Roccat Kone Pure Ultra gaming mouse review

While the Roccat name isn't quite as well-known as Razer or Logitech, the German company has been manufacturing PC hardware for well over a decade. Its experience in this field led to gaming headset manufacturer Turtle Beach acquiring the company in 2019, raising both the awareness and availability of the brand worldwide.

One of the first products to come out of Roccat following the acquisition was the Roccat Kone Pure Ultra, an ultra-light offshoot of its well-established Kone gaming mouse line. To distinguish itself from the increasingly-competitive ultra-light market, the Kone Pure Ultra places greater emphasis on ergonomics, making it an attractive choice for folks wanting speed and comfort in a single package.

Design

Design

• Lightweight build allows for fast movement with minimal effort
• Full-sized body provides a good level of support and comfort
• Thumb buttons are awkwardly shaped and positioned

• Read more about the Roccat Kone Pure Ultra's design

  With a shape derived from the original Kone gaming mouse, the Kone Pure Ultra looks a lot heavier than it actually is. I was quite surprised when I first picked it up. Weighing in at just 66g, it almost feels hollow, but not in the cheap and flimsy way that budget mice do. My tight grip was met with reassuring resistance, giving me confidence that it can survive a good bit of wear and tear.

  The surprises continued when I realised that the Kone Pure Ultra lacked any form of visible texturing or rubber grips on its sides. Such features are relatively common on modern gaming mice, as they enhance stability and control even if your hands start to clam up.

  Fortunately, the rubber coating that covers the Kone Pure Ultra proved remarkably grippy throughout my testing. Combined with the Kone Pure Ultra's ergonomic curves and comfortable thumb groove, I always felt fully in control of my movements – well, almost always.

  The Kone Pure Ultra's ergonomic design breaks down with its thumb buttons. Not only are they positioned too high up to reach without lifting your thumb out of the thumb groove, their bottom edges jut out and dig into your skin if you try to press them from below. Worse, they're angled upwards such that hitting them from below isn't reliable – a fact I discovered through multiple failed spell activations in Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem. Ultimately, I had to switch my grip in games where I frequently use the thumb buttons, resting my thumb on top of the buttons so I could reliably press them down. This was both less comfortable and left me feeling like I had less control over my movements.

  Other than the two thumb buttons, the Kone Pure Ultra sports two more buttons below its scroll wheel for adjusting DPI. DPI, or dots per inch, controls the sensitivity of the mouse's optical sensor. The scroll wheel itself is Roccat's "2D Titan wheel", which simply means it scrolls up and down but doesn't support horizontal tilt functionality.

  Rounding out the package, Roccat has opted for a rubber USB cable instead of a more durable braided one. Roccat touts the cable as lighter and more flexible than those found on its previous mice, but it still felt a little lacking to me compared to, say, the Speedflex cable Razer built into its ultra-light Viper Mini gaming mouse.

Performance

Performance

• Owl-Eye optical sensor delivers accurate tracking performance across all DPI settings
• Left and right buttons click reliably and responsively
• Click feedback could be firmer

• Read more about the Roccat Kone Pure Ultra's performance

  The Kone Pure Ultra's lightweight design has a significant impact on its performance. Slinging it around at high speed requires very little effort, making it easy to snap off a quick 180 and take down enemies trying to sneak up behind you.

  At the same time, the ergonomic contours of the Kone Pure Ultra ensure that agility doesn't come at the cost of control. With my thumb nestled in its groove, transitioning between large sweeping movements and pinpoint aiming was smooth and reliable. I had no trouble swiftly swinging my aim from target to target in Destiny 2 before slowing down to dial in precise headshots.

  Credit also needs to go to the Kone Pure Ultra's "Owl-Eye" optical sensor, which tracked flawlessly throughout my testing. I didn't encounter any hiccups in twitchy first-person shooters like Doom, Gunfire Reborn or the aforementioned Destiny 2. And like the Pixart 3389 sensor it's based on, Roccat's custom sensor is plenty versatile, supporting sensitivity options from 50 DPI up to 16,000 DPI.

  There is a downside to the Kone Pure Ultra's featherweight design, which is common to most ultra-light mice. Because it takes so little force to move the Kone Pure Ultra, it's more susceptible to unintended cursor movement than heavier mice. I found it quite difficult to rest my hand for any length of time without the cursor jittering in place. The movement was never severe enough to impact my performance in games or outside of them, but it is noticeable.

  As you'd expect from a premium gaming mouse, the Kone Pure Ultra's left and right buttons have a reliable and responsive click to them. They feel sufficiently durable, too, capable of weathering many marathon sessions of Diablo 3 or any other click-heavy game.

