In the (very) wide world of gaming peripherals, a certain bar has been set by big name companies such as Logitech, Steelseries, and Razer. This bar demands certain bare minimums for gaming mice, which any product pretty much has to meet in order to be considered a serious contender for PC gamers’ hard-earned cash.
It’s easy to weed out the mice that don’t bother to compete on this playing field with the big guys; your typical computer hardware store will stock their shelves with any variety of gaming mice, and mostly these companies are competing on box art and marketing jazz to get the attention of people who may not be well-researched, discerning gamers.
At first glance, it seems like Genius—using their GX Gaming moniker, a name not well-known amongst PC gaming enthusiasts, might be one of those companies. It seems like maybe they’re relying on flashy box art and a nice-looking product to woo the eyeballs of the teenage gamer with a fistful of allowance cash in her pocket.
Well, that’s why they sent along a review sample of their new DeathTaker mouse—to get it in front of the more discerning folks (that would be you, dear readers) who research well before they buy.
DeathTaker Specs
The GX Gaming DeathTaker definitely meets all the minimum requirements to be considered a serious contender for your gaming desktop:
- Nine programmable buttons
- Independent X/Y axis sensitivity adjustment
- 1.8m braided, gold-plated USB connector
- 5700 dpi laser sensor
- User-adjustable weight, in 4.5g increments
- Five user-selectable profiles, supporting up to 55 programmable macros
- On-board memory to store macros on the mouse itself
The shape of the DeathTaker is relatively standard as far as gaming mice go. The weight chamber is in the palm rest, and the cover slides off easier and locks on magnetically in a clever fashion. The RGB backlight is programmable for color and pulse rate (it’s purely aesthetic, but it looks neat).
Design
With any mouse that is geared towards RTS and MMO players, there are a lot of buttons. The trick is to make them all accessible while still making the mouse ergonomic. This mouse would not be good for gamers with large hands. Being a Taiwan-based company, and seemingly marketed to mostly the Asia Pacific market, this is a mouse geared towards gamers with smaller hands. Even my medium-sized hands had a little trouble cramping up a bit to reach some of the buttons (particularly the thumb buttons—the ones normally reserved for browser back and forward).
Slightly cramped; notice the sharp and somewhat awkward angle of my thumb
Other than the awkward angle for the thumb buttons, if you have medium- to small-sized hands, you’ll find this mouse comfortable. Right handed only.
Performance
The mouse, as is typical with most gaming mice now, performs well. I used Torchlight to test it, as there is a lot of frenetic quick aiming and clicking, and with the particular class I play, you often have to quickly switch to a new enemy. There are also a lot of keypresses for spells and powers, so this would give me a good chance to test out the macro programming.
Recording macros was a bit awkward. You push the record button to start recording (note that you cannot do this in-game, which makes it even more awkward), and then press your keypresses. If you want to add mouse clicks, you have to stop recording, click the “insert mouse click” button, and choose right or left click. Here’s the problem: This means you can only either put mouse clicks at the end of a keypress macro, and then they’re only either right or left click (no middle click or scroll, for example). When you click “record”, to presumably continue adding keypresses, it clears out whatever you had previously programmed. This seems like a design flaw that should be corrected in their software, but for now I’d say that macros are limited only to keypresses.
Here's my illustrious "Summon All My Bros" macro for Torchlight
The other downside is that you can only assign one macro to the macro button on the mouse. You could theoretically assign the “X” and “Y” buttons next to the left mouse button as a second and third macro, but realistically you are only going to have one macro at a time accessible from the mouse interface. The “55 macro” capacity is how many the mouse’s internal memory can hold.
Conclusion
The GX Gaming DeathTaker is hard to judge; it feels good, and the sensor is really responsive. I actually enjoy the clicking and mousing better than my Razer Deathadder. However, the software is minimal and confusing. It doesn’t help that the GX Gaming site has no instructions (you can download instructions in a RAR file from a very slow server). The macro feature has its heart in the right place, but it doesn’t really shine if all you can really do is activate one macro from the mouse itself. It’s nice to be able to select your DPI settings, have independent X/Y axes, and change your polling rate, and the mouse itself looks great and has good heft (especially with all the weights in), but in the end its obvious that GX Gaming isn’t quite up to the level of what North American gamers might consider acceptable. It falls short on the details, especially in user interface and web support.
At $53 (Amazon), it’s not too bad for a gaming mouse, especially when you consider that the competition that the DeathTaker is aiming at is usually in the $80-$100 range, but there are better ones out there if you have the money. If you’re a gamer on a budget, the DeathTaker really isn’t too bad, especially if they were to update the software to have more flexible macro recording. Here’s to hoping.
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