by Amr (@siegarettes)
- Retroid Pocket 2+
- $100 via Retroid, $150 via Amazon
- Android based emulation of whatever systems you can load onto it, up to the Dreamcast
Emulation handhelds sell an incredible promise. Multiple generations of consoles and handhelds, all on a single device , with a unified control scheme and the added features of years of emulation development. But more often than not, these devices are a bundle of compromises with features packed in no matter if they make sense.
The Retroid Pocket 2+ initially seems to be exactly that–an incremental upgrade for a sub 100 dollar device, reusing the same shell and awkward controls,running on an outdated version of Android. No matter how you cut it, any modern Android smartphone with a decent USB controller is going to outpace it in performance. So it better offer some other compelling reasons to pick it up.
Before we start, I want to note that this isn’t a comprehensive overview, or technical deep dive. There are others who’ve already done that better than I can, and have thoroughly tested emulation performance with a variety of systems and games. Any metrics I put out would likely be outdated by the time I put out this review, anyhow.
Instead I’ll be looking at the device’s practicality,and how enjoyable it is to play games on, based on my own personal experiences and preferences.
We’ll find out what, if anything, kept me playing this thing for three months, instead of putting it down and picking up a more powerful device instead.
Let’s get this out of the way first: despite improved buttons, an added touch screen, and a significant power boost, the 2+ is still held back by the controls it inherits from its predecessor.
The Retroid Pocket 2+ uses the same Switch style buttons and sticks, but the cramped layout means they lack the offset d'pad and button placement. To prevent the right stick from interfering with the face buttons, they’ve shortened it into an analog nub, that technically offers analog control, but is clumsy and stiff enough that it’s not useful for anything requiring precision. And trying to operate it in tandem with the left stick and shoulder buttons results in awkward and painful hand gymnastics.
That left analog stick, by the way, isn’t recessed at all, causing it to snag on sleeves and pockets.The function buttons are also crammed awkwardly together near the bottom, with no real space to separate them. The raised profile generally makes it possible to differentiate them by feel, but I’ve definitely quit a game accidentally when I meant to pause.
Its saving grace are stacked shoulder buttons and upgraded button switches. Stacked shoulder buttons are still sadly uncommon in this space, especially in this price range and size, and it makes it much easier to access all the controls on systems like the Playstation. Retroid has also replaced the switches on the d'pad and buttons, making buttons easier to press, and reducing fatigue over long periods.
The addition of a touchscreen is very welcome, since operating Android without one on the original Pocket 2 was a nightmare. It’s one of those features that should have been included to start with. Though I do have to mention it’s not great for touch heavy games,even if there are ways to side step that.
I bought the original Pocket 2 nearly two years ago, being the best performing device in the sub $100 range. Emulation performance was…barely passable. There was a lot that *technically* ran but wasn’t enjoyable to play, and it struggled more than I thought it would with certain 2D games. 3D was laughably out of the question.
For me to say that something runs well, I expect it to play full speed, with no major hitches, without frameskip and consistent frame pacing. It should work more or less as well as original hardware, with minimal tinkering, and adjustments only necessary for enhancements. I enjoy the process of tinkering and dialing in my personal settings, but putting in half an hour or more just to get a game running isn’t worth my time. At that point I might as well shove a monitor into my bag and set up the original console each time I want to play a game.
The original Retroid Pocket 2 fell short of every one of those expectations. Still, it was good enough for me to finish half the Mega Man X games,and throw on some shorter games and ROM hacks to kill time between tasks or travel.
The Retroid Pocket 2+ is, in short, what the original should have been with to start. Performance is finally what you’d expect out of a device in this range, with highly accurate emulators for 2D systems running at full speed, without frameskip, and 3D games are a lot more feasible on the device.
Dreamcast is the highlight of the device, with the 480p screen being a perfect match for the Dreamcast’s VGA output, and the limitations of the controls being a good match, aside from the lack of analog triggers. My initial tests were done with the Redream standalone emulator, which I found frustrating and limited, but after switching to Flycast almost every game worked with little to no tweaking. And games that had issues ironically ended up working in Redream.
Playstation is at a point where it’s basically plug and play, which means I can set aside my PSP and Vita as my go-tos for portable Playstation games, which before this held their spot for a decade and a half. The added convenience of being able to straight up load ISOs through an SD card or USB C cable, without going through the eboot conversion process, on top of the general quality of life improvements brought by the Duckstation emulator has resulted in me playing Playstation a lot more regularly.
