Roccat Kova Mouse Review

Details:
Price: £45

Verdict:
The Kova is one of the most flexible, ergonomic and practical mice available 8/10

Optics: Up to 3200 dpi
Feedback: Coloured dpi-change indicators
Buttons: 5 + 2 customisable buttons
Drivers: Plug and play, driverless configuration
Bling: Custom-coloured, pulsing lights
Web: Roccat

Line Roccat’s latest innovation in PC mice, the Kova, up against the competition and it’s easy to dismiss it as a budget solution. It’s not that it looks cheap – in fact, a more discerning eye will pick out the quality of the build. But in a world of textured, coloured, multifaceted peripherals, the one-piece black PVC Kova with its plain Roccat branding is remarkably simplistic. There’s much more to the Kova than meets the eye, however. You might have criticised its symmetry, for example, when the sloping contours of a right-hand bias mouse looks so much sexier. But this mouse fits just as easily into the left palm as it does the right, allowing users to easily switch between left and right-hand modes. And once it’s plugged in, four sets of LEDs will pulse gently in the colour of your choice – matching the ambient glow from your case if colour co-ordination takes your fancy.

Beneath its humble exterior, the Kova houses several quality gaming features. At 90-grams it’s extremely lightweight and has an appreciable tangibility to button clicking. A driverless configuration means that this mouse is truly plug and play, so any OS upwards of XP will recognise the Kova and not just its basic functionality, but the features integral to the peripheral, like the dpi-change feedback. With monitors burgeoning in size, this mouse offers a maximum of 3200dpi, more than enough to flick the cursor across a native 22-inch screen at a breakneck rate. It also has three other intermediate speeds with a low 400dpi for very fine movements, such as tracking a target with a sniper rifle. It’s a welcome enhancement on what is now a standard gaming mouse feature, but switching through these resolutions can be tricky. It requires a pincer grip to press two buttons located on either side at the back end of the mouse, which is awkward in particularly frenetic bouts of gaming. For a mouse so clearly designed with speed in mind, this could pose an issue for some gamers.
Ben Biggs