Gaming mouse review: Roccat Kone

I’m a big sucker for gaming mice, and the Roccat Kone is probably my biggest surprise. I bought it around the time when Roccat wasn’t a very well known brand, but the Kone was getting great reviews all over the place, and now it’s one of the best selling gaming mice on the market. I’ve had it for maybe six months now, so I thought I’d just dish out my opinions quickly. I’m not going to go over the feature list, you can find that somewhere else.

The good things: It’s very comfortable – maybe not for people with small hands, but it’s the most comfortable grip I’ve ever experienced. Because of this, it’s great to use – it’s easy to get a feel for. Overall, it’s simply a great mouse in regards to grip and aim with. It’s quite heavy, though, and you can’t really get it light enough to play RTS games with all that well, even though there are different weights.

The bad things: There are a lot of them, but somehow they don’t nearly outweigh the good parts. First of all, the mouse wheel. It’s very weird, it’s almost stepless, but not quite. It’s not very good. Also, it’s near impossible to click the mouse wheel without scrolling up or down – you have to be very specific and use a lot of pressure, which is a bitch when trying to open links in a new tab, for example. Mine also broke some months after I bought it – the wheel seemed to simply detach from the bit that made scrolling possible. I’ve heard a lot of other people have had the same issue, so it’s kinda bad. The drivers are also very weird. For some reason, if I put my update rate to 1000Hz, my cursor would occasionally skip to the left before skipping back to the right. I also had similar problems when turning TCU on, so I had no idea what that actually did, which isn’t exactly good considering it’s one of the advertised features. The mouse worked more than fine at 500Hz without TCU, though, but it was still annoying.

So, can I recommend it? Yes and no. It’s probably the best mouse for shooters I’ve ever used, but the drivers might be holding back some of the fine-tuned performance. The crappy mouse wheel is also an issue for whenever you’d like to browse the web or if you’d like to use it in whatever game you’re playing. I was able to look past those issues, but I’m a very patient and excusing man. Most people won’t tolerate that. So I probably can’t recommend it. But it’s damn good anyway.