Asus Chakram Review – JOYSTICK ON A MOUSE??
I’ve checked out a lot of ‘innovative’ gaming mice, from ones with OLED displays, to insanely lightweight ones, and plenty with modular aspects, but none with a joystick. Yes that’s right, Asus and their Chakram wireless gaming mouse has a joystick on the side. Lets see if it’s any good, but first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!
So, a joystick on a mouse then. It’s definitely interesting – the concept is one I and many others have thought about before and seems like a great idea. I mean, the idea of being able to play games entirely from one hand is pretty cool, whether its racing games, running in FPS games, or anything else.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure the Chakram has it quite right. You are able to set it up as either an “analogue joystick”, or as a 4 way d-pad type thing although I found that games would only recognise it as the latter. Because of that, the usability is… limited. In CSGO it wasn’t a big deal, as walking diagonally isn’t too important for ‘basic’ play, but in Project Cars 2 not being able to accelerate and steer at the same time was a problem. It’s possible the analogue input style would work better for that, but I couldn’t seem to get it to work so I was stuck with key inputs.
You can switch between the 3 profiles Asus lets you use – although it’s not a simple button press. You need to lift the mouse up to access the “DPI” button on the bottom, and press that AND one of the side buttons or middle mouse button to change profile. Not exactly hot swappable.
What is hot swappable though is the left and right mouse switches. The whole top of the mouse is only held on by magnets, so when you pull the back off, you can then remove each of the left and right button covers revealing the OMRON switches. Inside this little accessories kit is a set of tweezers – not to be confused with zip ties mind you – and two other OMRON switches, a slightly different feel to the preinstalled switches. Swapping them out is nice and easy, making customizability a breeze. You might think this is great for longevity of the mouse – you can just replace the switches if they break, right? Well, yes, but they’ve used a rather specialist tri-wing screw to hold the mouse together, meaning the battery, the thing that will almost always need replacing first, is pretty well sealed in so I wouldn’t necessarily make the “longevity” a selling point.
You might have also noticed the ROG logo under the back cover – that’s removable too. Under it is an RGB LED which shines through the logo and the translucent back cover. They even include a blank white plate you can customise and replace the ROG logo with, should you fancy some arts and crafts.
That’s not the only RGB this has either, on the front you’ve got a light bar that spans the full width of this thing, of course all tied in with Asus Aura if you want to match the rest of your Asus parts. Personally, I’m not overly fussed on RGB on a mouse, since it’s under my hand most of the time.
Connectivity wise, you probably noticed the USB C port – thumbs up there, you also get bluetooth, 2.4GHz with the included USB dongle, and Qi wireless charging should you rather no wires at all. Battery life is decent, Asus claims up to 79 hours of play time if you turn off the lights, but realistically you’ll probably need to charge it once every week or two if you don’t opt for wireless charging.
What about playing with it, you know, as a normal gaming mouse? Well, it’s not bad. It’s a little on the heavy side at around 120g, and the weight feels pretty high too making for a bit of a strange feel, but it tracks well in games. It was pretty hard to get used to it as its shape is fairly unusual – definitely for the larger hands as I could barely reach the joystick with my reasonably large hands. This isn’t for the flickshot kings out there, I see this as a more jack of all trades, master of none type product where it’ll work reasonably well in most game genres, but not really specialise in any.
So it’s feature packed, and it’s from Asus, so it’s going to cost a pretty penny right? Yah. £150. That’s a lot of money to be dropping on a mouse, admittedly a wireless, Qi charging mouse, but still. I feel like the joystick is more of a gimmick than anything, while you can use it for playing games, unless you are an amputee (for which this does seem like a great option), I don’t think you’d actually want to. Same goes for the switches, unless you really care about the exact model of switch you are clicking away at, I can’t see many people ever bothering to replace them. Add those together and you suddenly find it very hard to justify spending this much on a mouse with, realistically, not that many usable features.
But hey, maybe I’m wrong and you would use them – feel free to let me know in the comments!
Chakram on Amazon: https://techteamgb.co.uk/chakram
Products provided by Asus
-
TechteamGB Score
