Corsair Scimitar RGB mouse review

Can you ever have too many buttons on a gaming mouse? If you’re an MMO or MOBA addict, the answer is probably no. It’s certainly the approach Corsair has taken for the Scimitar; it’s got a whopping twelve buttons on the side alone, ensuring you won’t run out of macros when you wade into battle online.

The Scimitar is an evolution of Corsair’s previous mice, including the M45 Raptor; it has a similar shape, built to suit right-handed users with multiple grip styles. The scroll wheel is large and ratchets slightly, but not enough that you can’t spin it quickly. Unfortunately, it doesn’t tilt left and right. The two familiar buttons below the scroll wheel can adjust sensitivity on the fly between five pre-set levels, and the whole top of the mouse is coated in a soft-touch rubberised plastic that ensures it won’t fly out of your hand mid-game.

The sculpted right mouse button has room to rest your ring or little finger on, depending on your grip style, and your thumb rests naturally on the grid of buttons on the side. A screw tool is included in the box, to reposition the buttons to better suit your grip and ensure all twelve are within easy reach. The 4, 5 & 6 and 10, 11 & twelve keys have a textured finish meant to resemble Diamond plate metal, but it’s debateable whether this is enough to differentiate all twelve buttons from one another. The LED lights help when you’re playing in the dark, but there are only two zones, so you can’t set each button to a different colour. That being said, the grid-based layout is a million times easier to comprehend than the bonkers design used for the Vengeance M95.

There are three other lighting zones around the mouse; one on the scroll wheel, another on the Corsair logo etched into the palm grip, and the third at the front of the mouse to dimly illuminate your desktop or mouse mat. There’s also a white LED next to the thumb buttons, but this can’t be changed to a different colour – it’s simply to help you see the buttons.

You can customise each section individually, or apply your changes to the whole mouse using Corsair’s Cue software suite. It’s very comprehensive, with different glow patterns and timings, or you can synchronise the mouse with a Corsair keyboard using Cue Link. With a Strafe RGB Silent keyboard plugged into my PC, the rainbow wave pattern carried across to the mouse with just one click.

Cue is also where you’ll need to go to add macro keys or create custom profiles. You can set up shortcuts that launch applications, record multiple keystrokes, or set up complex timed macro functions with the simple recording tool. There are even MMO countdown timers designed specifically for certain spells and abilities. It doesn’t take long to get powerful key combinations that make all the difference in games, and I appreciated the application shortcuts when working too.

The optical sensor is capable of a whopping 12,000dpi, although performance peaks around the 2,000-5,000dpi range. Naturally the Scimitar has a 1,000Hz USB polling rate, which is now the standard for all gaming mice, and I had no problems battling through the nexus in Heroes of the Storm or fighting Protoss stalkers in StarCraft II. It might not be built for FPS gaming, but it still worked brilliantly in Counter Strike, with the extra side buttons bound to specific grenades for quicker counter-flashes and anti-rush incendiaries. I play at a relatively low 1,200dpi, and had no complaints with speed or accuracy.

Unless you’re already deeply entrenched in the world of macros and shortcut keys, however, the Scimitar feels a bit like overkill. It’s a comfortable mouse, and the lighting effects work brilliantly if you have a CUE Link compatible keyboard or headset, but the tiny thumb buttons can be more of a hindrance for non-gaming tasks – especially if you’re used to using side buttons for forward/backward web navigation.

For the converted, however, it’s probably the best value MMO mouse around; it’s the same price as Razer’s Naga 2015 and only £10 more expensive than the Logitech G600, but the comprehensive software and Colour LEDs give it the edge.