Mousing off
Make your aim as sharp as your trash talk with one of these incisive gaming mice. Harry Domanski, Joel Burgess, Dan Gardiner and Ian Evenden test 11 current options.
Just as gamers have harkened back to the days of mechanical switches for their keyboards, we’ve seen a trend of gaming mice going back to using optical sensors (or, in some cases, opticalhybrid sensors) rather than lasers. Technically, laser sensors are actually a type of optical sensor too, but instead of using an LED to illuminate the surface beneath the mouse for the optical sensor to detect, these use a laser. While the laser light has an increased accuracy over standard LED light due to its different wavelength, it can be a hindrance when it comes to textured surfaces, including rough wood and cloth mousepads, as it can produce far too much detail information about the structure and depth of the surface. This flux in accuracy is most prominent with slower movements — ideally, where you’d want accuracy to be optimal. LED-illuminated sensors, however, produce much flatter information for the sensor to read and so don’t suffer the same accuracy loss at lower speeds. That said, laser sensors don’t generally suffer from these shortcomings when used with hard pads.
Sensors aside, gaming mice are still being put out with an impressive variety of traits. Whether you game with a claw grip — anchoring your palm and controlling the mouse with your fingertips — or rest your entire hand across the peripheral in a palm grip, the market has you covered. In fact, a good amount of the mice we tested here are suitable for both grips, although often their shapes do slightly favour one over the other.
For the FPS gamer, there are plenty of minimalistic mice that ditch the mess of buttons that come with RTS or MMORPG-oriented offerings. Decent ergonomics, a switchable DPI on-the-fly and reliability is king when it comes to first-person shooting. If you’re after ultimate control in the palm of your hands, and want to run macros and pause media with the twitch of a knuckle, then there are still a few mice that will suit your needs.
There’s also a nice balance between wireless mice and the freedom that they offer, and the old faithful corded mouse for those that can’t afford the chance of a drop-out or dead battery (or just the higher cost of wireless tech in general).