Razer Naga review

I've always considered myself a PC gamer. From my days in Ultima Online to World of Warcraft to Star Wars: The Old Republic (which just so happened to go free-to-play recently), I've had my fair share of experience in the MMO realm. What I haven't had, until now, was a legit PC gaming mouse.

Enter the Razer Naga, the self-proclaimed  "expert MMO gaming mouse". And when they say expert in the MMO department, they mean it. I'll admit, my extensive knowledge on MMO gaming mice is limited, but from a consumer/gamer and first time Razer-owner standpoint, I can tell you it did not disappoint.

At first glance, the Naga mouse can be a little intimidating. With the left and right mouse buttons, a clickable scroll wheel, two additional buttons on the top of the mouse and a full 12 key number pad for your thumb, the Naga has 17 fully customizable buttons that, at first, take some time getting used to, but with some practice begin to feel just as natural as the traditional 1-0 keys on the keyboard – and in the end, more comfortable.

Razer Naga

As someone who grew up with the keyboard shortcuts it was a bit of an adjustment using just the mouse for all of my hotkeys. While extremely useful, the closeness of the 12 side buttons made it difficult to press the correct hotkeys by feel alone; I often found myself glancing at the mouse to ensure I was pressing the right buttons. With some practice, however, I got a nice feel for the placement of my thumb in relation to the 12 numeric keypad buttons, though the 3rd and 4th rows always remained slightly out of comfortable reach.

While the Naga mouse clearly caters to traditional MMOs with tons of hotkeys, I found the Naga particularly useful with League of Legends – a game with six item slots that you can click on to activate item abilities. With League of Legends being a fast paced game where action happens quickly, the ability to hotkey the six item slots to the six side buttons proved extremely useful. League of Legends is all about reaction time and I can safely say that the Naga mouse improved my ability and speed in reacting to certain situations with the right press of a button.

For me, the 17 buttons were a bit overkill, but the traditional top mouse buttons coupled with six side buttons are easily enough to make a noticeable difference in gameplay. Even with traditional MMOs, the most important abilities were hotkeyed to the first few keys making the Naga extremely useful. With the other abilities that aren't as often used, the bottom rows of the Naga keypad work just fine with some practice – even for the slower gamers like me.

Razer Naga

Another nice feature, especially for me since I tend to do a lot of my gaming with friends at their house, is the Razer Synapse 2.0 software which allowed me to remap any of the buttons directly to the Naga mouse and save those keybindings to the cloud for easy access when playing on another's computer. This allows me to easily access those customizations from anywhere rather than having to rebind the hotkeys – what could be a painstakingly long process when you take into account the sheer number of macros MMOs use these days.

Let's get right to the point, a lot of these gaming mice companies like to use a lot of technical jargon to sound impressive. The Razer Naga has a 5600dpi 3.5G Laser Sensor, 1000Hz Ultrapolling/1ms response time, and 200 inches per second max tracking speed. What does that all mean?

In short, it means this mouse can basically do anything you need it to outside of getting you dressed in the morning. And if it doesn't do it all coming out of the box, Razer's Synapse software provides more than enough customization options to adjust the mouse to your liking. For FPS enthusiasts, you may prefer really high sensitivity, but I personally find an overly sensitive mouse annoying. The easy-to-use Synapse 2.0 software made navigating the different settings simple and easy to understand.

From sensitivity and acceleration to keybindings to changing the color of the little Razer logo to the three interchangeable side panels, everything about the Razer Naga is easy to manipulate and adjust to your liking. The 17-buttons may be the Naga's selling point, but for just $80, this mouse offers so much more to gamers than the ability to set more macros.