Review: Archos GamePad

Start with a 7-inch Android Jelly Bean tablet, slap on Sony PSP-style game controls, then price the thing at $170. What could possibly go wrong?

Less than you might think. With that sticker price, I expected a sluggish, Franken-tablet kludge of a device. But the Archos GamePad marries good looks with solid performance. It's a surprisingly adept entertainment console, even if it doesn't deliver a perfect experience with every game.

Lightweight and comfortable, the GamePad looks like a traditional 7-inch slate save for the thumb-sticks, D-pads, and shoulder buttons bolted seamlessly onto its sides and top. With its slim build, gunmetal finish, and symmetrical controls, it has the pleasant façade of a device that was designed, not merely slapped together. Anyone who's ever groped a Sony PSP will find themselves instantly at home.

The tablet sports a microUSB port for charging and connectivity, a mini-HDMI port (Hello, big-screen gaming!), a front-facing camera for Skype and the like, and a microSD slot if you need more than the stock 8GB of storage (and, let's face it, you will). An ARM Cortex dual-core A9 processor and Mali 400 quad-core GPU dish up more than enough horsepower for resource-hungry 3D games.

Alas, a corner had to be cut somewhere, and Archos chose screen resolution. At 1,024 by 600 pixels, it's a far cry from Retina. That said, it looks sharper than the specs suggest, even when displaying smallish text. Plus, it's an IPS display, one that my eyes found satisfactory for games and video alike. I particularly liked the small front-facing speakers embedded on either side of the screen. They're not especially loud, but they project the sound right at you instead of away from your face, like on most tablets.

There's only one real disappointment with the hardware: the thumb-sticks. They're stiff and imprecise, which makes for a disappointing experience with dual-stick shooters like Dead Space, Shadowgun, and the bundled Dead Trigger. Movement works well enough, but precise aiming is nearly impossible.

You can work around this by relying on the left stick for movement, the screen for aiming, and the shoulder buttons for firing and whatnot. This still gives you a more satisfying gameplay experience than screen-sticks alone. It's all about tweaking the control scheme to your liking, which you can do almost effortlessly with Archos' Game Mapping Tool.

That app lives in the toolbar, so you can access it from within any game. All you do is drag a button, stick, or target icon to the appropriate spot on the screen, then hit the physical control you want mapped. And Archos already includes mapping profiles for hundreds of games, though they're not listed anywhere.

This mapping solution works beautifully with some games, but not at all with others. For example, if you'd rather button-mash than screen-swipe your way through Temple Run, forget it: You can't map swipes.

But take a martial-arts combat game like Fighting Tiger–Liberal. During the tutorial, which introduces you to the various onscreen controls, it takes just minutes to map the GamePad's stick and buttons. When you're done, what was once a frustrating attempt at thumbing a flat piece of glass morphs into button-mashing chop-socky pleasure.

Then there are platform games like Jazz: Trump's Journey and Megatroid 2, which have just a smattering of controls – usually left/right, jump, and fire – that pair perfectly to the sticks and buttons of your choice. The GamePad lends them console-quality precision, and makes them a hell of a lot more fun.

Same goes for sports games. Real Soccer 2012, for example, benefits tremendously from the left-stick/right-D-pad combo. But racing games (I tried Raging Thunder II) tend to fare worse because the controls don't allow for precision steering. In some racers, you're better off with tilt steering, though the buttons are still welcome for arcade-type features like turbo boost.

Ultimately, your enjoyment of the GamePad depends a lot on the kinds of games you like to play. For platformers, fighting games, arcade shooters, and sports sims, it's outstanding. For first-person shooters and racing games, it can be frustrating.

But don't forget, too, it's also a full-featured Android tablet capable of everything from Chrome to Kindle to Netflix. The screen might not compare with some of the latest HD models from Apple and Amazon, but this is still an undeniably impressive entertainment console – especially for the price.

WIRED Delivers a terrific gaming experience, but only with certain kinds of games. Handsome design and thumb-friendly control layout. Bright screen flanked by decent speakers. Priced lower than competing 7-inch tablets that don't have game controls.

TIRED Thumb-sticks? More like dumb-sticks. Control-mapping can be cumbersome, and you can't map screen-swipes. Non-removable battery offers so-so battery life.