Why You Can Trust CNET Razer Tron Mouse and Mat review: Razer Tron Mouse and Mat Bundle
We admire Razer for the lengths it's gone to in making this more than just a cash in, it's a proper tribute. Unless you're in it for the prettiness though, we'd recommend another mouse for serious gamers.
It's a bit weird to be reviewing a tie-in product after the hype has died down. Or perhaps sane, ensuring you never actually get caught up in the PR excitement machine.
Razer Tron Mouse and Mat
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Razer's Tron kit does its best to be part of the Tron mythos, with blue-on-black angular designs used both on the packaging and the product itself.
The first sign of gimmickry comes when you plug the mouse in, lights race around the device and it makes a sound. There's no way to turn the thing off either, meaning every time you restart your machine you're hit with the effect. Yes, it's authentic, but it's low quality audio and screams "cheap toy".
Not that the Tron set is, at AU$179.95. This is rather exorbitant, even if it does come with a mouse mat with rubberised desk grip that glows in the dark.
OK, the last bit is cool. Made doubly so by the fact that Razer shines an intense light at the bottom of the mouse down on to the pad, causing a light trail to follow the mouse, mimicking light bikes. It's impressive at first, but it takes a while to fade, and if you don't like your mouse pad to look like a toddler scribbled all over it then it may not be for you. Buy the mouse by itself, and it'll set you back AU$119.95.
The lights along the top of the mouse look great in the dark, but somewhat lacking in the light. On its site, Razer claims that "light effects [are] triggered by your in-game actions", but it's not the case: they simply stay on all the time. You can turn them off if you like in three separate zones: the scroll wheel, the side strips and the light pointing at the mouse mat.
Even the driver software gets in on the Tron-theme action. (Screenshot by CBS Interactive)
It's an ambidextrous mouse with a huge and comfortable scroll wheel, two buttons on each side and the required left and right click buttons on either side of the scroll wheel. Razer's effort to make it look more Tron-like has resulted in quite a few angles, meaning the mouse isn't as comfortable as say, SteelSeries' Xai. It's also a small mouse, our fairly normal-sized paw ending up gripping it in an eagle claw fashion.
Apart from the main mouse buttons there's an extra two on each side, and by default the left side buttons are assigned to browse forward and backward functions in your browser, the right buttons for on the fly DPI switching. This isn't the most convenient place to have put these, but then they're the only option. There's also no indication on the mouse as to what DPI you're set at, which is a little silly considering all the lights built in. Razer does have an OSD for it, but it seems to have problems with showing on top of other apps, making it rather useless for gaming.
The mouse does macros too (and does them well), but there's no dedicated button for them — you'll have to give up one of your existing ones to assign the macro function to.
Being a Razer mouse it also supports profiles containing many button set-ups, you can adjust both the X & Y axis DPI independently, turn off mouse acceleration and up the USB polling rate.
Performance was acceptable, but felt strangely floaty compared to the harsh and accurate precision of our fall-back Logitech G500, with Serious Sam HD and Left 4 Dead comparatively difficult to make accurate snap shots in.
We admire Razer for the lengths it's gone to in making this more than just a cash in, it's a proper tribute. Unless you're in it for the prettiness though, we'd recommend another mouse for serious gamers.