GGL Wire

A few weeks ago, my editor came by and dropped a peculiar looking mouse I had never heard of on my desk. The mouse in question is the Wolf King Trooper Gaming Mouse, featuring a laser sensor and the ability to squeeze off two, three, or four shots with one click.

It’s been a while since we reviewed a mouse here at the GGL, so to get back into the swing of things, it’s only fair to put the Trooper to the test.

The Shape and Feel

At first glance, the Trooper resembles the shape of the Logitech G7 and G5 gaming mice. It’s got almost the same shape, but is a bit wider and taller than the G5. The top of the mouse is made of slick plastic, while the black sides are ever-so-slightly more grippy. In the end, though, the whole mouse feels a bit slippery in the grip.

To test this, I tried picking up the mouse with only my thumb and pinky finger. It’s hardly a real-world test, but I can always pick up my standard office mouse — the Microsoft Intellimouse 3.0 — this way. The Trooper falls out of my hand almost every time. Again, it’s not scientific, but a decent metric for the grip of the materials.

Underneath, we find that the sensor is toward the back of the mouse, and a small amount of teflon keeps your device floating above the mouse pad. The teflon is really quite insubstantial, and a pronounced scraping can be felt when moving around on the mouse pad.

Buttons

The Trooper’s integrated buttons are hard to trigger accidentally, and due to being raised, your thumb won’t rest on the side buttons. Nothing stands out about the buttons, but they do all work properly.

Below the wheel, there are two buttons marked “F” and “S.” The F-button switches between two, three, and four shot burst mode by lighting up the mouse wheel in different colors. The S-button changes between 800, 1600 and 2000 DPI. A small meter at the end of the mouse indicates what DPI setting you’re on. Again, these work properly, and again, they’re hard to hit accidentally.

Drivers

Instead of many bells and whistles, as well as useless features, the Wolf King drivers are a bare-boned. Contrary to what you might think, I actually welcome this; there’s nothing worse than flashy mouse drivers where I don’t know if I can click in a certain place to change something or if it’s just part of the scenery.

The drivers include the ability to bind any button to various functions or a keystroke, which works without a hitch. Other than that, the drivers don’t offer anything that Windows itself doesn’t offer.

Courage Under Fire

Those of you who read my reviews know that the only test that matters is the one when that occurs when people are shooting at you. And in that test, the Trooper mouse fails — and not for a subjective reason.

I was astounded at how easily the mouse skips. I put it to task at Warsow, one of the games that requires a lot of quick sweeps of the mouse, and I would end up looking at the ceiling when just trying to bunny hop around. Aiming quickly wasn’t much better, as flick shots become pretty hard when the mouse decides to just randomly skip.

Overall, I use a medium sensitivity when playing, so it’s not as though I was pushing the mouse to extreme levels of acceleration, nor am I using a non-standard mousepad. The sensor just isn’t up to the task, and I’m not sure how anyone gets off marketing this as a gaming mouse if it skips at 800DPI.

Conclusion

There’s probably a good reason I’ve never heard of the Wolf King Trooper — it’s because the mouse is bad. It’s not for lack of trying or anything, though. The “one click, two/three/four shots” feature is interesting and could come in handy for burst fire in tactical shooters. Other than that, though, nothing on the mouse stands out as a clear winning feature, and the downside (skipping) makes it incredibly hard to recommend as a buy.