REVIEW: Roccat Kone gaming mouse

Seeking to throw off the reins of oppression brought on by Microsoft, Logitech and Razer, German company Roccat has entered the gaming market with its new Kone mouse. Roccat already has roots in gaming due to its sponsorship of the Team Roccat (formerly 69°N-28°E) Counter-Strike squad, and the Kone has been in production/testing for quite a while.

With any new company come a ton of questions, like: Do they know what they’re doing? How many actual gamers work at the company? Why am I going bald? (Actually, that’s a personal question to make sure you’re paying attention.)

Featuring four interchangeable weights, a max of 3200 DPI with its laser sensor, a Tracking Control Unit to improve tracking on all surfaces, user profiles and macros, the Kone brings a lot to the table. However, to find out if the Kone is a decent mouse, Roccat sent GGL a sample Kone to put through the paces. Is it worth the €69.99 price? Here’s what we found.

Shape and Design

The Kone features the now-standard right-handed design, leaving Southpaws out in the cold. Its shape is highly reminiscent of certain Logitech mice, like the MX 620 and MX 610. When holding the Kone, your thumb will fit nicely into the left side of the mouse, and you have the option to put either your ring finger or pinky into the depression on the right side.

As you can imagine, this is a palm-only mouse, which will put off many wrist users. If you absolutely have to have a smaller mouse, go elsewhere. However, if you have bear paws for hands, feel free to use the Kone to its fullest.

A majority of the Kone is covered with rubberized plastic that should help your grip. Underneath, you will find an ample amount of teflon surrounding the weight insert and sensor. One thing to note about the sensor: it’s almost dead-center on the mouse, unlike the sensors on some other gaming mice these days.

Depending on your style, this can be good or bad–gamers who hold the mouse with the palm but articulate at the wrist as well will probably like it, as inside and outside motions made with the wrist will result in  similar curves of the cursor. On the other hand, if you never move your wrist while mousing, you probably won’t notice the placement of the sensor at all. Overall, this is the best of both worlds and Roccat is right on the money with its sensor placement.

Buttons

The Kone features a grand total of ten “buttons,” consisting of the standard three (left, right, mousewheel down), two side buttons, two DPI buttons, a menu button the wheel tilt buttons. If you are daring, you can bind all of them to different functions in games, but there’s a high likelihood you’ll never be able to reach the DPI up/down and menu buttons during a pitched battle. They can be useful for MMO games, however.

The standard left and right buttons are integrated into the mouse shell for aesthetic reasons, and give a satisfying click when pressed. They’re not hair-trigger buttons by any means, so if you’re a ham-handed individual, this is a plus. The side buttons, meanwhile, are long but don’t stick out too far. It’s unlikely you will find yourself accidentally pressing them.

Drivers

Roccat’s drivers showcase the expected sensitivity settings, mouse acceleration, and DPI from 800 to 3200, in 400 DPI increments. As is always the case for me, I used 800 DPI because the higher DPI settings were too fast–but maybe I’m just getting old.

The most interesting feature of the drivers is the ability to assign macros and tweak the delay between keypresses in the macro. For example, it’s possible to have the macro execute “press down B, wait 920ms and release.” This is accomplished via a bar that you pull out to determine the length of the keypress. The screenshots probably offer a better explanation.

With the macros in place, it’s possible to execute (for example) an attack in World of Warcraft, wait X amount of time for the cooldown to end, and immediately execute another attack while eating a butter-flavored popscicle, or whatever it is WoW players eat.

Additionally, you can use the Kone drivers to change the color of the lights on the mouse, pulse and rotate the colors, or just turn them off completely. While this won’t get you the Northrend Scimitar of the Horde, or any additional headshots, it will let people comment on how cool the mouse looks.

All of the above features are stored in five different profiles that can be triggered by starting a game. It seems that the profiles aren’t stored on the mouse itself like they are with some other mice, but actually on the computer’s hard drive.

The mouse also doesn’t appear to work without the drivers installed. There’s no way to tell on the mouse itself which profile is enabled either, so you’ll have to install the drivers if you take the Kone to another computer.

Finally, the drivers have an update feature built into them that allows you to download updates directly from the driver window, and shows the latest firmware version information. This is pretty cool and a welcome feature from such a complex device.

Courage Under Fire

The Kone also sports a Tracking Control Unit that supposedly calibrates the mouse to a given surface, adjusting the strength of the laser so it won’t track when the mouse is picked up past a certain height. When you switch mouse surfaces, you’re supposed to recalibrate the TCU.

Unfortunately, the TCU didn’t seem to make any difference in our informal testing with the Roccat Taito, Razer Mantis, Razer Goliathus, or a GGL custom Steelseries pad. It seems like this feature is a wash, and could just be pure marketing gibberish. We may never know.

As far as using the Kone to kill people, that worked out fine. It took a little adjusting to the palm-on shape of the mouse, but the Kone delivered in nearly every respect.

I will say that, like all laser mice, the Kone skips at super low sensitivities. We’re talking “can’t turn more than 15 degrees in the length of a Supermat” sensitivities, so you will ideally never be caught with your pants down using that speed. However, if you are a complete mutant and need to use a sensitivity like that, take a pass on the Kone.

Most normal humans will be able to appreciate the features of the Kone. I especially liked the side button placement and size–they are around the same length and only slightly raised from the rest of the mouse, minmizing accidental presses. Additionally, pressing down on the wheel button doesn’t risk tilting the wheel side to side, which is another big gripe I usually have with tilt wheels.

The large amount of teflon on the bottom of the mouse helps out immensely, and while I’ve never been a huge fan of weighted mice, the simple weight system works as advertised.

In summary, the Kone delivers great performance on a lot of fronts, and is a worthy alternative to Microsoft/Logitech mice. However, its price may be hard to swallow for those gamers who feel they can do just fine with any OEM mouse. Only time will tell if the Kone is a success.

The Roccat Kone receives a GGL score of 9/10.