Ozone Xenon Gaming Mouse Review

Ozone are a relatively small brand when it comes to gaming peripherals and are often unknown to some gamers. We have seen some great products from them in the past like their multi platform headset and great budget mechanical keyboard, so they certainly know what they are doing and how to fit into the already crowded peripherals market. Today we get a chance to look at their latest product, the Xenon gaming mouse, so this will be a good opportunity to compare Ozone's offering to other gaming mice on the market. Gaming mice are one of the essentials when it comes to playing games, especially competitively, as they can mean the difference between being the hunter or the hunted. Gaming mice are currently split into three sections that are based on the sensor they have; optical - which tend to be more precise, laser - which have the sensitivity and speed and the few mice inbetween that have both (such as the Razer Taipan and EpicGear Meduza). Normally the high end mice have laser sensors, which offer great performance in terms of speed and sensitivity but can sometimes lack the precision and accuracy that optical sensors have. The Xenon features the latter, a 3500DPI optical sensor that could produce some great results. Before we delve into the review, lets just take a quick look at the specs of the mouse: OPTICAL SENSOR Avago professional sensor Acceleration up to 20g Dpi 1000/2000/3000/3500 MATERIAL Anti-tangle braided cord Gold Plated USB connection 30% base made out of teflon DESIGN Three colors available Rubber grips Ambidextrous So from looking at the specs we can see that the Xenon is lacking in features, however this means it could make a great budget mouse for those gamer who just want a pure and simple device. The Ozone Xenon comes in fair small box with an open front, allowing you to see and get a good idea of the grip of the mouse. The front features a few features with the rest being down the right side of the box. The whole packaging follows Ozone's theme of red and black, with the white mouse in the middle being a contrast, which really makes it catch your eye. The back of the packaging lists the features in more detail and below that has several language variants of the specs. Inside the box you have an Ozone sticker, software CD, manual and a brief overview of Ozone's other products, and most importantly, the mouse. Straight out of the box we were quick to admire the form of the Xenon with its sleek futuristic look and it's gloss white coating, with subtle black details. The Xenon is an ambidextrous mouse, meaning you can use it left or right-handed. The size of the Xenon would suit most mid-sized hands and even some smaller ones. Being designed for use in either hand the mouse has a symmetrical shape. Ozone haven't entirely skimped on the design as they have included a nicely braided cable with a gold-plated connector at the end, ensuring maximum signal quality. Unlike the majority of other gaming mice, the Xenon has no side buttons and instead has rubber grip. Normally we'd expect to see at least a forward/back button here, but most likely due to the ambidextrous nature and costing, these have not been included. The whole style of the mouse is very simple with clean angles and ridges. The Xenon does have a slight ergonomic shape to it, but since it is designed for use in either hand, this has been kept to a minimum. You can also see the distinct lack of buttons - the Xenon has left and right mouse buttons, scroll wheel, which also acts as a middle button and one small white button just behind the wheel that controls the DPI. The belly of the Xenon has 30% of it's total surface area covered in Teflon glide pads to aid manoeuvrability. This is of course, where you find the sensor also and in this case, we have the 3500 DPI Avago optical sensor. The Xenon also has different LED colours for each DPI setting. Typically this is blue for the standard DPI with the other colours being red, green and white that will pulse when connected. The software is very easy to install from the CD or can be downloaded from the website. Upon launching the software you are presented with the screen below, which allows your to change the button assignments and the profiles. Compared to most mouse software, this is by far the most simple we have come across, not to mention slightly pointless as the only 3 buttons that can be changed are the 3 essential ones. The advanced section of the software allows you to fine tune the scroll speed and the double click speed. That concludes the limits of the software. As soon as we plugged the Xenon in to our PC the mouse was good to go and pulsed blue indicating it was ready for use. The shape is a little different to what we are used to, so this took a while to settle in. The overall feel of the mouse is of a solid build, but a little on the plastic side. We prefer the gloss texture so this wasn't a problem for us (also easier to clean) but it could be an issue for some. We did notice a lot more resistance when using the mouse on our mouse pad so we checked with four other pads of varying performance and noticed the same - that it had a fair amount of resistance compared to our normal mouse (Razer Naga). Whilst it did perform better on a cloth pad, it still did not feel as smooth as a gaming mouse should be - most likely due to the huge contact area. The mouse was reasonably comfortable to use even after several hours, however it would not suit a claw grip, so we had to adapt to use it. FPS Jumping straight into the gaming tests, we launched the recently released Borderlands 2. Compared to other mice, the Xenon was noticeably too slow for the fast pace action - even at it's max sensitivity settings. Whilst the movement was accurate and precise, it was fairly limiting in terms of response so we couldn't react as quick as we would like to enemy engagement. The lack of additional buttons also stood out as normally we bind one of the thumb buttons to the melee attack to speed up our reactions. This was also apparent when we tried out Battlefield 3 so we decided to try and find a game that the mouse was suitable for. One of the few games we could think of in the FPS genre that the mouse would be better suited for was Counter Strike: Global Offensive as it is less demanding on the mouse. Straight away we could see it was an exemplary performer as the game only required left and right click - the rest was handled by the keyboard. For CS:GO we tend to use a middle DPI sensitivity to the Xenon fitted in just right here, although the gliding issues on the mouse pad did effect it's potential. MMORPG As with FPS we were fairly limited in terms of customisation with the Xenon so we had to rely much more on the keyboard. Again the sensitivity was better suited to this genre, but the lack of buttons really did put us at a disadvantage when playing games like Star Wars: The Old Republic or Diablo 3. RTS Whilst we don't normally like to repeat ourselves, we found the performance in RTS games just as we did with the previous two genres when playing C&C 3 and SupCom 2. We really missed a higher DPI level when it came to scrolling so we often had to ramp the speed up in the game settings before we were content. The lack of thumb buttons wasn't really a problem here as it's easier to use the keyboard to issue commands than it is the mouse. General Use For everyday use browsing the web, editing images or playing the odd game of solitaire we couldn't fault the Xenon. The DPI rate is more than adequate for tasks such as these although again, we did miss the use of a forward/back buttons when browsing the web. The scrolling had a fair amount of resistance, which we prefer and the clicks were faultless. To conclude this review, Ozone have produced more of a budget gaming mouse that puts form over function. Whilst it looks like a worthy opponent for many similarly priced mice (RRP approx £25), the lack of features really does put the Xenon at the bottom of the list if you are a gaming enthusiast. Having no side buttons on the thumb area is pretty unusual and we didn't like that mainly because we use those buttons everyday for gaming and general use. The software is another aspect of the mouse that lets it down, and by that, we mean it's almost pointless as the operating system can handle most of the changeable options and there really isn't any point in changing the LMB or RMB's functions. We were also disappointed with the level of friction the mouse had with most of our mouse pads. Clearly the larger surface area creates more friction, so much so it is audibly louder than the other mice we have in to test. That said, the Xenon isn't actually that bad. Sure it lacks features and would not suit most gamers, but at the right price point, this could be a decent contender for games like CS:S or CS:GO, not to mention for everyday use. We really liked the design of this mouse, so with a few tweaks internally and on the bottom, Ozone could have a pretty decent mouse on their hands. The Xenon doesn't tick all the right boxes for us to give Ozone an award - although it is creeping towards the budget award, but it just lacks the additional features that require it to reach the grade. We'd love to see a V2 of this mouse and will keep our fingers crossed that Ozone produce one.