CM Storm Sentinel Advance II Gaming Mouse Review

The Software at first glimpse can seem a bit daunting, as the display is quite frankly a bit cluttered, but when you realise how much you can configure on and with the mouse, you realise that every bit of space is ultimately needed.

Along the left hand side is the list of buttons on the mouse and what action they perform. On the standard CM Storm profile the only button you can change the function of is the profile change button but on all the other custom profiles you can change each button to perform the action you wish. Along the right hand side it lists the DPI settings you can have for your current profile, which allows you to change the sensitivity on both the horizontal and vertical axis, which will allow ultimate personalisation for gaming and general use alike. On the next tab, you can find the visual configuration options, which allow you to change the colour displayed at the front of the mouse, the colour displayed at the top of the mouse and also the logo that is displayed on the OLED screen. The LEDS can be configured to either be always on, breathe mode (fade in and fade out), to be on and flash white with button presses, or t o just be switched off. Also included is an OLED screen saver mode, which switches off the screen after a few moments of not being used, to stop OLED Burn in, a problem with the original Advance mouse.

The custom Logo uploader takes any monochromatic bitmap (.bmp) file that is 32×32 pixels, and displays it on the mouse. Interestingly though, when creating it, you have to do the inverse of what you wish (black becomes white and white becomes black on the mouse) and the mouse rotates the uploaded image clockwise by 90 degrees, so you have to save it facing sidewards. It’s a cool feature that only takes a second to use and really makes the mouse feel unique and yours.

The next tab shows the TX configuration panel, which unfortunately, on inital use, allows the TX combinations to be assigned to unused mouse functions, like profile+/Profile – and so forth.

The Macro button lets you record macros to store on the mouse. It lets you record the macro and assign it to any of the buttons, including the TX buttons. The editor gives you a good choice of activation events, button down, button up, button up and lets you choose whether to loop or run the macro once. The recorder seems very complete, logging all button clicks and the delay between each press. I found the macro easy to set up but spent about 10 minutes trying to work out how to set the buttons up to run the macro. The process included manually: setting the button to be a TX storm button, Setting the TX button to the Macro setting. Sounds simple but seemed complicated at the time.

A nice feature would have been to enable the storm TX button automatically when you create a combination, but I found after a few minutes of frustration that you had to enable it yourself back on the main screen. Interestingly, a problem I found was that when I tried to create a new macro and save it to run on the TX button 1 setting, I found the software remapped both mouse buttons on the active profile to be right click, making it impossible to use the current profile accurately until you set it back to left mouse click on the interface (which still said it should have been). This happened about 3 or four times.

There is also a script editor which is a more advanced macro editor, a library feature to store and load profiles and macros from the hard drive and then a support page, linking you to the relevant help sources.

Also included is a firmware updater and a factory reset utility, along with a test program to test mouse functions before you use them in your games or applications.