How to Zoom In and Out on Bluestacks on PC

If there’s one function the Android emulator Bluestacks needs to make more obvious, it’s the ability to two-finger touch and swipe. A huge amount of games allow you to zoom in and out via pinching your fingers together or swiping them apart on the screen.

If you’ve ever given up on emulating a particular Android game because you weren’t sure how to zoom in or out, you’ll be free of that restriction soon enough.

There are two methods PC users can use to imitate pinching and outward swiping to zoom in and out in games on Bluestacks. These are:

• Hold the Ctrl key while pressing the – key to zoom out and the + key to zoom in
• Hold the Ctrl key while scrolling up or down using the mouse wheel

This works in any game that innately has a zoom in and zoom out function, but does not work on games that do not allow you to zoom.

Bluestacks has several keybinding functions. Some games have keyboard layout presets already available when you first launch the game (such as Lineage 2: Revolution), but most require you to set the keys yourself if you want to use the keyboard.

You can set up custom keybindings using the keyboard icon  on the bottom left of the Bluestacks window. Unfortunately you can’t use this function to set your preferred camera zooming method, but holding Ctrl and scrolling the mouse wheel is pretty simple.

There are a lot of reasons to use an emulator like Nox or Bluestacks — perhaps your phone can’t run a game, or you prefer to play your shooters on PC — but not knowing how to do a function as simple as pinching in or out to zoom is a big enough reason not to bother. Luckily now you do know how to do it, so go forth and emulate!