  Feedback from the Kone Pure Ultra's buttons isn't quite as strong as I'd like, though. For instance, I couldn't always tell when I'd pressed the scroll wheel button, especially when gaming with a pair of headphones on. Any click from the button would be drowned out by in-game audio and the physical feedback wasn't clear enough for me to be sure my click was registered.

  Actually scrolling the scroll wheel is less ambiguous. While resistance is relatively low, there's enough of a click between each step of the wheel to allow for precise scrolling. I had no trouble cycling through weapons accurately – a task that some low-resistance scroll wheels trip up on.

  I mentioned the awkward positioning of the Kone Pure Ultra's thumb buttons earlier and this has an undeniable impact on performance. To use them reliably you have to adopt a less comfortable and less stable grip. In doing so, I noticed my accuracy drop, so I ended up ignoring the thumb buttons altogether. The trade-off just wasn't worth it.

Features

Features

• EasyShift lets you access more custom functions and mappings on the fly
• AIMO lighting can sync with other Roccat devices

• Read more about the Roccat Kone Pure Ultra's features

  While the Kone Pure Ultra lacks heft, it isn't wanting for features. Roccat has crammed in all the bells and whistles you'd expect from a modern gaming mouse, each of which you can customise through the Roccat Swarm configuration software.

  First up, you can remap all of the Kone Pure Ultra's buttons: that's seven in total plus the up and down actions of the scroll wheel. The only caveat is that you must bind the standard left- and right-click functions, though you don't have to bind them to the actual left and right buttons if you don't want to.

  Along with duplicating the functions of other buttons or keyboard keys, you can assign an array of system-level actions like adjusting the volume, opening a new tab in your web browser or running a specific program. And folks who really want to optimise their efficiency can create and assign macros, defining sequences of actions to perform with the press of a single button.

  For even more versatility, the Kone Pure Ultra supports Roccat's "Easy Shift" feature. Much like Razer's HyperShift, this feature lets you define a button or key that, when held down, unlocks a secondary binding for each of the Kone Pure Ultra's buttons. For example, I set the scroll wheel to control volume when the Easy Shift key is held down, letting me adjust audio levels in-game without having to move my hands.

  

  There's no shortage of nitty-gritty performance settings to tweak in the Swarm software. Simple sliders let you adjust scrolling speed, DPI settings, double-click sensitivity, sensor polling rate (up to a maximum of 1,000Hz), vertical cut-off distance, angle snapping and debounce delay.

  If you're not familiar with the last three, here's a quick primer. Vertical cut-off distance lets you adjust the point at which the Kone Pure Ultra's optical sensor stops tracking once you lift the mouse off your mousepad. Angle snapping is a toggle that locks the cursor to a fixed angle when it detects you're trying to draw a straight line. Debounce delay is a time buffer built into devices with mechanical switches, there to prevent physical reverberations from registering as duplicate button clicks or keypresses.

  What would a gaming mouse be without RGB lighting? That's a question the Kone Pure Ultra won't answer, as Roccat has emblazoned the company logo on the bottom of the mouse face, right where the middle of the palm rests. While it simply cycles through colours by default, you can choose from a range of patterns including a breathing pulse, a soft wave or a blinking light if you really want to draw attention to it. You can customise each pattern further by defining the speed, brightness and colours, too.

  Rounding out the customisation options, the Kone Pure Ultra packs enough onboard memory to store five profiles, each of which can define its own button mapping, performance settings and RGB lighting. You can store macros on the mouse as well, letting you carry them between different computers.

  If you own other Roccat products, the Kone Pure Ultra supports the AIMO intelligent lighting system. While the name sounds impressive, the "intelligent" part seems a little optimistic. Currently, AIMO lets you sync lighting patterns across multiple Roccat devices, and that's it. Roccat has pitched the technology as reactive, changing automatically based on what you're doing at any given moment. As far as I could tell, though, the lighting remained static throughout my time with the device.

Should you buy the Roccat Kone Pure Ultra?

Amid a growing number of ultra-light gaming mice, the Roccat Kone Pure Ultra stands out thanks to its emphasis on ergonomics. Comfortable curves provide the support necessary to take full advantage of the Kone Pure Ultra's agility, while the Owl-Eye optical sensor keeps pace in delivering reliable tracking performance even in the most intense in-game engagements.

It's not without its flaws. Occasionally-ambiguous click feedback can be frustrating, especially when it crops up in high-action moments. And the awkward shape and positioning of the thumb buttons is a real disappointment, severely undermining their usefulness.

Still, if you're in the market for an ultra-light gaming mouse that doesn't sacrifice comfort, the Roccat Kone Pure Ultra is definitely worth consideration.

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