ZOWIE GEAR Hammer Gaming Headset Review

Setting up this headset was a breeze, it has two 3.5mm jacks, one for audio on for the microphone, I plugged them into my sound card, it started working, I would say it took about 30 seconds, 29 second of which could have been spared if I had just turned a light on so I could see what I was doing.

When it came to testing this headset I thought I would do things a  little differently, I normally test any kind of headphone / headset with music first, being a big music fan this is an easy option for me, but this isn’t designed to give me realistic reproduction of the works of Frank Zappa, it’s been designed from the ground up for being a tool for gamers, so I jumped straight to the fun stuff and dug deep into my online gaming library.

I fired up Battlefield 3, using Mumble (3rd party chat client) for a few games, the first thing I noticed was that speech playback was crystal clear, there isn’t a lot of bass to these headsets, but rather than sounding hollow it feels balanced, they’re not trying to blast your head off with sub woofer like thumps, so it speech sounded clear and natural, which is definitely a major plus point for a gaming headset.  The second thing I realised was that it doesn’t have any kind of in line controls, so no mute button I’m afraid, but if you use services like Mumble, then push-to-talk will resolve that issue just nicely, I would have liked a master mute button though.

I took a plunge into World of Warcraft, not something I do lightly either, can’t stand the game, but it’s great for product testing regardless, with such a wide community and a few select friends of mine who are never off the damn game I was able to test out the headset there and annoy them for 20min or so, again the headset performed superbly with regards to chatting, with crystal clear sound for both me and the people I was annoying on the other end with my limited WoW skills.

As far as game audio goes, these are not the best headphones in the world, but they are pretty decent, game music and sound fx are lovely and clear but don’t expect thundering bass and a big wow factor, which is fine because while using this headset the main factor is competitive gaming, you want to be able to talk to your team mates, the audio performance is on par with everything else in this price range.

I did try these out with music and movies, they worked fairly well, I wouldn’t expect to wear them to kick back and watch Lord of the Rings any time soon, but should you decide to take a break from your favourite game to watch a few videos on YouTube or leave your music playing while you’re getting stuck into a few games on your favourite game they are more than up to the task.