Great Haptics, When It Works

He couldn’t feel what I was feeling. He also couldn’t see what it was because I was sitting on it. There’s something immediately engrossing about the Razer Freyja, a $300 haptics cushion to make your back and butt feel more engrossed in the game than ever before. I want to recommend the haptic gaming chair, if nothing else, for the audio-based haptics when driving like a maniac in a racing game or to feel the kick of a machine gun without needing bulky, wearable gear. The Freyja is the near realization of the prototype I first experienced at CES 10 months ago.

As cool as it is, so many small details take away from the full promise. It requires you to plug it into the wall, and the cable is much too short, requiring an extension cord. It requires too many layers of software to get working properly. At $300, it can’t be a quick-decision purchase, even if I still think Freyja is well worth trying. Perhaps it may eventually be an easy recommendation, especially when Razer adds more supported games and gets the specific haptics on those games to work.

How is the Freyja Different From Other Gaming Haptics?

I’ve strapped myself into plenty of other haptic apparatus, from bHaptics full body suit and gloves to the odd, rotating RotoVR chair for Meta Quest. Too often, gaming haptics are a gimmick. They either hinder your play or feel more like Nintendo 64 rumble packs strapped to your chest and forearms, barely offering any sense of being “in the game.” Razer is so, so close to getting it right with the $300 Freyja. This works by translating your in-game sound into force feedback through 14 pads for your back and buttocks. It’s the least obtrusive, most engrossing haptics I’ve used, and it works for practically any game you can play on your PC.

Razer’s Freyja sits alongside the $400 Kraken V4 Pro headset, boasting haptic feedback. The headset’s sound quality deserves its own separate review, but I’ll also touch on its haptics here. You don’t really need the ultra-expensive Kraken if your only goal is to get the full haptics immersion. I’ve used Freyja with the SteelSeries Arctis GameBuds and Alienware Pro Wireless Headset and had just as good a time as with Razer’s headset. Simply put, any high-quality sound setup will do to get the most out of the $300 cushion.

It’s also a perfunctory device that makes it a hassle to use. It requires you to download several layers of Razer software just to control the “Sensa” haptics suite. You also need to plug the cushion into an outlet with an all-too-short cable. Finally, worst of all, I could not actually use the promised haptic effects built for some games.

As of writing this review, only five games support Sensa-specific haptics, including titles like Silent Hill 2, Final Fantasy XVI, and Frostpunk 2. I own these games through the Epic Games store, yet Razer’s Chroma app does not recognize them on my system. After weeks of trying to work with Razer on the issue, we could not figure out the problem.

There will be 20 games that eventually support Sensa HD haptics, but as for now, it’s a dead feature. The sound-based multidirectional haptics are already worth the price of admission, but the cushion’s software and cable requirements mean I can’t fully recommend it. And yet, it’s so good at enhancing immersion that I’m so close to telling users to ignore all those issues and find some way to try it out for themselves.

What Does the Razer Freyja Feel Like?

The haptics in Freyja are easily its most impressive quality. They work best in a more immersive game, especially well if you’re seated in the cockpit of a car or are being showered in bullets in an FPS. What’s great is that they also help with immersion in other gaming contexts.

If you’re playing a game with a heavy bass to its ambiance, like the city builder Frostpunk 2, you’ll start to interpret the rumble on your back as buffeting winds. In Baldur’s Gate III, you won’t feel much until you cast a spell or land a big attack, when the rumble moves up your spine.

Razer Chroma allows you to set the haptic gain for both the Freyja and the Kraken. Three base modes will sound off haptics for different frequencies. You’ll always get some haptics for sub-bass, but you can set it to rumble for low mids up through upper mid and treble if you want to shake every minute of play. You can set a preset for any installed game on Chroma; at least in this regard, it works well.

What’s sometimes odd about the sound-based haptics is how it might even pick up on dialogue. In a game like Ghost of Tsushima or Cyberpunk 2077, under all base settings in Chroma, I felt near constant rumble from the surrounding environment. Even talking with some characters, I get random jolts in my thighs. Goro Takemura may have a deep voice, but it shouldn’t be deep enough to feel like a subwoofer. You can cut out the sub-bass to make it more serene, but then you’ll miss out when driving and shooting.

Combined with the Kraken V4 Pro, it has almost too many haptics. The 4D feeling along your back is far more manageable, but not so much when your head is rumbling, too. Razer’s software defaults to a low level. That’s basically all I would want from earphone haptics. It was so minimal that the Kraken felt largely unnecessary.

Razer Freyja is Such an Interesting Piece of Gaming Tech Marred by Too Many Issues

Freyja problems start right at setup. You attach it to your chair via three elastic belts to hold it in place. Depending on the size of your chair, it might have some part of the cushion sticking out, as it did mine. Of course, it’s meant to fit well on any of Razer’s high-backed gaming chairs like the Iskur V2, but perhaps you should measure your setup before clicking the buy button.

As is typical of Razer, you’re forced to download convoluted software to your PC to control any of the Sensa haptics. In particular, you’ll need to use Razer Chroma. Why is Razer’s haptics locked behind its RGB control app? God knows, but it’s supremely annoying. Razer Synapse also recognizes that you own the chairs, but you can’t affect their settings. I don’t know if I’ll ever understand why Razer has so many different executables for its hardware, but it’s all the more boggling with these latest products.

At the very least, you can control the layers of sound-based haptics to get the best feel, but without the game-specific haptics, there’s no middle ground. It feels like it’s so close to being a real revolution for gaming haptics. Unfortunately, it’s just not there yet.