Speaking of portable Playstation, PSP apparently has wide compatibility on the Pocket 2+. I say apparently, because I’ve only tested a few games, to see if it worked for the purpose of this review.I might not use my Vita or PSP for PS1 emulation anymore, but nothing beats original hardware in terms of controls and ease of play.The PSP already has a built in sleep mode, so it’s just as simple to pick up and put down, and 4:3 aspect ratio of the 2+, while a great fit for a majority of older consoles, is a poor fit for the PSP’s widescreen presentation. With letterboxing the effective screen size of PSP games is 8.5cm, down by 2cm from the already cramped screen of the PSP Go, which stands at 10.5cm. It works in a pinch, but I’m not that desperate to have everything on one device.
Likewise, GBA games run great, but make a poor fit for the screen. The 3:2 aspect ratio doesn’t lose as much in terms of letterboxing the image, but the resolution means you’ll be choosing from a miniscule 1x scale image, or uneven scaling and applying filters to interpolate or blur the uneven pixels. Again, it’s passable, and the extra buttons might even offer some advantages in creating custom control schemes for titles more limited by the GBA’s original hardware, but at this point I’m so spoiled for good choices I’m not willing to compromise there.
Returning to the SEGA side of things, Saturn emulation is a nice bonus when it works.My initial setup seemed to black screen on a majority of games, but reinstalling the app after updating the emulator and Retroid firmware, suddenly plenty more games were playable. Some games still just don’t work at all, or have severe sound or sync problems, but enough of them do more or less run with minimal tweaks. Save states and other features are still a bit buggy, but that’s more a problem with the relative difficulty of Saturn emulation.
N64 emulation has likewise always struggled with emulation, thanks to the major ways that it differs from the standard architecture computers use today. Performance was initially so miserable that I gave up on it. Even after spending a half hour or more on single games, and following the several community settings guides, I could not get them to run at an acceptable level.I nearly wrote this review with a recommendation that you skip it entirely.
But once again, a major update made several more games playable out the box, or with one or two tweaks. The Pocket 2+ still isn’t powerful enough to approximate the N64’s image processing features, so there’s a rough, inaccurate quality to it–but if you’re lucky you can play through certain games with no major issues. I have no idea what makes a game playable or not–I’ve had Tetris of all games stutter and drop inputs, while hacks like Smash Remix play relatively fine.
For both N64 and Saturn you’ll also be bottlenecked by the limits of the original consoles themselves. A lot of these games ran like GARBAGE on original hardware, so accurate emulation would technically replicate that. Some games can potentially run faster if they were designed for uncapped framerates, but in a lot of cases this’ll either run the game too fast or make emulation even more unstable.
Another problem is that Saturn and N64 controllers use layouts different from the current standard, so unless you’ve got a controller with six face buttons, you’ll either be using a compromised, awkward universal control scheme, or making custom controller profiles for every game. N64 games that use the whole controller are genuinely painful to play on this.
Oh and before you let anyone convince you that this thing plays PS2 or Gamecube games–it doesn’t. Sure, you can get select games to a barely playable state with a lot of work, but even for simpler titles I’ve had to run them with a lot of frameskip, often at half the original resolution, to get them to play at a smooth frame rate.
There are community compiled lists with “ideal” settings, but even when working with those I was spending more time tweaking settings than playing the games, and I felt my time was better spent playing any of the thousands of other games on this device that run without problems.
Even with emulation for those two systems improving every day, you’re better off looking at a device with more power that will be able to take advantage of them.
That said, the experience IS improving. As I’ve alluded to a few times,the Retroid Pocket 2+ has seen its share of updates. Not only to the included emulators, which have been updated independently by their authors, but for the device itself and the included custom game and app launcher.
Since I received my unit, there have been two updates, the major 1.8 update and a smaller 1.9 update. The former added updated software and custom configurations for emulators that made a lot of games more playable out of the box, as well as addressing complaints people had with the launch software. The 1.9 update likewise aimed at complaints about the launcher, adding in navigation features that further smoothed out the experience. Importantly, these updates are delivered “over the air”, meaning you can download and install them directly via wifi, without needing another device.
As for the custom launcher itself, it’s a weird mix of design languages imitating both the Switch UI and Emulation Station. Standalone Android apps are organized into a way too small 2x2 grid, and emulators are in a single row tile view, not unlike the Switch. Neither of these are comfortable to use, personally, and as of writing, only app tiles can be reorganized–in a very clunky way–and emulation tiles are stuck in the order you’ve added them. Meaning if you want to reorganize you have to remove and add them again, possibly losing settings in the process.
