My sim racing setup is pretty much complete now, as far as the typical recipe goes: Solid rig, good wheel, great pedals, triple screens. Lovely.
But, there’s been a recent addition that I’m quite excited to finally experience. That would be a ButtKicker - the Gamer Plus model to be exact - which is a shaker device that attaches to your cockpit and vibrate to create rumble effects you can physically feel through your seat, like a seriously powerful version of what you get in console controllers. They're also known as 'bass shakers', which is the category of products to which this sort of thing belongs.
I’ve known about ButtKicker for years, they’ve been around a long time and from what I see anyone who has one seems to love it, but I guess I’ve never really been able to imagine what they’re like or truly understood what they do. Now that I have one, that’s about to change.
Time to see if I can put into words how much butt a ButtKicker can kick, if a ButtKicker could kick butt.
Notice: ButtKicker provided this device to me for free for review, but they have no say in what I say, and I say what I think with the cost in mind. You can find links below for places to buy a ButtKicker - these links support my work if you then proceed to purchase through them. As always, thank you to my viewership/readership for sparing your clicks and support in the past!
ButtKicker stockists:
Race Anywhere (UK/Global) 5% Off* with code DANNYLEE : https://bit.ly/3P3sNB8
Demon Tweeks (UK/Global): https://tidd.ly/3BaCbid
Ricmotech (US): https://bit.ly/3IYW8u9
RSeat (EU): https://bit.ly/3fAtN38
*Doesn't work for items already on sale, but fine for everything else
Buttkicker Mounts:
Trak Racer: https://bit.ly/3U7oN5e
Digital Motorsports: https://bit.ly/3t2FH9i
Here’s a quick roundup of my thoughts first.
I much prefer driving with the buttkicker than without. It legitimately adds enjoyment to your racing, and though it’s definitely more luxury than necessity, you shouldn’t regret getting one. I can’t actually stomach racing without it anymore!
I can see it being especially helpful to people who struggle to build a mental connection with the car. It really helps with creating immersion.
It can create noise and vibrations that could disturb others, especially if your rig is upstairs above a living area. Think carefully about getting one if that’s your situation.
Where and how you mount it seems to affect how well it works, and there’s plenty of stuff to tweak so you should definitely experiment.
Box and Contents
The ButtKicker box is quite big and quite heavy. This is an early clue that maybe this device is not here to mess about. I am a man with a simple mind; I am reassured by objects of density and the ButtKicker itself is a solid lump of a thing. It’s heavy, cold to the touch and nice to look at.
The ButtKicker comes with an amplifier to deal with the power and signal sent to the shaker, with some dials and buttons on the front for direct twiddling of some settings. The Gamer Plus includes a wireless remote which can turn the ButtKicker up and down along with some other tweakeries, very handy.
Setup
Connecting everything up is super simple - the ButtKicker connects to the amplifier, and the amplifier connects to your PC via USB. There are other cables supplied to allow a direct audio connection to consoles and music players too, but I haven’t tried it.
A bit of personal judgement comes in as to how you mount the ButtKicker to your rig. Lots of cockpit manufacturers offer a ButtKicker mount which is just a stub that it clamps onto or you can bolt it directly to your cockpit somewhere with the mounting holes at the foot of the shaker unit. I happen to have a bit of profile sticking out that I can clamp it onto and so far my best results are when I mount it this way. I tried mounting it directly to my cockpit's aluminium profile via the mounting holes, bypassing the clamp altogether, and I could barely feel it. It seems that the offset positioning of the clamp actually aids the ButtKicker's effects, so if you’re underwhelmed with it on initial testing then you definitely need to experiment with where you put it.
Driving
With everything hooked up and live, I headed into the action to try it out. My sim of choice as my subscribers will know is iRacing. The first time I clicked Enter Car, I held my breath and waited a moment for things to fire up and feel what the ButtKicker would do. As my on-screen Audi R8 fired up, my seat suddenly buzzed into life, albeit faintly. I clicked the volume up on the remote to give it a bit more juice until the rumble of the idling engine could be clearly felt at the tail end, even as the car sat motionless without me touching the controls.
I revved the virtual engine and sat in fascination of how I could now feel a physical sensation that tied together what I was seeing, doing and hearing. Clicking the car into gear, the ButtKicker sharply jolted to mimic the gearbox biting 1st. OK, this should be good - let’s get out on track.
As I drove around my mind was torn in two - one half was going through the motions of driving around the lap like I’ve done time and time before, but the other half fixated on something completely new to me. The cockpit is now made live by a rumbling of a simulated engine, but as you accelerate up the rev range and the noise rises, so does the ButtKicker, and the resulting effect is sent straight through your hips and back, and can even be felt through the soles of the feet because the vibrations are conducted through the entire cockpit and up through your pedals, though that might vary depending on the cockpit type.
Changing gear is now accompanied by a short kick of energy that shoots through your seat, pretty much how you might imagine a racing transmission would feel as it pops into the next cog. Suddenly, the simple act of accelerating in a straight line is interesting and so addictive.
When you push the car too hard under braking and the ABS cuts in or a tyre locks up, you can really feel the imagined chassis stutter underneath, it’s immediate and unmistakeable - that’s going to come in really handy.
