Geekscape Games Reviews: ‘Gamdias Ares Essential Gaming Gear Combo’
Searching for a keyboard and mouse is a long process with lots of endless hours comparing features and prices. What if you could get a bundle of the two that was good enough for your needs that cut out the tediousness of all that research? Gamdias tries to deliver by bringing together their Ares gaming keyboard and Ourea optical gaming mouse into the Ares Essential Gaming Gear Combo.
The Ourea mouse has a small form factor and would make it great for LAN parties or anywhere else you would need a mouse. Having just one thumb button is a bummer for people like me who are used to two on most gaming mice. The mouse is useable for lefty and righty’s with the thumb buttons mirrored on each side. This design leads to some unfortunate accidental button presses that won’t cause anything more than the color profile to change on the mouse wheel. However, it did make holding the mouse a little awkward. The bright Gamdias logo cannot be turned off or change colors, which doesn’t matter when your palm is covering the light. If your PC is in the same room where you sleep, you’ll have a nice nightlight at least. The left and right mouse buttons are very firm and seem to need a little more pressure before registering that audible click which bodes well for long term durability. Weights are included in the mouse for those who want more stability when trying to get that crucial headshot from across the map. You can lighten the load by removing the five gram weights if you prefer to glide your mouse with barely a touch.
At first glance, the Ares keyboard looks slick with its matte black finish. The keyboard has some good heft to it feeling solid enough to withstand anything you can throw at it. The backlight colors are limited to green, yellow, and red which saddens me that more colors are not available like the non-bundled version of the Ares keyboard. Another limiting factor in color choices is the inability to change them for the Gamdias logo and macro keys at the bottom of the keyboard. My OCD has issues with this. The closest I can get to match the gold color of the Logo is choosing yellow for the backlights. For those of us that are accident-prone, there are drainage holes on the bottom to easily funnel out coffee, tea or whatever you were drinking at the time the crime of spilling liquid all over the keyboard happened.
With the Ares keyboard, typing took some getting used to since the keys felt a little mushy. After a week spent pecking away, the keys felt less mushy due to the springiness of the keys, which is surprising since most membrane keys don’t have that kind of responsiveness that fans of mechanical keys are fond of.
Since this is a gaming keyboard, there are some extras built into the Ares that might enhance your gaming sessions. First off, extra macro keys are located at the bottom of the keyboard which is a great location for your thumb to easily reach. I found it rather odd that the macro keys replicated the function keys at the top of the keyboard. Dedicated macro keys would be more useful so the function keys can still be used for their default actions. Swapping the WASD keys with the arrow keys is possible with a press of a button. I can’t think of a time where I would ever use this function but it’s nice to have this customization for people that would make use of it. Locking that pesky Windows key is also available though I never seem to have an issue accidentally hitting that key during intense gaming sessions since the key on the Ares has a very small footprint.
There are two strange keys I do have to point out since I feel like they are something I never came across before. One key is dubbed the “Consecutive Attack Mode” that when turned on, will act as an auto-fire mode for whatever key is held down. With no way of setting a specific key for this function to work, every key ends up on auto-fire mode. The other strange key on the Ares keyboard has a picture that I can only describe as a Capri-Sun with the straw already in. Nothing in the included manual explains what this key actually is. Pressing the Capri-Sun key pops up the same menu the right-click on a mouse would. With the revelation that the picture is actually a mouse, I’m not sure why Gamdias dedicated a key for simulating the right mouse button. At least it’s unique for a gaming keyboard even though it feels useless to me.
The Hera software that is used to bring out the full functionality of both the keyboard and mouse is cluttered and very hard to navigate. With options to setup macros for multiple keys, on-the-fly macro recordings, and even setting up sound files to play with certain key presses, I couldn’t begin to tell you how to do any of this. Conveying how to use these seemingly dizzying array of options would be better than just random guessing. I got intimidated and frustrated so I left these options alone. I did try some basic macro settings but beyond that, I stayed frightened of diving into the rest of the options.
You could go out and purchase a keyboard and mouse separate that won’t have some of the issues I have with the Ares Essential Gaming Gear Combo. The whole point of this bundle is not to be the best thing out there, it’s made to be a more than adequate choice that not only saves time from research, it saves cash for more important things like more games.