The whole thing is honestly missing a lot of features you’d expect to be the baseline, and the original version of this software was even more lacking, missing options to add consoles like the MEGA DRIVE even though they had entries for systems like Gamecube that this device isn’t suited for at all.
But importantly, while I wouldn’t consider this a good experience yet, Retroid has shown a willingness to take feedback, incorporated suggestions into their updates, and delivered those updates at a reasonable timeframe. Handhelds like this rarely get any long term support, generally leaving the community to improve on the experience, so it’s rare to see major, actually useful updates from the developers themselves. Those initial problems I’ve mentioned have already been addressed, with other unexpected improvements that genuinely made my experience measurably better.
Features like being able to launch a game with a specific Retroarch core OR standalone emulator, the ability to get the checksum of the file for better game database matches, and the immediate inclusion of relevant emulators in the initial install–all make it easier to get up and running sooner.
There’s even handheld specific options to tweak options for Xbox or Switch style controller layouts, how the screen behaves when connected to an external display, assigning buttons to touch controls, or quickly enabling and disabling Google Play to eke out a little more performance.
It won’t make emulation plug and play, but it’s clear Retroid are making efforts to make the process as simple as possible.
And if you don’t like the way they chose to handle features or presentation, because this is an Android device you can sidestep it completely. Other gaming front ends exist with different navigation styles and aesthetics, or you can do what I do and stick mainly to the regular Android UI.
Now, given that I’m basically using it as a low powered Android device, it’s worth returning to the question: why bother with this instead of paying the same price–or less–and taking advantage of the powerful hardware already on the very phone I’m filming this with?
Well, never to be one to resist a frivolous purchase, I did exactly that, for comparison’s sake. What I found confirmed a lot of assumptions I’d made. The most immediate difference is how easily my Pixel 6 powered through every system that gave me trouble on the Retroid, and the controller I used provided a more comfortable and ergonomic layout.
Systems like the Playstation weren’t even a challenge, and I could easily push 3-4x native resolution–probably more if my phone’s display could display it. Gamecube and Wii games were a bit less steady, but this has as much to do with mobile specific emulation issues as it did the complexity of the games. Still, I was able to run games like Sin and Punishment: Star Successor, which have TONS going on all the time, at 2x resolution, with basically no slowdown outside the places they’d lose frames on actual hardware.
Even older games are improved, with the BSNES and mGBA cores able to output perspective corrected, high definition textures for games that use Mode 7 style scaling.
And naturally, this setup works great for native Android games, something that the Retroid can struggle with, even when it has enough power, thanks to incompatibilities with how each game adapts to the aspect ratio and low resolution.
So again, why bother? Part of it has to do with the current ecosystem of phones, one that makes it simply more practical to have a different device. Phones might be absurdly thin now, but the wide dimensions a lot of them use means that with a controller they’re impractical for pocket gaming, let alone other everyday functions. Imagine trying to call, text or pay the train fare on a Nintendo Switch, and that’s basically the experience you’re getting. As if the spirit of the NGage possesed your phone. No, more often you’ll be assembling and disassembling it whenever you wanna play games, which is a hassle in its own way. The 2+ has its own annoyances, but it’s much simpler to pocket.
With the 2+ I won’t be burning through the battery of the device I rely on for every day tasks either. Even on a phone with a good battery, gaming eats up a ton of energy, and a gaming session is naturally going to end up limiting the time you have to text, call, look up directions, or even pay for things, if you use a digital wallet. When that battery drops below 30% forget about games. There’s no way I’m risking access to all that to play games.
By comparison, I never worry about the 2+. The 2+’s battery has lasted for DAYS, even up to a week, without charging, with regular use. Even at 10% or less I found there would be plenty of juice left to get in an hour of gaming on my commute home. It was actually hard to get an accurate idea of how long the battery would last, because before it ran out I'd want to add another game or app to it, and inadvertently end up charging it in the process.
Phones have also been trending towards non-expandable storage and removing the headphone jack. Any games you add to your phone will immediately be competing with space for other apps and media. Putting just a fraction of my Retroid’s SD card on my phone had me immediately needing to clear out space, since I already use it to shoot video and listen to music.
Oh and on the subject of headphone jacks allow me to go on an oldhead rant about how that’s one of my least favorite trends in tech. Wireless headphones seem like a great convenience, until you have to worry about dead batteries or switching between devices. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but being forced into the headphone jack free life did make me reconsider which combinations of gadgets and headphones were practical to carry with me.
