Azeron Cyborg Gaming Keypad review: A new way to play?

Azeron’s line of gaming keypads, in particular the new Cyborg model, has been making waves on social media of late. In the midst of esports and accessibility options stirring up the market with a demand for new ways to play, Azeron has generated lots of praise from those who have never felt comfortable using a keyboard.

The idea is simple: with one hand you use a mouse to control a game’s camera, and the other you rest in the Cyborg’s ergonomic cradle – which resembles something you might see a sci-fi villain use to pilot their spaceship. With simple flexions and extensions of your fingers, small buttons are clicked, each one activating a chosen in-game function.

Does it work? The short answer is yes, it does. To my delight, it showed itself as a viable alternative to using a mouse and keyboard, offering unholy levels of customisation and blissful levels of comfort. If you’re willing to put the effort in to customise each game’s controls and do some serious relearning, this might just become your new favourite way to play.

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Azeron Cyborg Gaming Keypad review: What do you get for the money?

For your purchase, you get a fully customised keypad built to order. You can choose the size, the colours and even the addition of a D-pad component should you want one. Azeron’s website has a handy 3D model for you to play around with that allows you to see exactly how your preferences will impact your keypad’s build.

With this new Cyborg model, you also have the option to customise some text on the side with a name, a gamer-tag alias or anything else you fancy.

A Cyborg will set you back £153 (€175), which sits fairly comfortably among competitive pro controllers and top-of-the-line gaming keyboards. Our current favourite high-end gaming keyboard, the SteelSeries Apex 7 TKL, for example, costs £180, while a Scuf Reflex Pro Controller for PS5 and PC will set you back the same amount. Customisation options do add extra to the overall cost, but these are optional.

Alongside the keypad itself, you get a selection of tools that help you set it up. A small set of screwdrivers helps you adjust each “tower” or finger slot to the exact size of your hand and the position it sits in. You also get a helpful instruction sheet, two thumbstick replacement caps and some spare screws.

The keypad cradles your hand with your palm facing down. Each finger has a slot to sit in, while your thumb controls an analog stick console gamers will find a welcome and familiar feature. In total, there are twenty-eight programmable buttons on the Cyborg. Surrounding the index finger and pinky are six buttons and, for each of the middle two fingers, there are five – that’s a huge amount of customisability.

The keypad plugs into your PC or laptop via a USB-A. The keypad itself uses a Mini USB connection, and Azeron supplies a cable in the box.

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Azeron Cyborg Gaming Keypad review: What does it do well?

As someone who has never felt at home with a mouse and keyboard, the Azeron Cyborg made me feel like I finally had a viable alternative I could use with PC games. A standard console-style controller, especially in competitive gaming circles, can get you laughed out of a lobby fairly quickly, after all.

Azeron’s keypad made sense to me as a way to convert and, to my surprise, I found it much easier to use in PC games than a mouse and keyboard. It even made me faster and more efficient in games I had plenty of mouse and keyboard experience with.

To test that, I started with a speedrun of Dishonored, a game I’ve played countless times in the decade since its release. My “speedrun” time, without using any level skips or serious glitches on PC usually comes to a fairly slow two hours with a mouse and keyboard.

On a console, that time comes down to about 90 minutes, since that’s where I have most experience and feel most comfortable. With the Cyborg on PC, I managed to bring my time down to 1hr 45 after taking a while to learn the new movements and control scheme. I started with this playtest, in particular, because I wanted to see if the Cyborg could help bridge the gap between my experience with a controller and my dissonance with a mouse and keyboard. The answer to this question, I’d argue, is a most definitive yes.

The reasons for this are simple. With the Cyborg, I found it far easier to distinguish which key I was pressing than on a keyboard and my hand never left the “home” position because the clever design of this product brings the keys to you instead of the other way around.

Elsewhere, I found that the Azeron’s high levels of customisation offered more help. A competitive first-person shooter like HUNT: Showdown involves so many in-game actions that you have to be very dextrous to use a keyboard and mouse effectively. Once I’d settled on a control scheme for the Azeron that made sense – for example, pushing down with my index finger to crouch – the whole in-game experience felt much more natural.

It’s hard not to rave about the modification options the Cyborg provides you with. The sheer scope of potential functions and range of configurations is enough to make you sit back and wonder where to even start. I’ll come onto the drawbacks of that later on, but praise must be given first.

The possibilities here are endless, even if you don’t want to map every single button to a specific function. You can double buttons up, you can swap mid-game if you work out something that will fit better. You can make each button work for you with a simple click-and-change system in the accompanying software. It’s easy to use, effective and there’s no unnecessary fluff to get in the way.

The thumbstick is a worthy addition. It’s an ingenious design aspect that frees up even more choice for in-game functions to your other fingers. With the WASD keys on a keyboard, you’re using up three digits, but this thumbstick frees those fingers up to focus on other tasks. The joystick and optional D-pad can be pivoted to suit any hand position, and you can even remap the directional elements if you so require.

And comfort is a further bonus. For many gamers, carpal tunnel syndrome is a common issue that comes from using a controller that’s too large or too small. Mass-produced gamepads for Xbox and PlayStation can only cater to a happy medium of hand sizes, while a keyboard requires hands to be contorted into demonic positions just to hit the necessary keys for each game.

With Azeron’s keypad, I felt instantly at home and I didn’t, at any point, feel the need to shake my hand out from holding it in an uncomfortable position. I slid each finger into place and, after adjusting every angle to what was comfortable for me, I never looked back. I played Sable, a much more relaxing affair than Dishonored and HUNT and time seemed to slip by without me realising. It’s so comfortable to use, it made me wonder if learning to type on it for work was a possibility.

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Azeron Cyborg Gaming Keypad review: What could it do better?

Have you heard of the paradox of choice? Because you might want to be familiar with the idea before you invest in one of Azeron’s keypads. Annoyingly, the Cyborg’s biggest positive is its most irritating negative. Not only does all of this adjusting and configuring take a lot of time to set up and learn, but creating one control map to suit every game you play is unlikely. So, the chances are you’ll need to make slight modifications to your software profiles to suit each game.

All of this choice is astounding, but even the physical adjustments before you settle in to use the software can take a while. It would be easy to see all of this personalisation as an eventual faff that gamers can’t be bothered with.

Another small gripe is that you can only have two profiles stored in the Cyborg’s system memory at one time. It is possible to import and export profiles into the software on your PC to save you having to make new ones from scratch constantly. Luckily, you can also share profiles with others in the Azeron community. However, the option to store more preset profiles on the pad itself for quick access would definitely save some friction.

One other slightly flaw is the fact that each button has a tiny actuation point and is, therefore, very easy to activate by accident. You might consider this a strength – it only takes a miniscule movement to pull a particular weapon out, for example. On the other hand, it doesn’t take much to slip up, pulling out what can only be referred to as an accidental healing syringe-crouch-punch while staring down an online opponent who will be completely bemused by your actions.

As you can imagine, there’s also quite a learning curve here if you’re transferring from a mouse and keyboard, or a controller. While this can’t exactly be considered a flaw – it’s more a price of admission – it is something to consider before taking the leap.

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Azeron Cyborg Gaming Keypad review: Should you buy it?

How we play our games is highly subjective. Some swear by mouse and keyboard, and others are far more comfortable with a controller in-hand. While only you will be able to say if an Azeron keypad is right for you – I would certainly argue its products are nowhere close to being a passing fad.

The Azeron Cyborg is an easy recommendation for any gamer who likes to make each game bespoke to them, or for anyone who’s trying to make the shift from console to PC. I know for a fact it’s the way I’ll be playing games on PC from now on.