I'd happily recommend it to an adult on a tight budget, but it's not premium. It's a lightweight, soft plastic with a textured surface where you'd want it that I think feels nice but I can see why some might not. It will not survive an afternoon with an eight year old with anger issues, but I treat mine with some care and put it back in the (very cheap and flimsy, but included) plastic case it came with and I'm not worried about it. It's decent enough, imo.

The problem with recommending controllers is that so much of this is subjective. I wanted something that felt more like the Switch buttons than my wired PDP Afterglow Xbox controller did (hate that thing), and what I got was exactly what I wanted and was impressed for what I spent on it. I don't have an 8BitDo Ultimate 2C to compare it to which seems to be the direct competition in the price point (seriously, check out the Retro Game Corps vid ) - and there were some trade offs for both - 8BitDo was maybe slightly more premium feeling but similarly light and had Android only Bluetooth and wouldn't work with my Switch, the GameSir has firmware upgrade issues (don't upgrade the firmware!). Honestly, if you can get the 8BitDo, that might be the better choice for your use case - with the dongle it has a higher polling rate so less input latency, but I'm not playing anything where I'd even notice that. Also I suspect I prefer the ergonomics of the GameSir, but again that's subjective. Or just buy one of the more expensive 8BitDo controllers, it sounds like you're on less of a tight budget than I was.