Roccat Kone[+] Gaming Mouse Review

Reviewing a mouse is a very subjective process. There will be a lot of variation among each user’s hand and arm strength and size, as well as each person’s ideal “feel” for thinks like button depresses, scroll wheel motion, and movement sensitivity. So, it is best to find a chance to test a mouse in person to find if it is the ideal fit for you. That being said, let’s see how this mouse performed during daily use.

The mouse came with very little in the box other than the mouse itself and the adjustable weights. Since there was no driver CD in the packaging (a fact I’m perfectly OK with, by the way), I visited the ROCCAT website, www.roccat.org to find the latest driver. The website was easily navigated and I was soon downloading the most recent driver, which was about 3 months old at the time of testing. ROCCAT seems serious about supporting their products though, considering they released 11 driver updates for the Kone[+] during 2011.

Upon plugging in the mouse, Windows 7 installed a generic HID driver, so the mouse was usable immediately. While plugged into the USB port, the mouse immediately began a cycle of colors on the built-in LED lighting strips, rotating from various shades of blue, red, purple, orange, green, and white. The colors add a distinctive flavor to the mouse and definitely add to the sexiness factor for a gaming rig, but the lights can also be turned off if desired.

Being 6’6″, I have relatively large, lean hands. The mouse felt very substantial in my hands, but natural and comfortable. I was able to easily reach both thumb buttons, although I would say the button that is typically used as the “back” button in an internet browser felt like it was a bit too far toward the rear of the mouse (toward my wrist) for my liking. This position does make the “forward” button much more accessible than it is on my Logitech G400, however.

The left and right mouse buttons are perfectly stiff and satisfying to depress. While rolling the mouse scroll wheel, each notch in the scrolling motion feels deep and deliberate. While an office/desktop user might prefer a scroll wheel that moves a bit more freely, I did find that it was easier to dial in the desired weapon in FPS games because of how deliberate each notch in the scrolling wheel feels while scrolling.

I tested the mouse on a bed sheet, a desktop, and mouse pad, and the tracking on each surface seemed perfect. I was able to use the onboard sensitivity adjustment buttons to quickly change the mouse movement speed when needed, but I did find that I typically left the sensitivity on a single setting throughout my testing. The driver software for the mouse offers an impressive level of customization for DPI and sensitivity settings. The DPI buttons on the mouse can flip between 5 individual presets, and the user can select what DPI setting on the mouse buttons should correspond to each of those presets in the driver.