Curling the car into a corner too quickly the rear gets a bit loose and starts to float, and so I feel a high frequency buzzsaw vibration that does a great job of conjuring the image of the rubber chattering across the track surface as the grip is broken.
I keep going and going until I reach the point where these new sensations become the new normal, I’m settled in and enjoying the extra dimension to driving, it now feels totally natural.
So far so good, but one of the best ways to tell if a piece of kit is truly doing anything is to rip it back out of your life, cold turkey, and see how much you miss it. So I do just that, by reaching for the remote as I drive down a straight and pressing the ButtKicker remote’s power button.
When the ButtKicker fell still, it felt like one of those scenes in films where a car drives off a cliff at speed, floats through the air in slow motion, and everything just goes quiet.
Moments ago I felt a real sense of grounding, as though I was driving a real machine connected to the track. Now, I feel like the road has just been dropped from underneath me and replaced with fresh nothing. Driving without the ButtKicker is comparatively boring, you feel the difference instantly when it’s switched off. Yesterday I was very much content driving without the ButtKicker, I didn’t know any better and I could live my days out happily without one because I didn’t know what they’re like. Now, I feel like a baby that’s just been introduced to ice cream and had it torn away from me. Sneaky how this device so quickly becomes an essential part of your sim racing experience...
In races, the persistent effects of the engine and gear shifts helps make things more fun, for sure, but the tyre locking effect did really help me keep things nice and tidy as races draw on and my standards slip. Having that physical cue when I’m being too scrappy helps me sharpen up and reign it in before I push it too far, I definitely like that. All in all I’ve become smitten with the ButtKicker's effects and I can’t imagine sim racing without it.
It is possible to push the effects too far and end up with clipping. When this happens, the ButtKicker can suffer a split second pause, like it’s been stunned, and there’s an LED on the amplifier to tell you if the effects are clipping. When that happened to me it was because I’d turned up the gear shifting effect too much, and putting it back down to neutral sorted it out.
Noise
Briefly on a more practical topic, noise. The ButtKicker is a powerful thing and it does what it does by creating vibrations that can be very intense if you so wish. Because of this, you may find that noise could be a factor. Your rig can become a bit like a gigantic tuning fork when the ButtKicker's putting out high frequency vibrations, the problem is that you just don’t want to turn the intensity down because the effects are addictive. I’m sure I can dial this out with some clever mounting and isolation but the majority of us are just gonna slap it on the rig like I have so my experience is representative.
This is one situation where all you blokes that have been kicked out of the house and into the garage with your sim rigs can rejoice because this won’t be a problem for you at all, turn it up and have yourself a good time, but if your sim rig is upstairs above the living room, or right next to a wall adjoining your neighbours, put some serious consideration into this before you buy.
Software
The software demands a little mention, because it’s a bit peculiar. It looks and acts like any other peripheral software, only ButtKicker's Hapticonnect utility is sliced into 3 versions - base, standard and ultimate. Standard is included with the Gamer Plus model, but ultimate is 30 dollars extra. Standard includes access to the full effects for 6 popular sim racing games, being iRacing, ACC, Assetto Corsa, F1 21, F1 22 and Dirt Rally 2. If you happen to want a ButtKicker just for those titles, you don’t need to pay a penny more, but if you happened to be an rFactor 2, Raceroom or AMS2 fan for example then you would need to buy extra plug-ins for a few dollars each per title, or upgrade to ultimate for 30 dollars extra and get all plug-ins for life.
I think it’s absolutely bonkers to slice up the device software into separate tiers and charge money to unlock full functionality - even if Standard is included with the Gamer Plus - and when I spoke of this approach with others, they were equally confused. It’s not megabucks but it’s going to catch some people out.
If you’ve just paid a few hundred for a ButtKicker Gamer Plus, you would never expect to have to pay extra to unlock full functionality for the sim you like the most. This sort of thing is commonplace in the world of business products, but you just never expect it for a direct to customer item and I think they’d be better off adding an extra tenner to the product price and scrapping that model entirely, it would raise less eyebrows.
Conclusion
So to wrap things up, I really like the ButtKicker, I can see why they’re still making these after so many years. It adds an extra dimension of feedback to my sim racing that I have to say I don’t want to be without. Once it’s felt, it cannot be unfelt, and for that reason I think this is a worthy addition to a sim rig if it’s within budget. 75% of what it adds goes to immersion and experience, but it can contribute to your consistency and race pace in a practical way because you’re getting additional cues when you lock the brakes or push too hard which has already helped me pay more attention to the car. If you do get one I am pretty confident that you will quickly fall in love with it like I did, after 15 years of sim racing myself it’s just nice to experience something genuinely new to me.
That’s all for now, thanks for reading and remember to check out the purchase links below if you're out shopping. Cheers.
ButtKicker stockists:
Race Anywhere (UK/Global) 5% Off with code DANNYLEE : https://bit.ly/3P3sNB8
Demon Tweeks (UK/Global): https://tidd.ly/3BaCbid
Ricmotech (US): https://bit.ly/3IYW8u9
RSeat (EU): https://bit.ly/3fAtN38
Buttkicker Mounts:
Trak Racer: https://bit.ly/3U7oN5e
Digital Motorsports: https://bit.ly/3t2FH9i