WHAT IS THIS??? Azeron Gaming Keypad Review
If you saw this in the thumbnail and thought, “what the hell is that?” Yeah, me too. This is a game pad, think Razer Orbweaver on steroids… It’s 3D printed, costs 150 Euros, and despite me using it for the last week, I’m possibly more confused than when I first saw it. Let me explain, but first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!
The Azeron has a pretty dedicated following, you’ll find enough posts on Reddit about how it completely changed their gaming experience, but for those of you that haven’t heard of it before let me explain what it is and what makes it unique. Beyond the funky design and it’s 20 hinged switches, the main selling point of this over a keyboard, or more specifically over something like the Razer Orbweaver, is the analogue joystick on the side. This is a true joystick, not a D-PAD with a cap on the top, and you can even swap the joystick top for Xbox Elite Controller tips. It’s the real deal.
This means that you can be moving around with just your thumb and free up your other fingers to perform other actions much faster. It’s basically like holding a controller in one hand and a mouse in the other, but better, at least in theory. If you can find a game that natively supports both controller and keyboard input it can be great. Fortnite is close, it works fine but the UI glitches like crazy between console and keyboard button labels.
The learning curve is really steep. Especially if you are coming from keyboard and mouse, and are using the joystick to move, learning what keybinds are where takes a while. It’s even more difficult if you play more than one game as your keybinds for say Fortnite won’t be the same as the ones for say COD. You can customise everything in their software, and can toggle between 2 onboard profiles with the latching button on the side. The LEDs show you if you are on profile 1 or 2, and you can swap out what profiles are on there in their software too.
The software is pretty straight forward, which is pretty unique for an indie company like this, you’ve got a load of options for each key. They can be keyboard buttons, xbox controller buttons or triggers, mouse buttons, macros or layers – basically on the fly profile switching, although both macros and layering are only available on software profiles meaning you have to have their software installed and configured to have that work.
Gaming with it, like I said, took a while to get used to. In something like Fortnite it worked pretty well although I’m not used to playing it, nor using a controller for movement, so it didn’t feel overly natural for me. In something like CSGO, a game that does supposedly support controller inputs, it flat out wouldn’t work. You can set the joystick to be mapped to WASD instead, but then you lose the diagonal and proportional movement a joystick affords, and you have to move your finger much further to move which makes fast side to side movement impossible. In COD, it didn’t work either unless I used the WASD mapping which is even worse because to sprint in COD you have to hold shift which felt a little uncomfortable. You can of course just map WASD to the more “natural” keys for each finger, but then you may as well just use a keyboard or a more conventional gamepad as that’d be much easier to learn.
A note about the design, this “Classic” version doesn’t quite work for me. The lower set of buttons are ok, they are a little light for my taste and hinge from one edge making the travel really long it you are pressing them from the top, but the second row, man I don’t get it. If I go to move my finger up from the little box the lower keys make, I always accidentally hit the lower front key before i get close to the upper row one. It feels so out of my way and unnatural to have to reach that far to press them that I barely ever did when using this. I’m sure your mileage will vary, but I have this adjusted as close as I can and I still can barely reach the second row keys.
Build quality for this is mixed. Like I said, it’s pretty much all 3D Printed. The keys, the housings, only the palm rest is injection molded and the base is what I assume is CNC & powder coated metal. The keys feel fairly flimsy, especially the one for the thumb. The prints haven’t been finished at all, so there are still strands poking out, the little hat switch hasn’t been sanded or smoothed at all so it has a pretty sharp edge, and the extra palm rest that came in the box still had printing support material on it. The whole thing has a bit of give to it, and especially the joystick piece moves no matter how tight I sinch the bolt down. It just feels unfinished to me, as if it’s still in development and they are selling their pre-production models.
I get why it’s 3D printed, and the insane amount of customisation does mean you can set it up exactly how you’d want it, but it doesn’t feel like a polished good. They are using a standard Arduino Teensy++ board and the USB cable is just a standard cable that’s strapped down on the inside. For the price, I think I’d prefer a more refined product. One interesting note, while you can customise the colour of every key and braided cable, you can’t pick what weight switches you’d like which is something I would really like to see as these are just way too light for me personally.
This is a very, very niche product. It’s for people who play one game and nothing else. That game will support multi-input and will have a load of keybinds to use on a regular basis, like Fortnite for example, and will have fairly slow movement as side to side strafing isn’t a strong suit of this. And they’ll have to have a fair bit of disposable earnings. If that’s you, awesome, pick one up and enjoy it. But for the rest of us, I’ll stick with my keyboard and swapping to a controller when I fancy it.
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TechteamGB Score
