The Recoil Centurion Gaming Chair is a solid, versatile gaming room/office chair that has more upsides than down. And my backside has certainly enjoyed testing it out to the max…
Assembling the chair
Yep, this thing doesn’t come pre-assembled like a lot of chairs so you’ll have to summon your inner IKEA-lover and get the flatpack-assembling part of your brain motoring.
From opening up the package, the quality of the product is clear. And I should think so for nearly two-hundred pounds (although there is a discount on the price at present). Everything is well packaged and the individual parts were all labelled.
All this good work was slightly undone by the very brief, and very blurry, instructions.
As you can see, it’s all crammed onto one sheet of A4 (a tick for being green I suppose) with no clear extensions of where some of the components join up/go through. And some of the holes on the main bits of the chair were covered by loose fabric so a bit more fiddling around was required compared to your usual flatpack. The screws came in a nice blister pack but they’re all Allen key. I don’t have a fancy electric screwdriver with Allen key bits so did everything by hand via the key provided which wasn’t the most enjoyable experience. Actual screws would have been nice.
It took about an hour to put the thing together which isn’t bad. It’s a big chair so feel free to ask for an extra pair of hands when putting the back on and these heavy hinges (pictured above, and make sure they go on the right sides). I wasn’t totally enamoured with the head pillow (more on that later) which is held on by an elastic strap that kept pinging off. The lumbar support cushion just sits on the chair with no Velcro attachment.
Using the chair for gaming
This chair is for PC gamers, there’s no doubt about it. Or console gamers who like everything neat and tidy on a desk with a monitor… So you can’t chill in front of the TV with this and you’re limited in how much you can adjust the chair for big gaming sessions.
It goes up and down like an office chair. It has adjustable armrests like an office chair. It reclines more than an office chair, but doesn’t feel wholly safe when reclined the whole way back. And you wouldn’t want it to be all the way back if you were gaming using mouse and keyboard.
As I said before, the quality is apparent in all the components that go into this chair. This includes the fabric finish of the seat and back. And there’s the real indication that this is an office chair as much as it is a desktop gaming chair. Over a short amount of time, certain bits of this will start to get very stinky, so have a good upholstery cleaner to hand.
However, where this differs greatly to an office chair is the complete lack of built-in lumbar support. The cushion is comfy-ish, but the lack of adjustable lumbar support was a real negative for me. You can’t sit on the chair without the cushion so you’ll need to work out a way of making it comfy for those long sessions.
The head pillow was completely pointless for me. It kept squirming off the top of the chair and I was more comfortable without it anyway. The lack of adjustment for head/neck support was also a real negative.
Conclusion
What we have here is a well-priced jack of all trades that can live in your office as an office chair or casual gaming chair. It doesn’t have the comfort of a bucket-style gaming chair, isn’t really suitable for console gamers, and isn’t adjustable enough to do a full day’s work in.
But, if you’re looking for a chair that’s well-made, doesn’t break your bank balance, and needs to serve a casual gamer/worker environment then you could do worse than get one of these.
It’s available at Bed Kingdom now for a discounted price of £179.99 (UK delivery only),
Dylan