Review: The new Sensei is a surprisingly sweet gaming mouse that’s changed our mind on SteelSeries' gear.
My mind... has been blown.
Not by the Sensei’s cool bronze exterior, nor by its surprisingly good performance. No, what has seriously boggled our mind, indeed, baked our brain, is the fact that the Sensei has a 32-bit ARM processor in its verminy little body.
As SteelSeries points out, that’s the equivalent of the Pentium 75 that a lot of us would have once used in our desktop PCs. Forget the fact that our phones are more powerful then old PCs, that’s nothing. Now your goddamn mouse has old-school desktop computing power. Far out, man. Far. Out.
Our shattered worldview aside, the Sensei is pretty damn neat. It started rough, and to be perfectly honest if we’d reviewed this when we’d intended, it’d be a different story. But, luckily for SteelSeries a new driver came out while we were distracted by the Battlefield 3 beta. What had been a mouse that was prone to random skipping and poor tracking has magically become one our favourite gaming peripherals of the year.
For one thing, it looks great. With three zones (body, mouse wheel and profile indicator) of customisable lighting and a shiny yet comfortable bronze shell (actually, it's more gunmetal, but we've realised that it looks bronze in the lighting we have near our gaming rig - huh), it’s more like a fashion statement than a PC peripheral. The upper surface is a single piece of plastic, so there are no uncomfortable seams or ridges. The two main mouse buttons are rigid enough to deliver good click feedback, and quite responsive, while the three large Teflon feet feel like they’re exuding some kind of industrial lubricant, they’re so smooth.
Which all leads to performance, which is pretty amazing. We’ve often thought that SteelSeries was rather more boastful than it deserved, but with the Sensei, we’re willing to sip some of the Koolaid. In games from Battlefield 3 to World of Tanks, we’re find precision aiming to be a breeze, and profile switching means we can easily change up from Windows use to gaming mode. Using the SteelSeries engine, or the onboard programming abilities and the built-in LCD display, you can devise a mess of game profiles, and the ones already included cover a lot of popular games. You can even work on more detailed ExactTech settings to customise everything from mouselift (which we adore), to acceleration and smoothing.
This mouse is simply damn elegant. For the price, it’s really hard to beat, and is possibly our new go-to mouse. Nice work SteelSeries.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012