There’s a fantastic thumb hold that seems like home within mins. We like the Roccat Kone Aimo’s form, but primarily since the prescriptive contours fit our hand well. The huge Roccat insignia and also those bright lights won’t appeal to every person. Its appearance is much less low-key than something like the Logitech G703 too.
It’s intense as well as the LED diffuser strips are thick, not simply skinny lines that ring around the scroll wheel. The Roccat Kone Aimo has a few of one of the most famous illuminations of any video gaming computer mouse. It’s bent on load your hand, and also is not the sort of mouse you hold lightly with your fingers, palm floating over. The Roccat Kone is specified by two vital characteristics.
This isn’t a Roccat problem, it’s an industry-wide one and I’ve yet to see a company nail the software experience.ROCCAT® Owl-Eye optical sensor with 12000dpi Can’t we get just one of these stupid software utilities to work as intended, all the time, without gobbling up system resources, randomly crashing, or bugging out between restarts? Apparently not. A minor quirk, and probably not one you’ll encounter if you’re installing Swarm from scratch-if this is your first Roccat peripheral, in other words.
But I did encounter a problem where Swarm asked me to download the “Configuration Module” for the Vulcan 120 Aimo, then refused to actually download the damn thing when I went to the appropriate submenu.
It’s usable, fairly intuitive, and for the most part you’ll just forget it exists. Which, at last, brings us to Roccat’s Swarm software. There are also M1 to M6 macro listings on the Home block, though with Roccat’s Swarm software you can technically program any key as a macro key. The Vulcan 120 Aimo also includes a lot of utterly bizarre shortcuts, like one to open your default browser window (F6), one to open your email program (F7), and one (F8) to open your…calculator?į1 through F4 correspond to separate user profiles, which is more normal. The rest of the media functions are mapped to Function shortcuts on F9 through F12.
The Vulcan 120 Aimo’s two-buttons-and-a-dial design is a shallower version of this idea, defaulting to Volume and “Fx.” I pretty much left it on Volume and forgot about it, though even then the vertical grab-and-twist action required by the Vulcan 120 Aimo’s dial is less pleasant than the horizontal rollers on say Corsair’s keyboards. Some might remember Roccat’s Horde Aimo keyboard from earlier this year, which built Microsoft’s Surface Dial tech into the keyboard. There are a handful of controls in the top-left, but only for mute/unmute, two programmable functions, and then a large dial at the end. The media keys, or lack thereof, are most frustrating though-especially for a keyboard in the $160 range. It’s just a chintzy piece of plastic, which would’ve been fine two years ago but is increasingly unsatisfying given the plush wrist rests coming from Logitech and Razer nowadays. The Vulcan 120’s wrist rest attaches to the keyboard magnetically, but that’s where the high-end feeling stops. Notice how it’s only a $10 price difference? Yeah, you can tell. It’s the primary distinction between the $150 Vulcan 100 and this $160 Vulcan 120. It’s the extraneous features-those outside the core typing experience-that are a let-down.
Typing on the Vulcan 120 Aimo takes some getting used to, but after a few weeks I’m pretty enamored. It’s easily my favorite design from Roccat, a company that has (in my opinion) struggled to make much of a dent in the mechanical keyboard market thus far. So yeah, for the most part I think the Vulcan 120 Aimo is a successful experiment. The half-height keycaps make a much larger difference than the actual switches, in this case. As with most of the in-house Cherry knockoffs (e.g., Razer, SteelSeries, and now Roccat) the goal seems to be to mimic Cherry’s feel as closely as possible. You’d be hard-pressed to notice the difference though. The closest equivalent is the Cherry MX Brown, with a tactile bump at the actuation point-though the Titan’s travel distance of 3.6mm and actuation of 1.8mm are slightly shorter. Surprise: It still looks like a Cherry MX switch, though the usual stem is supplemented by two reinforced bits of plastic on the outer edge. Roccat’s gone the way of proprietary tech, designing its own “Titan” switch in collaboration with TTC. You’ll notice I keep saying Cherry- style switches, and for good reason.