As someone who generally gravitates to the couch or whatever random chair is nearby, I’m definitely open to the idea of a dedicated gaming chair. So, when the EwinRacing Gaming Chair Company reached out to GameCritics with an offer of a chair for review, it was a clear case of two birds, one stone.
Unfortunately, I don’t think this chair is going to be the one that wins me over…
Disclosure: the “EWin Knight Series Ergonomic Computer Gaming Office Chair with Pillows“ featured here (MSRP $289.00) was provided to GameCritics free of charge for purpose of review.
First things first, when the chair arrived, it was fairly easy to assemble despite the instructions being for a different model and in Spanish. Luckily, the pictures were clear enough to muddle my way through and it was ready for action in 20 minutes or so.
The chair itself is pretty flat on all of its surfaces. There’s not much natural contour and it’s firm to the point of being inflexible. There’s not a lot of give to the padding — there’s definitely no squoosh — and I ended up grabbing a small cushion to sit on.
The unit comes with a neck pillow that has a strap and buckle in order to secure it around the top of the chair, but since it’s only got a strap connecting it, the positions it can be in are limited. I ended up tossing it aside.
The chair also comes with a lumbar support pillow which has no fastening at all. It’s got a good curve to it and it forced me to sit upright in a proper spinal position (which I appreciated!) but every time I’d move in the chair, the pillow would slip and dislodge. It would have been great to have a strip of Velcro or something similar on the chair back to hold both of these pillows in place, but no such luck.
The armrests are padded, but they’re so firm that they feel like hard plastic and move only up or down, similar to any standard office chair. I moved them all the way down and out of my way, and did not use them.
There’s a lever on the side of the chair to adjust the vertical angle of the back which had good range of motion and worked fine, but there’s also a lever behind the chair to adjust the height. It’s difficult to reach this one, and I had to actually get out of the chair to adjust it because it was difficult to trigger it while also getting up to let the chair raise. I suppose the height isn’t something that will be constantly changed, but the placement still felt strange and suboptimal.
The chair is rated as “heavy duty” by being able to handle up to 400lbs and the manufacturer describes it as an “office gaming chair”, though I’m not sure what that means, exactly. It serves both purposes, I suppose?
While it looks nicely stylish and the material covering the chair (a faux leather) feels high quality, the entire point of a unit like this is to provide comfort for not just play sessions, but extended ones. Between the too-firm padding material, flat planes and the lumbar pillow that wouldn’t stay in place, this seat was simply not comfortable and I retired this chair after a weekend.
While my impressions of this particular chair weren’t very favorable, the company offers several different models, and there might be one there that’s right for you. If you’ve been eyeing one, whether it’s from the Knight series or otherwise, feel free to use discount code “gamecritics” for 20% off of any model.
Transformers fan. MOTU stan. Black Lives Matter, pro-LGBTQIA. Anti-fascist.
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