Sensei Gaming Mouse

Serious gamers love their gaming gear, which can range from headsets to keyboards and mice.   Mice can be arguably the most important tool for First Person shooters and RTS games such as Counter strike and StarCraft II.  However, which mouse is the “best” is possibly the biggest question one could ask.  The right mouse is different for every person.  Some prefer high DPI sensitivity; others hold their mouse in different ways: some gamers are left handed; some like glowing mice; some like extra buttons.  Logitech, Steel series, Razer, Microsoft, Thermaltake…there are heaps of different gaming mice out there.

Today we will be looking into the new Sensei mouse provided by Steel Series, which is claimed to be ‘the world’s most customizable mouse’.  To achieve this, Steel Series offer an ergonomic, ambidextrous shape and size, which means that the mouse is suitable for many different kinds of gamer grips.  Additionally, you have macros, custom profiles for applications, DCPI (mouse sensitivity) adjustment on the fly, a choice of over 16 million colours of LED lighting for different areas of the mouse, left handed support…so far so good.

The mouse itself is very similar to the steel series Xai in both appearance and feel.  It feels a tad bit heavy in comparison however to its older brother.  After downloading the near 28mb driver from Steel Series website, you will find in the taskbar the steel series logo to get access to the vast amount of options you can change to the mouse settings.  

What instantly caught my eye were the application profiles you can set for specific games.  There are several listed by default, however you can easily add as many as you wish, and the driver will automatically change modes once the application is launched (or you can just manually select the specific profile yourself).  Seeing as so many games have different forms of mouse acceleration and smoothing, I already see heaps of usage with this tool alone.  Oh, and it also changes the colour scheme per profile as well.  This is a feature that Razer and Logitech have had in their driver software for quite some time now, so it’s great to see that Steel Series have followed.

Shifting over to another menu, you then get a list of the features most players will want to tweak right away.  The DCPI levels, exact aim, free lift, exact accel, and LED lighting colours.  If you are like me, you can sometimes spend hours upon hours changing these levels until you get that perfectly right feel.  Fortunately for me, mimicking the Xai’s settings had the exact same results to it, so I could spend some time enjoying the LED configuration settings.

Initially the driver had a couple of issues with choosing certain colours outside the default options given.  For instance, I wanted to have a dark red colour instead of the standard, and had to adjust it many times to get the desired outcome.  On many attempts I was met with a more bright pink than a red.  This could possibly be a minor glitch in the software that Steel Series will address soon.

Now onto the important part, gaming.  After playing a few games of league of legends, Red Orchestra 2, and Bad company 2 I can safely say the mouse to me is very good performer.  While I can move the cursor around easily in League of legends, I can also with little effort line up long distance shots in shooters.  Again as I said before, experience with any mice is all dependants on the player and their preferences.