Wolfking Warrior XXtreme

Of course, the XXtreme version has been expanded with a very specific audience in mind and that audience aren’t the type to confine themselves to just FPS games. I took the XXtreme home and booted up The Witcher, a game that would allow good use of keyboard shortcuts and the like. The right hand on the mouse, the left hand on the XXtreme, I plunged back into this crazy Polish RPG and tried to make the most of the XXtreme.

Unfortunately, something that slowly dawned on me was that most RPG games require gamers to make use of the keyboard and the mouse – which is the same as most other games, so the XXtreme doesn’t really add anything. All the XXtreme brings to the situation is that the keyboard is made circular and thus more keys are made accessible – unfortunately, the right hand side of the XXtreme arranges those keys in a way which is neither familiar nor ergonomic.

Finally, I switched to one game which I felt would really showcase the strength of such a design – Garry’s Mod. This little Source game is a fiddly little monster which really benefits from decent inputs, so I tried out the XXtreme there too.


Unfortunately, it was the same story again. Having the keyboard designed to be circular as on the right-hand side of the XXtreme proved to be of little benefit when you consider that you can remap the keys anyway for most games.

In a game where you’ll definitely be using a certain set-up, such as WASD, the design can be changed to accommodate the player and put the best buttons within easy reach. With the right-hand side of the XXtreme, this hasn’t been done – all of the keys have just been clustered indiscriminately, which means that the design is no more ergonomic or helpful than remapping the keys for a standard keyboard. Sure, the XXtreme design would help if you had both hands on a keyboard, but you’d likely only do that when typing since most games need a mouse.


Even if you did want to type on it, the XXtreme has all the keys you need on the right-hand side, thus encouraging one-handed typing, which we’ve already found doesn’t really work.

Conclusion

It’s discouraging to say the least, but the reality is that the XXtreme version just isn’t as good as the original Warrior. Worse, the effort that has been put in to improve the design has only worsened the product, removing the portability and creating a second, useless half to the product.

I suppose, if you were very much into MMORPGs, which typically have more complex interfaces, then the XXtreme may be a little more appealing – but you’d have to overlook the fact that there are other keyboards out there targeted at the most popular MMOs specifically.

That said, the XXtreme isn’t a bad keyboard – half of it is still really good. The only insurmountable problem is that the only half you’d really want to use is available on its own. The XXtreme version doesn’t add anything essential over the original and that’s where it falls down.

• Build Quality
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• 10/10

• Performance
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• 7/10

• Features
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• 6/10

• Value
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• 6/10

• Overall
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• 6/10

What do these scores mean?