Review: An excellent first mousing outing from Corsair, but the M60 has a few niggles to overcome.
Choosing a mouse is one of those intensely personal things, like working out whether you like boxers or briefs, or exploring whether you like your porn vanilla, or full of furries in gimp suits. So it’s impossible to really quantify an experience with a mouse beyond an admission of “well, we liked it, so you might”.
Nonetheless, for some reason people seem to think we know what we’re talking about, despite our tiny, girl-ish hands and an intense dislike of left-handed people. This is quite the opposite of our feelings for Corsair’s M60 mouse, an FPS-focused rodent that scurried into our hearts over the Xmas break. It’s part of the big new Vengeance line of gaming peripherals, alongside another mouse, two keyboards (one of which we reviewed last issue) and two headsets. Corsair doesn’t do anything by halves!
Nor, it seems, does the company design by halves. For one thing, the M60 features a unique two-piece slice of aluminium that runs through the mouse, which makes up the bottom plate and supports the entire plastic structure. Like last month’s K60 keyboard, this offers incredible strength. What’s more, it also allows the structure of the mouse to be much more open; each ‘side-panel’ is a separate piece, and slightly grippy in texture, while the upper surface, which splits into the two main buttons, is far smoother. There’s a lot of subtle gaps that run through the mouse, that help keep your hand ventilated during long fragging sessions – it’s a clever design.
More importantly, it’s comfortable under the hand, though perhaps a touch too small for some. The grippy side-panels make thumb-and-little-finger gripping very easy, and despite being small, we never felt like our fingers had no place to go. The Sniper Button, however, is bit of a let-down. When pressed, this lowers the DPI for precise targeting, but it needs to be held the entire time, and we found it simply too far forward to comfortably use. Similarly, the DPI switching buttons, of which there are two, were very sticky, more prone to actually actuate the right mouse button than change the DPI. Neither issue is a big deal to us, since we tend to stick to one DPI, but if you like to switch, it’s something to keep in mind.
One design touch we really like are the weights. There are three, that screw directly into the lower surface. No moving parts, no excessive spring-loaded gubbins, just sensible engineering. By removing one or a combination of these weights you can even adjust the M60's center of balance, which is quite unique.
In-game performance is solid. The M60 is no SteelSeries Sensei, but then again it’s nearly half the price. We found the M60 could easily handle the action of Battlefield 3, and after a brief tweak in Corsair’s (still in beta) software, we had it working perfectly. The ability to tweak lift-off distance is great; we like to lift our mouse a lot, so by setting the M60 to not track at any height, we ended up with solid mousing. Sadly, that beta software is very obviously a work in progress, at least in terms of look. It gets the job done, though, so we can’t complain too much.
Designing a great mouse first off is a tough proposition, and if anyone could do it, it’s Corsair. The M60 is good, don’t mistake us, but we get the feeling that it’s the next iteration of Corsair mice that are going to really make an impact. On the other hand, given this is still very good, and for a very fair price, it’s still a very good mouse. Not the best, but a long way from the worst.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012