HyperX ChargePlay Duo Review – PS4 Controller Charging For Two

I love a good quickly accessible controller charger. It keeps things neat and organized, frees up the USB ports on your PS4, and ensures that you always have a controller at the ready. With more than five DualShock 4s, it’s nice to know which ones are good to go at a moment’s notice. The last thing I want to be doing during a Raid in Destiny 2 is scrambling to find which one is charged when my controller dies. HyperX’s ChargePlay Duo is a convenient low-footprint solution, allowing easy swapping of controllers with clear displays that show when they are fully charged up.

Sporting a sleek and simple design, the ChargePlay Duo doesn’t try to look fancier than its function. Its shape doesn’t extend much beyond the space that two controllers would take up anyway. Allowing two controllers to sit back to back, they slide into place easily without having to struggle with finding the port. Ease of plugging in the controller is often what makes or breaks a charger for me. I don’t want to struggle to even get the controller onto the device, especially if I’m in the middle of a gameplay session when I need to quickly swap. DualShock 4s fit onto the ChargePlay Duo like a glove. A small press and click, and your controller is charging.

Full Power

In front of each controller socket is a small LED screen with a three-level indicator to show how charged up the controller is. Time to a full charge is always under two hours, or at least that’s the time until the indicator says the controller is fully charged. About 10% of the time, when I pull a controller off of the ChargePlay Duo, I’m met with low battery notifications on my PS4. Either it only charged partway or failed to charge at all, despite the battery indicator saying it’s full. Most of the time the controller is ready to go, but it’s always a little bit like roulette to see what the PS4 will say when I power the controller on.

When I first encountered this issue, I started making absolutely certain that the controller was clicking into place and the light on the back of the DualShock 4 turned orange to indicate that it was plugged in. Even then, I would occasionally run across times where the controller I pull is not charged. The issue is a low enough occurrence for me that it’s little more than an annoyance. Having a lot of DualShock 4s and charge mounts for them helps to mitigate potentially not having a charged controller, but it could end up being a problem for people with fewer controllers. Again, it doesn’t happen often, but with as many charged controllers as I go through (especially on weekends marathoning sessions of Destiny 2), the issue has come up a number of times in the couple of weeks I have been testing the charger out.

If the front of the ChargePlay Duo is opposite where the cord comes out, then the LED indicator screens are on either side of the device. Though convenient and slick looking, it’s impossible to see both of them at the same time. This isn’t going to be the type of charger you can tuck away in a cabinet, at least not if you want to see whether your controller is actually charged or not. The size of the charger makes it easy to tuck it away in some corner, but it also defeats the purpose of the charging indicators, which need a pretty wide viewing angle to be seen. If these had been rotated slightly around both face the same direction, it would make it easier to check at a glance.

Where the HyperX ChargePlay Duo falters, it makes up ground with the small footprint and ease of use. If the placement of the charging indicators doesn’t bother you and you don’t mind pulling off an uncharged controller every once in a while (firmly reconnecting it for another couple of hours usually fixes the issue), this is actually one of the most convenient controller chargers I’ve owned. It looks great as a display piece, focusing the attention on the controllers themselves rather than the form of the charger. Even with its couple of faults, I’m happy to add the HyperX ChargePlay Duo to my collection of controller chargers as one more tool to make gaming a little bit more convenient and easy.

HyperX ChargePlay Duo review unit provided for the purposes of this review. For more information, please see our Review Policy.