Ozone Xenon Gaming Mouse Review

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.