Review: Razer Freyja

I remember the first time I played a first-person shooter. It was Star Wars: Battlefront 2, the 2005 version, on the Playstation 2 in my friend’s basement, when I was a kid. I felt like I was right there. The frigid winds of Hoth ripped across my face, and the chatter of comms was right up against my ear. I felt the heat of blaster bolts zipping through the air, and heard them crackling as they shot past my face. I brought the scope up to my eye, aimed, steadied my breath, and pulled the trigger. A stormtrooper fell to the ground, and I felt like I’d earned a small victory for the Rebellion.

As a child, games felt immersive to me. They felt real, like I was in that world. A large part of that was my suspension of disbelief—I wanted the game to be real, and I was willing to accept it as real, so I overlooked the low-resolution textures, the polygons that I could count, and the compressed 32-bit audio. The scan lines of the CRT television in my friend’s basement faded away, and the controller felt less like a tool and more like an extension of myself. It’s an experience that slowly slipped away as I got older, one I’ve been chasing ever since.

In chasing that feeling, I’ve tweaked my setup with fine-tuned keyboards, open-back headphones, ultrawide monitors, racing wheels, and even virtual reality headsets. They help, but they're still external to my senses. The Razer Freyja, on the other hand, is a $300 haptic gaming cushion that brings gaming a step closer to a full-body experience. Sounds and actions rumble through my body and make the game world feel just a bit more like I’m sitting inside of it, instead of being an external force looking in through a window. It doesn't suspend my disbelief like when I was a kid, but it makes it much easier for all the details of the external world to disappear.

Gaming Seat

Photograph: Henri Robbins

The Freyja can strap onto nearly any gaming or office chair to create physical feedback while you game. The system can either directly connect to some games or it can vibrate based on the audio coming from your computer. It's exactly what you might think a gaming cushion looks like, and unlike some pricier alternatives, it means you don't have to replace your current chair. It is entirely dependent on the software it works with and how developers implement it.

To connect the Freyja, you’ll need both a nearby electrical socket and a free USB-A port on your system for Razer's 2.4-GHz wireless dongle. The cushion doesn’t have any batteries, so your chair will lose some mobility whenever the Freyja is connected. If you need to roll around, disconnect the barrel jack connector on the side of the cushion.

It’s robust, with vibration zones that react quickly. It could get to the point where I was being shaken in my chair, without ever eliciting a slight rattling or a stray noise. The integration into Razer’s Chroma software never had any issues and worked well. However, I ran into a few hiccups, especially with intermediary software like SimHub. The game I was playing would lose connection with SimHub, and I would have to restart my system or spend some time troubleshooting to get it working again. The Freyja didn't have connectivity issues itself, but some outlets in my house didn’t want to keep it powered. I suspect that’s a voltage issue more than anything else.

As of publication, the Freyja has full native support for 12 games and one simulation racing app, SimHub, which opens it up to countless racing games. During my testing, I focused mainly on racing games: Assetto Corsa, Forza Horizon 4, Forza Horizon 5, and DiRT Rally 2.0, all of which used SimHub’s built-in telemetry to create haptic feedback for pretty much every aspect of a car.

Photograph: Henri Robbins

Using SimHub, these are deeply customizable. You can adjust everything from what creates feedback to how it’s transferred to your seat and how intense each type of feedback is. Ultimately, these features make driving more immersive and responsive. I found myself having a much better sense of what the car was doing and where it was on the track, compared to using just a controller. I knew more intuitively when a wheel was breaking traction, if I hit a rumble strip, or whether I was going too fast for a corner. It helped me to understand the dynamics of cars more readily and made the experience feel more real.

Some small details break immersion, though. When driving on an actual track, the feedback from the car is very organic. The bumps and bounces are never fully metered, nor do they happen in the same place. But with a haptic cushion like this, there are only so many ways the feedback can be sent, and a lot of the time, they start to feel too consistent in their limited locations and intensities. This makes immersion difficult at times, especially when you’re relying on the feedback of the seat to make decisions when driving.

While the Freyja increases immersion even with a monitor and a standard controller, it shines when you dive in with a VR headset, racing wheel, and a set of pedals. The Freyja feels so much more like genuine tactile feedback from a car. Feeling like you’re inside, with your head in the cockpit and your hands on a wheel, so much of the incongruence between reality and simulation melts away. The bumps and cracks in the road transfer from the tires, through the suspension, into your seat. The torque of a full-throttle pull shakes your entire body. The steering wheel’s force feedback feels like it’s following the camber of turns. Your brain wants to believe it more, so it does, and it’s like you’re actually moving through space.

Photograph: Henri Robbins

The cushion's feedback is impressive in its detail and functionality. Even with some flaws, a haptic cushion can emulate a significant portion of high-performance driving without spending thousands of dollars on a dedicated sim-racing rig. A large part of it is having the patience and attention to detail to properly get your entire system set up, though, since the entirely independent systems of a racing wheel, VR headset, and the Freyja aren’t able to communicate with each other.

