SteelSeries Ikari Laser mouse

Feature

SteelSeries Ikari Laser is the flagship mouse of a Danish gaming gear developer, SteelSeries.

August 28th, 2008 by Varg

Customisability (cntd.)
However, the greatest feature of the mouse is definitely the possibility to adjust the CPI setting on the fly. On the left side of the mouse you have an indicator showing whether you are using High or Low sensitivity. By clicking on the button in front of the wheel, you can use the wheel to adjust this CPI at 1 CPI steps. A small LCD screen on the bottom of the mouse shows you the current setting. When you press the button again, the new setting is saved. This makes it easy to adjust the mouse settings even when you are using someone else�s computer and cannot install your own drivers.

Drivers
The package that the SteelSeries Ikari Laser Mouse comes in includes no driver CD. Instead, if you feel that you need drivers, you have to go and download them from the SteelSeries site for yourself. Of course, this also ensures that you get the latest drivers possible.

The driver software allows you to load and save profiles that you have prepared for different games (or downloaded pre-existing ones from the SteelSeries site). Each profile holds the settings for the five mouse buttons and the macros can be set for the buttons in a very self-explanatory screen, sensitivity settings for both High and Low sensitivity (as was said before, you can set these directly from the mouse as well), as well as a setting called Freemove. Freemove is a setting that allows you to set the amount of �software help� that the driver software provides the user � allowing even the shakiest person in the world to draw a relatively straight line. As far as we've seen, SteelSeries is the only mouse company that offers these settings to the user, and we are happy for it: unwanted help in graphics editing can easily ruin your work, or make it pretty hard to accomplish.

However, the drivers also come with some shortcomings: if you want to change the speed of the double click, you will have to use the general mouse settings provided by the operating system for that. Also, if you want to set the number of lines scrolled when you use the mouse wheel, you will have to set this somewhere else. In fact, it is peculiar that these basic settings cannot be determined in the Ikari driver software. It is only for these reasons that the driver software falls short of some other examples we've seen.

Rating
Once again, the scores below represent the average score of both Varg and Wolfwood.

Ergonomy 9
Buttons 8.5
Wheel 9
Customisability 7.75
Drivers 7.5
Total 8.35

Overall, we liked this mouse very much. Even though it has fewer buttons than other gaming mice and its weight cannot be adjusted, the overall feel was still better than with many other mice we�ve tried. In fact, with the scores shown above, SteelSeries Ikari Laser beats every other gaming mouse we reviewed in our previous article. It is definitely one of the best gaming mice on the market.