LIGHTWEIGHT WIRELESS MMO MOUSE! Steelseries AEROX 9 Wireless Review

There are plenty of lightweight gaming mice on the market – hell there are even wireless lightweight mice like this Glorious Model D- Wireless – but do you know what I’ve never seen? A lightweight wireless MMO mouse. I use a Razer Naga Trinity as my main gaming mouse, that may as well weigh a metric tonne by comparison, so a lightweight and wireless option would make for a great replacement. Enter the Steelseries AEROX 9 Wireless. It’s just beautiful.

Ok, it’s not actually that beautiful. It’s one of those cutout style mice with more holes than plastic. They have tried to make the PCB and the very visible internals as pretty as possible, but I can’t say it’s exactly stunning. But, I mean, who cares? It’s a mouse. It lives under your hand most of the time. That’s why I never understood RGB on mice – sure on a keyboard you are never covering the whole thing so you can see parts of it and having backlighting is genuinely useful in the dark but on a mouse? It’s under your hand, you can’t see it! Well Steelseries clearly agrees because this thing will turn the LEDs off whenever you move the mouse! That means you get to increase the battery life too, Steelseries quotes 180 hours for this, which I’m not exactly mad at.

I should mention, while Steelseries claims this is an “ultra-lightweight” mouse, it’s not quite. It’s 89g, which compared to the 69g Glorious Model D- Wireless might as well generate its own gravitational force. Ok not really, compared to my Razer Naga Trinity at 120g this is a featherweight. Even comparing to Razer’s newer Naga Pro wireless, that’s 119g. So, this isn’t the absolute lightest – despite the cheese grater holes – but it’s definitely lightweight compared to its rivals.

Features wise, the main event here has to be the 12 programmable thumb buttons. They are laid out with a slight concave shape to them to make them as accessible as possible, and for my larger hand size it works pretty well. I do have to twist the mouse in my hand a little to get the corner buttons, but on the whole it’s fairly comfortable to use them.

Speaking of comfort, this is definitively a palm grip style mouse. If you have large hands you might have a chance at hybrid gripping it, but odds are you’ll feel more comfortable with a palm grip. One thing that might put you off is the lack of grip you get on the smooth plastic all round. Even on the ring and pinky finger side, it’s a smooth mostly flat piece of plastic. That just isn’t great for holding on too well. It’s not the worst I’ve felt by far, I can still hold onto it without too much difficulty, but it could be grippier for sure. Comfort felt pretty good – the shape does have a pretty high rise to it but it fits my hand nicely enough. The only fatigue I felt with it is having to carefully grip it so as to not press any of the side buttons while lifting and sweeping around.

You might be concerned with build quality on a mouse with more holes than swiss cheese, but I’m happy to report on the whole it’s fine. It doesn’t feel like it wants to crush in on itself when you are flicking around, the side buttons all feel well supported and tactile – just like any other MMO style mouse really, and even the scroll wheel feels of decent quality. The only thing I would note is that possibly since the speed holes extend onto the left and right click buttons I felt a bit of catching on the left click if pressed in a certain way. It never interfered with my gaming experience, but it can feel just a touch crunchy to use at times.

Actually gaming on it felt pretty good though, I really like having a few extra buttons on the side of my mouse to do things like swap weapons or heal in games like PUBG, so this is great. The lack of grip surface did mean I had to put more mental energy into keeping hold of it and not smushing the buttons on the side, but I still had a decent time with it. I did happen to have fairly limited vision when filming some of these shots so you’ll have to excuse the considerably worse than normal skills on display. Regardless of that, I can see this appealing to a pretty wide range of people for a pretty wide range of game genres.

If you are after a bit of customisation on this, you’ll be happy to know the Steelseries Engine can offer plenty. You can adjust the CPI settings as you’d expect, change the sleep timer, enabled high efficiency mode which basically locks some of the settings like the adjustable polling rate to 125Hz (down from 1000Hz at stock) and locks the illumination smart mode on – that’s the thing that turns the LEDs off when you move the mouse. Of course you can customise the LED lighting pattern, and remap any of the buttons on the mouse to anything you want from keyboard keys to macros and even launch entire programs if you want.

Compared to something like the Glorious Model D or O wireless, this isn’t exactly a match – especially for LEET PRO FPS gaming, but clearly it isn’t really meant to be. As a pretty versatile option, I could happily use this as my main gaming mouse – although a touch more grip would definitely be nice. The lightweight design is something that’s usually reserved for FPS mice, so to see it available in the MMO space too is great. It definitely makes a difference compared to my Naga Trinity especially for longer gaming sessions.

The only other catch is the price. This is Steelseries’ top end option, which commands a premium. You can pick it up for around £100 right now, which is considerably more than something like this Glorious Model D- Wireless, although it’s right in line with the Razer Naga Pro so for the class it isn’t too bad, but it is still rather spenny. If you are interested though, I’ll leave a global Amazon affiliate link in the description below for you to check out.