Razer Imperator 2012
Manufacturer: Razer
Peripheral Type: Mouse
Costs: $109.95AU (Buy Here) /$79.99US (Buy Me)
The Razer Imperator 2012 is an incredibly comfortable mouse that I almost immediately fell in love with. It is both Aesthetically, ergonomically and performance-ie pleasing, which is something that every gamer on the market is looking for in a mouse. The lighting and pulsating razer logo are an amazing bonus to an already awesome mouse.
During my incredibly long playtest of several games, such as: World of Warcraft, QuakeLive, Unreal Tournament 2004, Duke Nukem Forever, Half-Life 2 Episode 1 and a few others, I noticed that this mouse was incredibly comfortable to use and made playing these games a much more enjoyable experience. The mouse slides seamlessly across my desk, and in the same manner across the pixels of my monitor, which makes clicking between icons an easy task.
A lot of gamers believe that having a superior peripheral will make you a superior gamer. Now, while I disagree with that sentiment, I should point out that with the Imperator 2012 I was indeed landing more shots on a bad day than I would if I was using my old mouse (Microsoft Basic Optical Black). Now, I’m not saying that the Imperator is a substitute for skill, but it is able to keep up with your movements and thus keeping in-line with your own skillset.
The clincher for most hardware with me is whether or not it can keep up with me in a game of Unreal Tournament 2004. Now, anyone can play this game with any hardware, but I’ve gotten so good at it that I actually have to play with Godlike bots and Instagib rifle mutators just so that I can have a challenge. And well, the mouse was able to keep up with me, even if I didn’t score the highest that I had ever done. There’s too much luck involved to test it score wise, I was looking more towards how the mouse was reacting to my movements, the Godlike Instagib part is purely for a challenge. And the mouse was able to better match my movements than my old one, so I’d easily recommend this mouse to anyone.
The mouse comes with a number of additions, including a mouse speed adjustment toggle, mappable buttons 4 and 5 (which are located to the left of the mouse, a switch to move the side buttons and these pretty blue lights on the mouse wheel and in the razer logo across the palm of the mouse.
The mouse speed toggle is represented by two buttons on the mouse, a higher button located just under the scroll and a lower buytton just below the higher button. Pressing either of these will increase or decrease the mouse speed, depending on which one you hit. I quite like this feature as it allows you to adjust to certain situations on the fly, like when you need to tighten your aim to hold your lightning stream on an opponent, and can increase your versatility in combat quite quickly, without you needing to go into an option menu to adjust sensitivity.
These two mappable buttons on the side of the mouse can be used within most games that allow you to map actions to additional keys or buttons. What I liked about this is that they can come in handy for quick-use items in certain games, keeping you alive without needing to reach across your keyboard to activate them. Another useful feature with these is that they can be adjusted for your thmubs positioning by reaching below the mouse and by flicking the toggle below. I believe this would be useful for people who like to hold the mouse in a particular way, I keep mine in the upper position, but some players might prefer them to be lower.
Lastly, I want to talk about the lighting. The Lights are a beautiful blue colour that are LED in nature (I believe). The light in the mousewheel is always on, which gives it this almighty presensce when it’s not being used, though I’m not sure how much power this is costing me… it shouldn’t be too much though, aren’t LED’s low power? On the palm of the mouse lies a pulsating Razer logo which is the same blue as the mousewheel. This is a nice addition and the mouse wouldnt be quite the same without it. When lifting the mouse off a surface, both lights on the device dim, but do not turn off, which could be useful for troubleshooting should anything go wrong. With the lights though, I did notice one thing that’s kind of fun. When you hold it over a surface at a particular elevation and angle, the moise has trouble working out if its lifted or grounded and begins to pulsate between light and dim. No idea if it’s damaging the mouse or not, but, for review purposes, I had to try out a few different things with the mouse.
Lastly, I’d like to say that installing the mouse was incredibly easy. Just plugged it in and it was good to use, no messy installations, no buggy drivers, it was just incredibly easy to set-up. After setting it up, using the mouse was something that was pretty quick to pick up on, considering I’ve been using mouses for the longest time, and working out what everything does was incredibly easy to do.
The mouse was packaged with a beautiful box, some interesting documentation and some really cool stickers to stick all over whatever you want to stick them onto. Mine are still in their sheets, but I’m sure I’ll find a use for them later.
I’m guessing that products such as the Imperator are the reason why ‘The Cult of Razer’ has so many members, everything just works and it all works well. I am in love with this mouse and wouldn’t mind picking up more Razer products in the future because of the really nice experience I’ve had with this peripheral.
Thanks to all the nice folk over at Razer for such an awesome device!