Thankfully, the Retroid has both a standard headphone jack, and pretty good Bluetooth. Again, doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it meant that I could keep both the Pocket and my phone connected to wireless headphones,and seamlessly switch between them if I needed to take a call, listen to music, or look something up.The 2+ even stays connected when you put it to sleep, and automatically connects to my headphones when I power them on, which puts it ahead of the Switch in that respect.
Bluetooth seems to work better with wireless controllers than on my phone, so if you’re one of those sickos that always has a controller on them you can whip it out and use the 2+ as some kind of mini console. About the only time I had an issue with Bluetooth was during Saturn emulation, where it was clear emulation performance was causing audio lag.
And if I need to switch devices quickly, take it along with older devices, or power headphones that need some more OOMPH, the headphone jack is there. Ya know, it seems weird to explain why I bother with a HEADPHONE JACK but people do genuinely ask me why I care.
Screenwise, the low resolution, squared off aspect ratio may initially seem to be a compromise, but make the 2+ more suitable for older games. Everything up to the Dreamcast era was more or less designed with 4:3 screens in mind, meaning even if you stick with integer scaling you’ll often get a picture that fills out the entirety of the 2+’s screen. By comparison, the ultrawide ratio of my phone means an effective screen size that is either the same or SMALLER than the 2+, but with pillarboxes nearly as large as the image itself. Most games before the Xbox 360 maxed out at 480p or lower as well, so compared to original hardware the 2+’s screen is as sharp or sharper than native quality.
The numbers work out a little differently for the 2+’s TV output. A micro-HDMI port keeps the USB-C port free for charging, or additional controllers and accessories, but you’ll be seeing the same standard definition resolution, upscaled by your display so you can pick out every visible flaw. And while the Retroid’s screen itself is 640x480, the output from HDMI is a slightly strange 720x480. As far as I can tell this mostly results in a slightly wider Android UI and NOT stretched pixels in game, but I don’t have the hardware to test it properly. At least when comparing the in-game image to the Retroid’s display simultaneously, they seem to line up.
Most widescreen displays should display the 2+ perfectly OK, with results varying depending on how your screen handles upscaling. My computer monitors all display the output fine, in relatively crisp quality, but on my 4K TV it looks like GARBAGE.
(Honestly, I don’t know why an oldhead like me even owns one, it basically just makes everything I don’t play in 4K look worse, which is most games for me these days.)
Oh and while we’re getting into niche and hyper-specific situations, depending on your display’s options, the 720x640 resolution WILL mess with your attempts to connect it to a 4:3 monitor without uneven pixel scaling.
Even with this mountain of caveats, I still enjoyed the jury-rigged setup of using the 2+, connected to a TV, and even sometimes an external controller and power supply if needed.
If you really wanna push more impractical setups, you could probably set up a USB hub and connect some controllers to play 4-player Super Bomberman or something. At that point I imagine it might start impacting performance, but nothing’s stopping you.
That sort of describes the Retroid Pocket 2+ on the whole. There are tons of situations it works great for, and plenty more where it’s unreasonable to expect a good result. But it’ll still let you try.
Practice runs of Shinobi 3, Star Fox 2 with a Super FX overclock, sneaking in rounds of Cosmic Smash on transit, catching up on fan translations and hacks, and creating a setup to easily switch to tate mode for arcade shooters–the 2+ has been flexible enough to pull off every one of these. I even got my word processor working as a Bluetooth keyboard to play Typing of the Dead. And I’ve got a long list of other games and ridiculous ideas I’m looking forward to trying out.
Emulation handhelds are as much about the platform they provide as the device itself. In a world full of RGB mods, boutique cables, upscalers, linedoublers, FPGA hardware, ODEs,modded consoles and endlessly evolving emulation, it can be easy to get focused on finding the BEST solution for playing every single game in your library. But at the end of the day, the one that gets you to just sit down and play the games is the best one.
Even as someone with a million hyper specific, incredible options, the Retroid Pocket 2+ was what did that for me. For some situations there are still other devices I’d pick over this one, but on most days, when I just wanted to play some games, the 2+ was my go to.
It’s a machine constantly grinding against its limits, full of frustrations and some outright bad design decisions–but it plays the damn games, and often enough, plays them well. Right now, that’s acceptable, but with so many obvious flaws it’s easy to imagine something making it immediately redundant within a year or so.
But for the last few months I can genuinely say that I’ve enjoyed games more, and finished many I wouldn’t have had time to sit down and play. So until the next big thing, I’ll be enjoying all the time for gaming the Retroid 2+ has given back to me.