CM Storm RECON Gaming Mouse Review

Introduction

It seems like in recent times not many good economical gaming mice have entered the market with something fresh and exciting on the table apart from the MX518 refresh aka G400 !

It seems CM decided to change that and so I present to you one of the most promising and VFM gaming mice , the CM Storm Recon “White Edition” (Long story we’ll talk about it later 😉 )

There is a twist here though, CM Storm Recon is only available in Black/gunmetal grey color, while we have got our hands on the upcoming white edition which was earlier to be a assassins creed limited edition mouse !

Spec sheet wise this mouse does impress but let’s hold our judgments till we take the mouse for a ride , Lately CM seems to be stepping up their game so let’s find out if this mouse really holds its own against its competitors like Razor DA and G400!

Specifications and Features

Here is some info taken directly from the CM Storm Recon’s product page,

Recon uses AVAGO 3090 optical sensor with a polling rate of 1000Hz and DPI range of 800-4000 which can be switched in 4 easy steps 800-1600-3200-4000 !This variation in DPI is very well thought out and the difference when switching to upper or lower level DPI is quite noticeable! Recon uses OMRON high durability switches for the primary left and right clicks making them quite durable rated for over 5 million clicks , The side switches as well as the Middle mouse click uses TTC switches.

One of the most interesting features about this mouse setting it apart from the competition is it’s on the fly parameter switching , for instance the LOD , Polling Rate , DPI all 3 can be switched on the fly(More on this later).

The mouse has 1.5m/s tracking speed and 20G acceleration meaning unless your actions are crazy fast, the mouse will precisely track your movements !To accommodate all this and more the chipset employs a 16 bit wide USB data path to keep things going smooth.

Recon is an ergonomically designed ambidextrous mouse as you might have noticed by now and is medium sized in a way that it should be good to use by both claw grip as well as palm grip users and the rubberised top is a cherry on the cake. Now one of the most important feature here is that the mouse has onboard memory meaning you can store upto 5 profiles on it and forget about the software, use the mouse anywhere you want without worrying about setting up parameters using the software utility.

Last but not the least multicolored LED system illuminates the mouse around appropriate areas to add that bling factor for those who like it (Let’s be honest who doesn’t :p ).

Product Showcase

Feast your eyes gentlemen 😀

Software

This section/tab of the recon software utility lets you assign functions to the buttons on the mouse, you can assign a total of 9 functionalities of your choosing at any point in time, you can even assign macros to individual keys but more on this later.

The second tab is the one with the details and is the most fun to play around with(Not counting the LED section), here as you can see we can set DPI levels , the corresponding LOD and USB Polling rate there are a total of 4 combinations possible at a point in time and you can choose any of them on the fly with the DPI change button on the mouse. You can even tweak the double click speed , sensitivity and response time to your liking, personally I like 1600 DPI , anything more just becomes too twitchy for me .

Now let’s explain the Terms DPI , LOD and USB Polling briefly :

Ah so now the most interesting part of the software, the “GLOW” tab, as we can see, it’s pretty much self-explanatory, this tab allows you to set LED color for all 3 LED locations independently, meaning you can set different colors to each one for them and even set different levels of brightness and GLOW modes. You can choose from the predefined 10 color modes or make your own shades using the color codes.

It’s worth mentioning that even though this is a pretty good feature , yet it does have some issues with correctly reproducing some colors accurately, so don’t expect it to be able to produce the whole VIBGYOR/RGB spectrum with ease, although the basic shades and colors are very well reproduced.

This section is godsend for people who take gaming pretty seriously and it’s especially useful for RPG/MMORPG/RTS players as these genre of games require you to use numerous keys as well as numerous key combinations in tandem to perform complex spells and stuff.

And Macros do exactly what they are intended for ,meaning they let you assign a series of steps to a single click of any button on the mouse, for instance in simpler terms if this was a non-gaming feature you could assign ctrl + alt + dlt as a macro to the right side key on the mouse, what this will do essentially is that it will perform the action which actually requires the simultaneous press of 3 buttons with just the press of a single button, pretty good if you ask me, makes the life of a gamer lot easier.

Again this section seems to be self-explanatory so I won’t be doing much explaining here, as it says, you can create delete and manage different profiles for your mouse using this tab, you can have 5 profiles stored on the mouse’ onboard memory which is real neat as this enables you to port over your desired settings along with your mouse to any PC in the world without requiring you to download and install the recon software.

If you want access to additional info or want to get into touch with the support team, this is the place to do that.

Experience and Verdict

Well to be honest I really loved this mouse, I mean it’s just perfect for people with neither too big nor too small hands , it’s equally good for claw as well as palm grippers as far as I can say , it completely fills you hand when you hold it down, and to add to that it comes with rubberized surface for much better grip and is anti-sweat.

I tried it with these games like BF3 , Tribes Ascend(Now this one really tests a mouse thoroughly, I bet all those out there who are fan of this game know what am talking about 😉 ), Starcraft 2 , TES V : Skyrim and Borderlands 2. The mouse never ever held me down, although I would like to state that it did get some time getting used to it because of it being a bit heavier and bulkier than my older mouse, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes a very potent part of your gaming arsenal.

But the mouse was still not without flaws , one minor hindrance I found was that the front side button on both side(the smaller one on both the sides) was very hard to reach, especially for people with medium sized fingers it won’t really be a comfortable experience trying to use those buttons and I felt the rear button was a bit too big, now this is not an issue but they could have extended the front button a bit towards the rear to make it easily accessible During my 1 month of usage, I never faced even a single minor bug or any kind of jitter of tracking issues, I would really say cooler master has done a very good job on this mouse, its economical, its ergonomical , very well built and has all those nifty features which you would generally expect form a mice priced quite a bit higher than what the recon is selling for.

And I almost forgot, here’s a piece of info to consider before considering this review, The white edition was earlier a limited AC3 edition, but upon seeing its success, CM made it as a standard edition, but still this piece was review only and the white edition won’t be available in India due to some reasons.

Pros and Cons

So it’s the moment of truth now, let’s see how the Recon measures up.

Pros:

1. Ambidextrous and Ergonomically well thought out.
2. Filled to the brim with useful features.
3. Economically priced.
4. Great Software.
5. Very good build quality.

Cons:

1. A bit on the heavier side.
2. The front side buttons may not be very easy to use by people with shorter fingers.
3. Braided cable would have done wonders for the overall build quality and life expectancy.