a  fair bit of use from me taking it over for gaming parties at friends’ houses, instead of having my expensive controller clattering around a carrier bag or backpack as it did before. 

This, combined with how thanks to the rechargeable battery (which looks great on a  white XBOX controller as it breaks up the colour nicely) has stopped me caning through AA batteries means that I’m happy to give this Venom Travel Kit the Games Freezer seal of approval. 

It has opened the world of mobile gaming to my peepers, which can now view the games on a smudge-free screen.

Whilst using the Venom Travel Kit, my mind drifted back to the occasions when I saw my young nephew struggling to play Fortnite over his grandparents’ house using touch-screen controls. 

If this kit was available then, it would definitely have been a gift for him.

BRITT