CM Storm Inferno Gaming Mouse Review

PerformanceWe always like to talk about comfort with a mouse as its something that can make a big difference, as you are likely to be using it for a fair amount of time especially if you are the type of gamer that would buy this kind of mouse. While we didn’t find this mouse to be uncomfortable as it fitted the hand well and the buttons were in sensible positions, it wasn’t exactly comfortable.

In terms of performance, the mouse has a brilliantly high 4,000 DPI which is truly brilliant and gives unrivalled accuracy. The drivers that come with the mouse allow you to customise nearly everything you could possibly want, it might however take you some time to set this mouse up exactly how you want but I’m pretty sure it will be worth it. On top of that the mouse has a full 128 kb of memory on board and while this isn’t much it goes a long way in terms of mice, as such it allows you to store lots of macros and scripts as well as 4 profiles. Another point is that it glides ever so easily across a surface, nearly as though you were using it with a ‘speed’ mouse pad, this certainly has a lot of advantages for any gamers.

I was certainly impressed with how they have managed to fit the 11 buttons in without it looking cramped, and all of them are in a position that can be pressed easily which is perfect for gaming. I did also like how the middle of the 3 buttons on the left hand side has an extra ridge of plastic, just like your F and J keys on your keyboard, so that you can feel when you thumb is resting over this. This simple little design really does make a difference. I did however struggle to make best use of the Storm Tactics Key, which should allow you to set combinations of buttons to functions, and while this is really useful if you are a big fan of a certain game and only ever play that game, it is not the best if you play several different games as you will never be able to remember which combinations do which, and usually 11 buttons ought to be enough for a lot of the operations I want to carry out!

The rest of the design of the mouse is fairly good, the illuminated logo is a nice touch although I am not as convinced by the front ‘grill’ which the light shines through, giving a weird red haze over my monitor or anything else in front of it. Although of course you can alter this with the provided software.

My opinion on the software that comes provided is unfortunately mixed, which I take as a bad thing, because yes there is a lot of potential for you to customise a lot of features, it is not the most self-explanatory and some of the features aren’t where you would expect. The lighting for instance is under Storm Tactics not Main Control, and even then you only have 4 different options for the lighting. There is also no way of seeing which profile the mouse is currently set to, which seems to be a large flaw. Each profile has a different light on the profile select button, but this doesn’t correlate with anything on the drivers, and you have no options to change this lighting set-up. While it is nice that there are lots of features on the software, I think it could of done with being displayed differently to make it more user friendly. The ability to create scripts is certainly going to be loved by lots of gamers, and luckily for them this is fairly straight forward to set-up.

I do however like how easy it is to change the DPI ‘on the fly’ with this mouse, although I do prefer it to cycle through instead of having one button for up and one button for down, but this of course can be set in the software.