Acer Predator Rift review: "A great balance of squish and structure that really works"

The Acer Predator Rift may confuse some. While Acer’s PC-centric Predator brand is one that’s likely to feature somewhere across your setup, it’s probably not the one that comes to mind when searching for a new gaming chair. Sure, Acer has come out with showstopping all-in-one pods like the $14,000 Thronos, but it still hasn’t come close to establishing a reputation as a major player in the gaming chair arena.

But what if one of the best laptop brands could also deliver some of the best gaming chairs too? For $299 / £299, it's not outside the realm of possibility that the Predator Rift competes with overly expensive premium brands as a cheaper alternative.

I got the opportunity to check out if Acer's gaming chair could live up to its pedigree and – spoiler alert – it does. At least for the most part.
 

Design and Features

The Acer Predator Rift sports a pretty classic gaming chair silhouette, with a high headrest and curved back. Its cover is black with a matte finish, which is a great choice when it comes to synthetic leather, as it lends a little more of a premium feel than the shiny pleather alternative. The blue chevron stitching down the main body of the chair and racing stripes give it an eye-catching but not gaudy pop of color. You’d better hope you like the colorway on the Rift, as that’s the only one it comes in. No contender for the best pink gaming chairs here, unfortunately.

Mercifully, the Acer Predator Rift’s design has saved me the indignity of having the brand name printed on my at-work office chair. Sure, I’m a total beast when I’m #gaming but HR would agree that “predator” isn’t a word that has especially positive connotations. Instead, the chair is emblazoned with the Acer Predator logo: an angular, abstract animal-skull-meets-butterfly design that is perfectly inoffensive even to non-gamer aesthetic sensibilities.

The Acer Predator Rift is like if you took the dubstep out of an MLG montage and played Adele over it. On one hand, it’s definitely trying to court an audience of wannabe eSports champs and teenagers with kitted-out gamer dens. However, it’s still subtle enough in its execution so as not to alienate those who have no idea what Gfuel is and are just looking for a nice, comfortable desk chair. 

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How does it succeed in being that nice, comfortable desk chair? For a start, it has a decent number of features, especially for a chair in its price range. There’s a wide range of adjustments that can be made to both the height and angle of your chair. Also, the armrests are adjustable in eight directions – a mechanism that's controlled by buttons that I mistakenly activated a shameful amount of times during my testing process. There’s not a whole lot of width to the armrests, so when I would go to reposition myself in my seat, it wasn’t uncommon for me to accidentally trigger the 4D motion with the pressure of my hand.

While there’s no real lumbar support built into the chair itself, the curve of your back is well supported by the chair’s detachable cushions. I’ll admit that this is a feature that I wasn’t initially optimistic about. I’d been burned too many times by this ergonomic compromise — I’ve had too many lumbar support cushions that would constantly shift out of place and eventually be transformed into a sad, squished prism by me accidentally sitting on it. 

Thanks to the taut elastic straps on both cushions, the headrest and lumbar support on the Acer Predator Rift are secured tight enough that they won’t move until you want them to. This is the kind of compromise I’m willing to make — it’s not quite the highly customizable lumbar support system you’d find on a higher-end chair but it’s still a functional alternative that more than impresses me at this mid-level price point.

Assembly

The Acer Predator Rift is one of the most foolproof assembly processes I’ve ever come across. Save from buying yourself a literal beanbag, you’re not going to find a chair that is easier to build than this. The single-sheet instructions included serve a similar purpose to those “DO NOT EAT” messages found on bags of silica gel: they’re there out of obligation rather than anyone sincerely needing their guidance.

To further eliminate any boundaries to successful assembly, the bolts used to attach the armrests are already in the chair upon shipping. No need to keep track of a little baggy of screws or worry about if one’s happened to have gone missing. All the process asks of you is a little over twenty minutes of your time and half of your attention. Parts of the chair even have helpful directional stickers that will save you the brain power of figuring out left from right.

Having anticipated the assembly to be a far more significant challenge, I had called my partner to supply a second pair of hands. Said pair of hands were instead put to work breaking down and binning the thankfully rather modest amount of packaging the completed chair left in its wake. Thankfully, there is no player two needed to put together this gaming chair. 

Performance

The Acer Predator Rift is free of any objectively awful gaming chair sins like being squeaky or uncomfortable. Beyond that, things get a tad more subjective. There are as many perfect chairs in this world as there are rumps to sit in them. Like some kind of gamer Goldilocks, it’s all about finding one that works for your own seating preferences.

For example, the dense foam of the Acer Predator Rift offers a great balance of squish and structure that really works for what I want in a chair. As someone who fluctuates between slouching and hunching over my desk, my spine needs just  a little extra tough love to keep it straight during the day. Based on my experience with various gaming chair brands, Noblechairs were too hard, Boulies were too soft, but Acer was just right.

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The seat portion of a chair is another point of contention for sitters the world over. In this case, the base is a tad narrower than many on the market and it comes up in a steep flare on each edge. In my experience, it prevented me from shimmying too far to one side or the other. This was not only great for regulating my seating posture but it was also oddly comforting. It's sort of like having a fence for your behind. It did make it impossible for me to sit cross-legged though but to be honest, I may be the only weirdo who enjoys doing that in the office. 

Of course, this experience will vary based on your build. I would consider myself a fairly stocky individual – I am a broad who is broad. However, according to the wisdom of statistics, I am smaller than the average American woman; which I can only infer means there are plenty of bodies that need a little more room than the Predator Rift can offer. If you’re plus-sized or just especially bottom-heavy, those lovely raised sides probably won’t make you feel secure, they’ll instead dig into your hips. In short, if you’re floating just below the Rift’s 120kg weight limit, you still might find it a tad too small for you.

Should you buy the Acer Predator Rift Gaming Chair?

 The Acer Predator Rift is an awesome choice for a gaming chair below £300. However, it's not going to be perfect for everyone. If you prefer a softer foam, need a larger chair, or want more options for color-coordinating with your set-up, the Rift is going to just miss the mark.

However, in pretty much every other area, it excels. If you want a comfortable chair that won’t break the bank but still feels oddly premium, pick yourself up the Acer Predator Rift. The best news is, once it hits your doorstep, you’ll be sitting comfortably in it in less than 30 minutes.

How we tested the Acer Predator Rift

The Acer Predator Rift served as my main desk chair day-to-day for a month. During this time, I had the opportunity to use it for eight hours a day, so it received some seriously extensive testing.

For this review I considered a number of key elements like build quality, comfort, and value to form a composite impression that informed my final review. All of these were considered relative to other gaming and office chairs I had experience using from brands like Razer, Bouiles, Noblechairs, and Secretlab.

For further insight into how we review everything from gaming accessories to furniture, check out the GamesRadar+ hardware policy.