SteelSeries Ikari Optical Gaming Mouse (Grey)

The mouse is well constructed and functions as advertised. It glides smoothly on the thin, no skid, QcK pad I bought with it. All the buttons work without loading SteelSeries software onto my system.The wheel depresses as the 3rd button. The two buttons on the left work as page up and page down FireFox, but not other applications I have tried. I could not get the two side buttons to work in AutoCAD LT 2008. (If I loaded the SteelSeries s/w I am confident I could get all five buttons to work as I wanted.)The small button behind the scroll wheel makes changing mouse resolution quick and easy. The mouse sensitivity functions of Win7 still works. The resolution button and sensitivity setting in combination provides great user control. Toggling the resolution button changes the two white LEDs on the side of the mouse to indicate whether high or low resolution in effect. (The resolution button has only this one function and does not count as one of the five buttons.)Other reviewers complained about the cable being kinked and stiff to the point of being distracting. I gently bent the kinks out of the cable when I opened the packaging and it's been fine for me.My only real disappointment is in the physical size of the mouse. Some reviewers commented that the mouse is too large. As my hand is relatively small for a man, I was afraid the mouse would be too big. In fact, it's too small!I have concluded that the "too big, too small" controversy regarding mouse size has mostly to do with how one holds a mouse. If I hold this mouse under my extended fingers and only the topmost part of my palm, this mouse is about the right size. However, my preference is to rest the center of my palm on the apex of the dome of the mouse body. If I hold this mouse in that way, it is about an inch too short and about half an inch too narrow. And, the pinky support ledge on the right side of the mouse does not help me keep my pinky from dragging on the mouse pad. Maybe I like to hold a mouse in a way that SteelSeries didn't intend.In summary, this is a very nice mouse. I like it! It just doesn't fit my hand the way I had hoped it would.

I perchased this mouse to play Battlefield Bad Company 2 as I found a good deal and wanted something more hefty than the Steelseries Kinzu for the game.The largest strength of this mouse is the shape. Of all of this mice I have used this is the most comfortable intuitive fit I have felt. It works fantastically for palm grips and even quite well with a claw grip. I find the best performance comes from a hybrid grip; pinky and ring finger resting fully on the side, pointer and middle finger raised more, palm resting slightly on the back. Along with this great shape are two thumb buttons which are placed perfectly (Spot and grenade in BF3). Cable is very very long and robust.I really did not like this mouse as much for Starcraft II. The mouse is quite large and long, I have a Razer Vespula mousepad (it has a wrist rest) and when I would try to move the mouse downwards I would very quickly run the bottom of the mouse into the wrist rest. This is less of an issue in FPS games as not so much time is spent looking at your feet. I also found myself misclicking more with this mouse in microintensive situations compared to the Kinzu. Not entirely sure why this is but the mouse negatively effected my performance in Starcraft. The other issue is comparing the mouse to the laser version. I suppose it costs more but the laser version is better in all regards. For me one of the most noticable differences is the texture, the optical has a nonsensical glossy texture while the laser has a perfect rubbery texture.I think this purchase comes largely down to price. This mouse is about perfect, minus texture, for FPS games. But depending on the deal you can find for this versus the laser, the laser is a better mouse.

After owning one for about 5 months the cable from the front of the mouse began to short so i would lose connection for s few seconds and hear the "Sol-Do" usb unplugging sound. Then after a few seconds you would hear the "Do-Sol" connecting sound and it would work again. I really think this has to do with my play style though, really low sense and i flick a lot. (quake live rails) Almost all my mice have struggled from this problem after 3-6 months though so I will not dock this mouse for it. But ok, onto the real review.....Although i had a hard time proving it (using test)this mouse just felt really inaccurate. No matter what settings i used i could not give it a natural 1:1 feel. It felt like it added small amounts of acceleration either positive or negative when you use flick shots. As that was not enough i noticed my accuracies fall quite a bit.Since then i have switched to the death adder my rail accuracies have improved again. From about 50% to about 65% some games hitting 80%-85% =p So I can say that I strongly feel that it was due to the mouse's inconsistencies. I have also heard many other fellow quake live players (a few pros too) complain about this mouse.For the price they are asking I do not think it is worth it at all.

DON'T BUY THIS MOUSE! I bought this mouse as birthday gift for my son who is in college. He started using it Sept. 1st, and it quit working in October. At that time he sent many e-mails and posts to the company support site. They did not ever respond to the problem. However during the month he was trying to get a response, he was able to figure out what to do to fix it himself. Then agin in Jan. after restarting his computer it quit working again. And again he sent many, many requests for help to the manufacture, all to no avail. Finally I had to buy him another mouse. He still has never gotten any response to any correspondence with the company. The only thing he ever get is an automated response that his message was received. After only a month of problem free operation. And it working for less than 6 months, I strongly say to anyone looking at this mouse , to buy something else! THIS IS A TOTAL WAIST OF MONEY! A TOTAL RIP OFF. IF I COULD GIVE NO STARS I WOULD.

Good mouse , thanks alot