SteelSeries WoW: Cataclysm MMO Gaming Mouse Review

PerformanceFirstly, the comfort of this mouse is not amazing as it is fairly large. The mouse is also fairly tall and so it keeps your wrist off your desk – good for gaming, but bad for general everyday use. While the buttons are clearly one of the main features, they seem to have tried to fit as many on as possible and as such a couple are fairly easy to knock accidentally. The buttons on the front corners are in my eyes awkwardly positioned, both for looks and practicality. They give the front of the mouse a very square look, which doesn’t complement the back of the mouse. They also stick out quite a bit and while the buttons may be useful it is not the quick and easy to switch between them and then use the ones near to the scroll wheel. Maybe they designed it to give you the choice of the outer or inner buttons, but then you can’t use all 14. That said, it could just be that it is a bit out there and this makes it feel weird and awkward to use.

The software for this mouse does cover everything and quite frankly I can’t do it justice, although a simpler interface might of been a bit nicer on the eyes. That said, theres probably not much more you could possibly want to alter while gaming or general use. If you don’t play WoW and want to use this mouse anyway, you can certainly find a good use for several of the buttons, but its a shame they didn’t think to incorporate some Media controls as this would of made it much more useful when you aren’t using it for playing games. The software is, while it is clustered, it is fairly easy to use.

The high CPI and 12000 fps Laser give very impressive gaming performance. The mouse works on a huge variety, if not all, surfaces meaning you can game where ever. The mouse is unbelievably smooth and glides over the surface as though it has an expensive mousepad underneath, which is a nice feeling. The very high CPI is perfect for many games, but it also has a brilliant application when using Photoshop especially as you can decrease the Windows-Pointer Speed giving very high accuracy.

Moving onto the design of the mouse, while it is not much of a performance factor, you are not going to want to use it if it looks pig ugly. Well, in my eyes, it doesn’t look pretty. It partly looks like it should be in a museum with a load of Scarabs or something similar. On the other hand, it looks more like a Starcraft machine that has come to life. Whether it really fits into the WoW theme too well or not, I’m not convinced. It is also quite large and will take up a lot of space on your desk.

In some ways I like the huge number of buttons, but 14 is what you would expect on a Joystick not a mouse. Whether you can find a use for all of these and frequently remember which each are, let alone switch between them with ease is a different story altogether. I can see a lot of advantages in WoW for having a few extra buttons, but I think maybe 8/9 might have sufficed?!