Along with racing games, I also tested the Freyja with other natively supported games, like Marvel Rivals. While the haptic feedback felt believable and was well done, a huge part of the Freyja’s experience is the desire to be immersed. The experience demands a suspension of disbelief, since the experience is ultimately only a vague impression of the things you see onscreen. I don’t enjoy Marvel Rivals—it’s a game I play because friends also play it. And so it felt like my chair was occasionally vibrating when I would do specific things.

Perhaps if I had gotten properly immersed in the game a little more, it would have felt great. But because I wasn’t invested—because I didn’t want to believe the experience—the Freyja’s purpose was lost on me. That is the largest limitation of something like this. As real as it can potentially feel, it only works because you want it to.

Non-Native Support

Photograph: Henri Robbins

Many of the games I enjoy don’t have native support for the Freyja. But there’s a solution—an audio-to-haptic mode, where it generates live haptic feedback based on sounds from whatever game you’re playing. This system isn't perfect, but it opens up game compatibility.

The Freyja loops into your computer’s audio system to create vibrations in coordination with the bass and sub-bass frequencies of whatever game you’re playing. These are split between left and right channels, and can cover frequencies between 30 and 8,000 Hz, with the lowest frequencies creating a response in the bottom of the seat, and higher frequencies spreading the volume throughout the entire cushion. The exact parameters of this audio can be adjusted, so different frequencies create different intensities of vibration, but you can’t isolate the system to specific audio sources or applications. If you’re watching a video or listening to music while you game, for example, the Freyja will function as both haptic feedback and a subwoofer at the same time.

Shooters like Star Wars: Battlefront, Destiny 2, or Red Dead Redemption 2 all worked perfectly. The deeper tones of gunshots and explosions were transmitted through the Freyja to create a sense of full-body immersion that wouldn’t be possible with just headphones. You could feel the rumble of trains shaking the ground, the boom of explosions rippling across your entire back, or bursts of gunshots thumping rhythmically. During intense moments, I genuinely felt energized and excited when using the Freyja.

Quite a few games today don’t have the most robust audio, though. When I tried the Freyja with Minecraft, there weren’t many low frequencies for it to pick up on. Because of this, I had to bring the sensitivity way up to get any response, at which point everything would create some feedback. Jumping, getting hit, or even breaking a block would cause the seat to vibrate, and non-diegetic audio like cave noises, music, or achievement alerts would create the same feedback as in-world sounds.

What's shocking is the lack of compatibility with the Freyja’s most direct comparison: gamepad vibration. Pretty much every game today already has some form of haptic feedback meant to be experienced through the grip of a controller. It seems natural that the Freyja would be able to loop into this system and use the same effects, but that functionality is absent. If implemented, it would not only expand the number of compatible games but would also offer guaranteed longevity even if developers don’t clamor to add in haptic cushion support for their games.

Long Stretches

Photograph: Henri Robbins

As much as I like the performance of this pad, calling it a “cushion” is a bit of a stretch. It’s not the most comfortable thing. The panels are fairly hard, and the thickness means both the usable area of your chair’s bottom cushion and the curvature of your lumbar support will shrink. I found myself feeling a bit uncomfortable sitting on it for a prolonged period, and almost immediately took the cushion off whenever I wasn’t using it, but the discomfort wasn’t significant enough to push me away from using it while gaming.

The Freyja was more comfortable when used on one of Razer’s own Iskur chairs, which it is explicitly designed for. It fits the form of this chair much better, and the adjustable lumbar can still peek through at a more aggressive setting. But even on the softest, most plush chair possible, you’re still putting a large slab of electrical bits between yourself and your seat cushions and drastically changing the shape of your seat.

The ease of removal (three elastic straps with snap-together clips) meant I could easily take the Freyja off when not using it. In the end, the mild discomfort of the cushion during use seemed like a reasonable trade-off for the enhanced experience and immersion it provided.

My biggest fear with a product like this is its long-term support. It’s hard to be sure your $300 investment will be worth it a few years from now. What if game developers don’t want to integrate this technology? What if an update to SimHub makes it incompatible? What if Razer decides to stop supporting it because it didn't catch on, like the Spotify Car Thing?

If the Freyja and its functionality seem appealing to you, then by all means, go out and get one. With the right setup and the right game, I loved using this cushion. It elevates a cheap racing rig into something special, and it brings immersion up massively for nearly every game I played. The system is robust and functional, and the audio-to-haptic system means most games have some level of compatibility. Even without direct support, it transforms games into a full-body experience and creates a sense of immersion I haven’t experienced in a long time.

However, the Freyja isn’t a cheat code to increase immersion across the board. It relies on the games you play—either their integration of Razer Sensa, or their audio design—and requires you, the player, to want to believe it.