The following Seenda Massage Gaming Chair was provided by the manufacturer for review purposes.
We all love a good chair. Seriously, it’s the number one thing you need to consider when sitting at a computer or game console for long periods of time. Sure, you and I could ignore our bums from screaming aloud when we’re busy typing or playing away, but that’s not a good thing. Just like how you don’t keep your wallet in your back pockets when sitting, you don’t want to ignore the cries of your spine until you’re left with a pilonidal cyst (and trust me, you don’t want one of those…).
There’s a reason I have a variety of office and gaming chairs across the house. My bum is important and so is yours, but these chairs also tend to be really pricey. The good ones anyway—I’m not going to be able to afford a Knol chair lest I go dumpster diving, for example. But that doesn’t mean the lower end chairs are a bad choice and this one chair I recently got ahold of from Seenda actually proved quite the competent if not a pleasantly surprising choice for gaming and lounging about. Less so for office work, but I’ll touch on that in a moment.
The “Seenda Massage Gaming Chair” is a small, fabric-based gaming chair that comes in a decently sized box and with all the tools you need to put it together. Compared to many chairs on the market, this little chair is surprisingly easy to get up, and you’ll spend at most a half-hour reading the instructions and screwing in the included bites. Lose a screw (in my case, it popped out of its box before it got to my place!) and you’ll have to count in another ten minutes of searching, but that’s just my kind of luck. Either way, don’t fret if IKEA furniture has been your end before—you’re not going to build this thing the wrong way, trust me.
Once it’s been put together, it’s hard not to notice the somewhat lime… Hmm, maybe watermelon green(?) look to the whole picture. It accentuates the fabric pretty well, with those faux fur-like hairs getting pushed about as you rub your hands over it or, do what a chair is expecting you to do, and sit on the thing. The chair does come in other colours: black and grey, and admittedly the grey one looks really cool. Still, the green isn’t gaudy and that much I can appreciate—the white accents the whole creation very well.
First impressions with this thing sitting upright aren’t really the best. The way the head of the chair slants makes it so that your trunk will likely need to slump a bit if you want to sit upright. Even getting rid of the headrest pillow ultimately doesn’t help here as the Seenda chair falls into the trap that is the gaming chair dilemma: trying to look cool but not quite shaping the backend to the average person’s spine.
Where the Seenda chair actually does itself justice, however, is being the perfect television gaming chair. That and just being able to lounge on this thing thanks to the included footrest is a boon. The lower you set back this chair, the more comfortable you’ll be and quite honestly better off. It’s easy to slip and slide this thing whenever you need it. It’s such an underrated feature as even my more expensive gaming chair has no such thing which makes it so that I would unceremoniously smash my legs on the TV stand for comfort. No longer do I have to do this, which makes the Seenda chair a fantastic option for console and PC gaming at a distance.
Now my two qualms with this chair are the armrests and the second “massage” pillow that’s included with this kit. The armrests on their own are fine, all though it does not support adjustments in anyway compared to other chairs on the market. That’s not a bad thing, per se, but I do think the rests are a tad too… Flimsy, I want to say, and that’s primarily because of the way they’re installed on the chair. I’m not the kind of person to put much pressure on my armrests but do keep that in mind if you’re a destroyer of worlds (and controllers).
This Seenda chair comes with a USB-powered massage pillow. Honestly, it’s an uncomfortable thing and I don’t really recommend using it. The USB port itself also felt fairly difficult to plug into my PC, having that same sort of cheap-feeling wire you get when you go to the dollar store. Not to mention, it’s not long enough to install into most setups anyway, so you’ll likely need an extension cable to get this thing working while you’re lounging about or sitting at a desk. For what it’s worth, once plugged in, it does a decent job of massaging your lower back—but the way it hooks to the chair makes it hard for you to depress your whole back into the gaming chair and, in a sense, defeating the whole purpose of its massage function. You’re better off using it as a bedside thing, in all honesty.
But those aside, this is a lovely chair! I don’t think it succeeds at being a massage chair and I wouldn’t use this for long work sessions at a desk either. As a gaming chair, however, the Seenda Gaming Chair is priced incredibly well for what it’s offering. You could even sleep in this thing for a bit without destroying your back! Don’t ask me how I know.
The Seenda Massage Gaming Chair is available from Wal-Mart’s website (US only), retailing at 159.99 USD.
Seenda Massage Gaming Chair
PROS
- Easy to put together.
- Included footrest is legitimately amazing.
- Fabric is nice and soft.
- Small stature.
CONS
- Armrests aren't the best.
- Included massage pillow is pretty useless.
- While fine upright, you'll likely enjoy this more when bent back.
