Why You Can Trust CNET Razer Naga (Molten Special Edition) review: Razer Naga (Molten Special Edition)
The Naga is aimed at a select crowd, but it definitely has its appeal. If you just can't get enough buttons for your WoW raids, this could be your ticket to success.
You'd think from the pictures that Razer's Naga would be rather uncomfortable, but it's surprisingly not so. If anyone has the thumb dexterity to hit all the buttons on the left-hand side, let alone quickly and accurately without looking, we'd be surprised, but they are there for the macro freak within us all. By default they are assigned to the same keyboard key as the number written on them, with 10, 11 and 12 becoming zero, dash and equals. Flip a DIP switch on the bottom, and the 12 becomes a plus sign instead. Of course, being Razer, you can customise all of these buttons to whatever you desire, and this shift button gives you twice as many potential things to customise.
Razer Naga (Molten Special Edition)
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
It's unsurprising then with this huge amount of buttons that the Naga is targeted at World of Warcraft (WoW) players. We'd be tempted to use a dedicated keypad instead, but we know some WoW players who love their Naga and wouldn't want it any other way.
Huge array of crazy buttons aside, there are two more buttons than the norm perched in the top left, which by default act as browser back and forward buttons. They're not spectacularly well separated, though, and the curve of the mouse makes them difficult to hit accurately and quickly, meaning that you could be in for some accidental left mouse clicks while fumbling for the correct controls.
We received the "Molten" special edition of the Naga, which looks quite cool in the promo shots and seems to have multiple lava-like colours. This is outright deception — it still looks cool, but there's only red lights here, folks. The lit Razer logo pulsates as ever, with the scroll wheel trim and side buttons also lit up.
Usual gaming trimmings are here, including customising buttons, separate X/Y sensitivity, acceleration and USB polling control, profile management and macros. Macro editing is excellent, allowing individual event editing, delay insertion and mouse event recording. You can also set the playback mode: a single play, a set number of repeats, repeat for as long as the mouse button is held down or a toggle for the aforementioned feature. We wish all mice had macro features so well apportioned. There is one minor bug: no matter what macro you select to assign to a button, you'll have to make sure that macro is selected a second time, as the software has a habit of choosing the default macro when asking what the repeat options should be.
The Razer driver allows much tweaking, especially in the field of macros.
(Screenshot by CBS Interactive)
Disappointingly, it's not all here: you can't insert additional key presses or append to a macro at a chosen point by recording after the fact. Despite the opportunity for nested macros, this doesn't exist either. At some point, some company will crack the macro editing nirvana, and we'll all be happy campers — but today is not that day.
Despite being an MMO mouse, the Naga is suited to shooters just fine, with Serious Sam HD proving that it still has the tried and true Razer feel.
The Naga is aimed at a select crowd, but it definitely has its appeal. If you just can't get enough buttons for your WoW raids, this could be your ticket to success.