Endgame Gear XM2we Review – Amazing Lightweight Wireless Gaming Mouse!

This is the Endgame Gear XM2we – not to be confused with the XM2w that’s been so long awaited. This is a bit of an evolution of the XM1r, with the same PixArt PAW3370 sensor, although it’s now running in “corded mode” which basically disables all the power saving features to help speed up tracking latency. One of the larger changes – beyond the fact this is wireless now – is the introduction of Kailh GO optical switches. I do love optical switches, and I’ll explain why in a bit, but first a quick tour around.

This is very much a palm grip style mouse. Even for my relatively large hands it feels like it’s on the larger side. It fills my hand, both for length and width, although it still manages to be fairly comfortable. Of course comfort is subjective so take that with a grain of salt – actually take everything I say with a grain of salt anyway. The two side buttons feel excellent, they’re directly on top of the Kailh GM 2.0 switches that are hard-mounted inside so they feel great. Even the middle click is a Kailh GM 2.0 switch. My only complaint on the feel is the finish. It’s a very smooth matte finish which is just a tad too slippery for my liking. It’s not like it’s a wet bar of soap but I did notice I needed to death-grip it a little more than I’d like to keep it in my hand, especially for faster moves, which are rather common thanks to just how light this thing is.

All in, this weighs just 63g. Now that’s not quite as light as the Glorious Model O Pro I reviewed a while ago, but it’s more than enough to feel like an absolute featherweight. Despite the need for lightness, they still fitted a 410mAh battery inside which gives you a week’s worth of gaming. What’s even better is that it should only take about two hours to charge from dead, and the included USB C cable with its strain relieved, angled connector, works well for gaming and charging. You of course get a USB dongle to go with the mouse, which comes included with a USB C to A adapter meaning you can keep the dongle on your desk, then pop the cable out when it’s time to charge. 

When it comes to gaming with it, I must admit it quickly became one of my favourite mice to use. The shape isn’t quite perfect for me, but the performance made it worth using. It tracks very well – to the eye anyway – and with how light it is, it’s really easy to stick it on a really low CPI and flick for your life. Even with that sort of fast movement I found it tracked well, and with the stock 2mm liftoff distance that felt good for me. You can tweak it to 1mm of liftoff distance if you’d prefer though in their rather basic software. You can remap the buttons to a few basic options, drop the polling rate if you feel so inclined but the strangest option has to be the debounce delay. Remember how I mentioned that this uses Kailh GO optical switches? Well the big benefit of optical switches is that you don’t need to debounce an optical switch. There’s no bouncy piece of metal you need to wait to come to a rest, you are just breaking the beam of a laser, so why they left this set to 3ms by default I don’t know. Set this to 0ms and let ‘er rip. You’ll drop your click latency by 3ms! 

With the debounce set to 0ms I found it just as accurate, and while it’s likely just placebo it did feel a hair more responsive. With the addition of the corded mode on the sensor meaning any initial movement it tracked more accurately and quickly than the older XM1 models. It is worth noting that as part of the wireless power savings, the click reporting somewhat goes to sleep after a few seconds, so an initial click after not using the mouse will take a few milliseconds longer than a click say a second after one before. I can’t say I found that to be much of a problem in my testing with it. 

A note on the mouse’s movement – the absolutely massive glide pads on the bottom feel great on a soft mouse pad. I normally use a hard pad for my filming and that felt a bit rough. It was catching and scratching on any minor imperfection, so you’ll definitely want a soft pad for this bad boy. Other than that I can’t say I have many complaints. It feels well built in the hand – despite the lightweight nature it doesn’t feel like it wants to crumble in your hand at the first sign of pressure. The clicks have very little pre-click travel, which I had to get used to especially for the right click as my middle finger’s resting weight was enough to trigger a click. Still, that only adds to the lightning fast feel of this thing. 

The only catch is the price, although in this sort of ultra-lightweight wireless mouse class the £80 price tag is somewhat average – even cheap depending on what you compare it to. At that price I’d be pretty happy to recommend it to anyone looking for a lightweight gaming mouse – although of course I’m no mouse nerd so I’d highly recommend you check out some more specialist reviewers for their opinions and recommendations too. If you do want to check it out I’ll leave a link to OverclockersUK in the description for you.