Ozone EXPOSURE: a sub-par mouse mat outing

It's flat, it's black, and it's splashed in blood. What more could you want from a mousing surface? (Hint: plenty.)

 We had a look at an Ozone mouse last issue and we found it to be a solid option for your pointing needs, if a touch uninspired. This month we’re looking at one of Ozone’s mouse pads, the loudly-named EXPOSURE.

It’s always odd reviewing a mouse pad – you start out thinking you can’t possibly have an opinion on something that’s essentially a flat plastic mat, but then you get reminded of just how finicky the average gamer can be when it comes to their mousing surface.

The EXPOSURE is a two-piece pad, with a hard plastic upper surface dramatically splashed with red, in a bloody splatter, and with a nodule-laden rubber underside. We’ve a preference for hard mousing surfaces – as opposed to foam ones – so were curious to see if this could stack up to our current favourite, the CM Storm BattlePad.

And whoa… it really can’t.

Combining it with out test Razer mouse, we found the scratchy upper surface really dragged at the worn feet of our Razer. In the Kill House training level of CoD4, this produced an alarming and inconsistent amount of drag on the mouse, slowing down our complete-time by up to a second. We also found ourselves concentrating on smoothing out the movement so much that we missed doorways and screwed up grenade timings. If you bought the EXPOSURE and a new mouse, you won’t have quite that issue, but if you’re using an older, worn mouse – and chances are you won’t be upgrading both at the same time – be warned.

Further to that, the rubber lower surface isn’t quite grippy enough, so the mat moved around a bit beneath our hand. What’s more, when we flipped the pad over to have a look at the underside, we noticed that it was about a millimetre smaller than the upper surface, and in the overlapping space you could feel the tacky glue holding the two layers together. In other words, it’s a crap trap, and even during our testing it was picking up lint, hair, crud, crap and who knows what else from around our NRG gaming rig. Not ideal.

Which sums up the entire EXPOSURE experience, really – there are simply many better options out there.