Roccat, now the PC gaming branch of headset developer Turtle Beach, is making its esports play. Its newest peripheral, the $59.99 Burst Pro, has all the hallmarks of an esports mouse. The base and click panels are solid, lightweight plastic, and their transparent surfaces reveal a trendy, honeycombed design underneath. Unlike many of its competitive gaming counterparts, the Burst Pro features better-than-basic components, including a strong sensor and a supportive shape. Even without a meaningful signature feature, the Burst Pro is a mostly well-designed, esports-ready mouse.
Burst Forth and Conquer
The Burst Pro is a simple, wired gaming mouse, but it definitely has a look. It’s thick plastic all the way around, has a matte finish on the sides, and features opaque, transparent plastic on the click panels and base’s top. There’s also an RGB lighting element inside the base. When the light shines through, you can see that there’s a honeycombed plastic frame underneath the plastic shell. In the Glorious Model D, the honeycombing creates a durable shell that also reduces the mouse’s size. The Burst Pro’s honeycombing is only inside the plastic, so the pattern exists for purely aesthetic purposes.
The colorful RGB lights emanating through the honeycomb, softened by the plastic shading, has a foggy look. The lighting is cool and different, which is great, but you can only see it when you aren’t using the mouse. So, it only counts for so much.
The Burst Pro looks more like a conventional gaming mouse than something optimized for competitive play. Measuring 1.50 by 2.63 by 4.84 inches (HWL), it’s of average size, and a little taller than most esports mice. Weighing 2.33 ounces, the Burst Pro is light for its size.
Most esports mice opt for a flat, faux-ambidextrous chassis, trading ergonomic comfort for lower weight. The Burst Pro doesn’t make that trade. Even at its low weight, the mouse features a pronounced base hump, giving your hand a place to rest. Is it the most comfortable mouse? No. Still, it’s pretty good, and there aren’t many esports mice that offer the same level of ergonomic support.
Like most esports mice, the Burst Pro is functionally very simple. The buttons are in a standard six-button layout: Two click panels, a scroll wheel button, and a large square DPI cycle in the center column. On the left side, there are two “back” and “forward” buttons. Unlike many mice, the Burst Pro has a large gap between the two click panels, creating a literal center column for the scroll wheel and DPI button. Though the click panels lack finger contouring, their thin shapes guide your hand into a specific position.
With no rubberized grips on the side, and a smooth plastic shell on top, the mouse doesn’t do much to keep your hand in position. You’ll need to apply a bit of grip to hold on, especially when your hands get sweaty. It undermines the mouse’s ergonomic benefits and, more importantly, may impede play in a critical moment.
The Burst Pro is the first mouse to feature Roccat’s new Titan optical mouse switches. Like HP, Razer, and other gaming mouse manufacturers that pivoted to optical switches, Roccat claims that optical switches enable an unperceivable response time reduction and drastically increase a mouse’s durability. Roccat states that the Burst Pro’s switches are rated through 100,000 clicks, which is high, even among optical switches. Of course, these claims are hard to test in everyday play. I’d take the company’s claims with a grain of salt: I’ve experienced no tangible difference between the Titan and a mechanical switch, after over a week of testing.
It also has a very nice custom sensor. The Burst Pro features Roccat’s Owl-Eye sensor, a custom variant of the Pixart PMW3389, which tracks at up to 16,000 DPI and is accurate at up to 400 inches per second. Many esports mice are inexpensive because they’re simple and lack features. As a result, many of them contain lower-grade sensors. Like the Razer Viper, the Burst Pro is a little more expensive, but offers better performance in the most intense gaming moments.
Swarm Like a Pro
The Burst Pro takes advantage of Roccat’s longtime configuration app, Swarm, which lets you remap buttons, create macros, and reconfigure the mouse’s RGB lighting, among other things. Swarm feels slightly low-fi in presentation, but offers a very strong range of customization features. Beyond the usual customizations, you can customize system-level features, such as scroll wheel speed, cursor speed, and double-click speed. Swarm also lets you customize the scroll wheel’s functions, which not every manufacturer allows. Like all recent Roccat products, the Burst Pro also features Aimo, an algorithmically generated RGB randomizer that theoretically changes based on your activity.
The Burst Pro can store up to five onboard profiles in memory, so you can carry them with you from device to device. That’s about as many as you’ll get from most mice at any price point. Swarm also lets you create additional profiles to store locally on your PC. I’m still waiting for Roccat to give Swarm a modern polish that reflects the software’s functionality, but I’ll take function over form in configuration apps every time.
Find Your Niche
The Roccat Burst Pro is a bit of an anomaly among esports mice. It’s a light mouse, but its low weight doesn’t come at the expense of a comfortable shape. It’s chasing the honeycombed chassis trend, but the honeycomb design doesn’t offer a size-reducing support structure. (Roccat says it’s designed to keep dust out, but that seems silly.) At $59.99, the Burst Pro is a little pricier than much of its competition, but for that added expense you get a better sensor than you would from most sub-$50 mice.
So, the Burst Pro is a bit of an odd duck, but that’s not a bad thing. Falling between diamond-in-the-rough budget picks like the Glorious Model D and high-end competitive options like the Editors’ Choice award-winning Razer Viper Ultimate, the Burst Pro offers an appealing value proposition to competitive players.
