Andaseat Fnatic Edition review

Two-minute review

There are three good reasons to buy this particular Anda Seat Fnatic Edition gaming chair. One is obvious: you love Fnatic. 

Fnatic is a UK-based esports team that competes in Dota 2, League of Legends and Apex Legend tournaments, among others. It is to thank, or blame, for the Anda Seat Fnatic Edition’s bright orange trim. 

The Fnatic logo is stitched into the side of the headrest, but the front and back of the gaming chair are black aside from the orange stitched Anda Seat logo. 

Size is the second good reason to buy the Anda Seat Fnatic Edition. This is an XL-size chair, with a big seat pan and a generous amount of room for thighs and bottoms. 

There are benefits to this for smaller folk too. A large seat base makes sitting with your legs crossed easier, and more comfortable. The armrests are much less likely to get in the way when you do so too. 

Moving the Anda Seat Fnatic Edition between rooms is a little trickier as a result, but there’s no major downside if you’ll only play in one room. 

Anda Seat says this chair is fit for weights of up to 25 stone (160kg, 352lb) or 31 stone (200kg, 440lb) with the seat locked upright. This is notably higher than the 120kg weight limit of the Noblechairs Epic, the most similar-looking chair in that company’s line-up. 

The final key selling point of the Anda Seat Fnatic Edition is perhaps our favorite. This chair is perfect for afternoon naps. 

Its backrest tilts back to 160 degrees, or about as closer to flat as you’d get in a business class flight. The experience is not far off that of a luxury recliner chair. You just miss out on the footrest. 

For comparison, Noblechairs’s seats recline to 120 degrees, but the SecretLab Titan goes just slightly further with tilt of 165 degrees. Don’t forget to tilt if you’ll use your gaming chair as a work-from-home seat and like the odd lunchtime nap. 

The Anda Seat Fnatic Edition doesn’t come cheap, at $449/£379.99, but if you’re looking for a sturdy gaming chair with a focus on space and comfort, then this could be the one for you.

Design

If those three features hold no appeal, this Fnatic Edition chair may not be for you. But Anda Seat really hasn’t messed up anything here. 

The chair is covered in high quality plastic made to look like leather. You may prefer the real thing, but rival chairs ask for significantly more money for their leather variants anyway. 

This fake leather has a convincing texture, and when you pull it away from the 65kg/m cold foam padding of the seat pan, you can tell it’s thick. This is important, because a thicker covering will take longer to wear out. 

It is not the most advanced synthetic leather seen in a gaming chair, though. Noblechairs offers a “hybrid” PU covering, as well as real leather and the PU fake stuff. This is still made of plastic, but its top surface is full of micro-size holes to allow for some airflow. Anda Seat uses regular non-porous PU leather.

Use the Anda Seat Fnatic Edition the way we recommend and only your backside will actually rest on the polyurethane anyway. The chair comes with two memory foam pillows, one for your lower back and another for your neck.

You fix them to the seat using pairs of elastic cords that run around the chair’s back.

These pillows are encased in soft synthetic velvet, which should make your back less sweaty than synthetic leather. They also highlight the inherent silliness of the classic gamer chair design. 

A race-car style seat looks dynamic and provocative, but to avoid low back pain you’ll want more lumbar support than a bucket seat can provide. The Anda Seat Fnatic Edition’s lower back memory foam support adds this and more, because its contoured block is so large it extends half-way up your back. 

The foam completely changes the shape of the seat, because it needs to. 

After a week of testing, we can confirm it is pretty comfy for the long haul. Sitting eight hours in the Fnatic Edition is no problem, but the lumbar support is relatively soft, and non-adjustable beyond moving the foam pad up and down the chair’s back. 

A huge number of gaming chairs take a similar approach, but the SecretLab Titan has a built-in adjustable lumbar support section. It may be a better bet if you have a picky back. 

Such a design also means you can use the seat as-is, without an (arguably) ugly block of foam strapped in. We tried using the Anda Seat Fnatic Edition sans back support several times and could not find a way to configure the seat to make it work. You’re left either sitting up straight with a 3-inch gap between the seat and your back, or slouching. 

And slouching is what we want to avoid. You can feel the low back pain clawing its way in by the minute. 

The Anda Seat Fnatic Edition’s adjustability is otherwise excellent. Ignoring the arms for a minute, there four controls on the seat. 

A handbrake-style lever by your side unlocks the recline control, letting you just lean back to relax. The left flipper below the seat sets the Fnatic to “leisure” mode. This stops the back from locking, so you can just lean back to recline. 

A knob at the bottom alters the resistance of this leisure mode. When maxed out you can sit normally without the Anda Seat Fnatic Edition tilting back all the time. Unwind the internal spring and it’ll flop around freely like a tourist at Oktoberfest.

The last control is the one seen in almost every gaming chair: the hydraulic gas lift. It doesn’t raise super-high, letting a 6ft person rest with feet on the floor even at maximum extension, but should suit most people. 

There are three separate controls on the Anda Seat Fnatic Edition’s armrests. They provide the “4D” customization you’ll only tend to see on higher-end gaming seats like this one. 

You can raise and lower them, move them back and forth, tilt them in and out by a few degrees and slide them closer towards you. These are the same adjustments seen in high-end office chairs. The surface of these rests may look like hard plastic, but it’s not. It’s very high density foam with a plastic top coat, so there’s a tiny bit of give to them. That is good. 

We have just a couple of small complaints. 

The Anda Seat Fnatic Edition arm rests’ lateral movement is minimal, just a few inches, and smaller folk may find they can’t move the rests as near to their body as they’d like. It’s a reminder this is a seat made for larger people. 

You can feel the difference between the Anda Seat Fnatic Edition and a £1000 office chair in the raise/lower action of the rests too. It’s just not that smooth. But does this matter? Not really. 

What does matter is the Anda Seat Fnatic Edition’s longevity. And we find no reason to worry there. This chair has a steel frame, an aluminium base and the casters are chunky 65mm diameter plastic. This is a heavy-duty chair. 

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

• Best gaming chair: the best PC gaming chairs on the market