- (energetic music) You can reach what?
20, maybe 23 keys on your gaming keyboard.
(keyboard crashing)
Garbage.
Get a load of this.
The Azeron Cyborg puts over 100 key bindings
and macros at your literal fingertips.
With up to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 functions per finger,
you are gonna need a bigger action bar.
(intense explosion)
Still not enough for you?
How about unlimited custom profiles?
Endlessly adjustable switch positions?
And whatever color scheme you want?
Yeah, when I saw this thing,
I knew I had to try it.
Or rather, pay someone else to try it for me
because as good as it sounds in theory,
to have 29 programmable buttons
within mere millimeters of my fingertips,
it can take weeks or even months
to overcome the steep learning curve
on a product like this to review it properly.
And I don't wanna drop my rank.
What I will drop though is this segue to our sponsor.
- War Thunder.
War Thunder is a free-to-play,
online military vehicle combat game
with attention to detail and a lot of thrills.
Try it for free down below today
and get some special bonus items for signing up.
(upbeat music)
- Truthfully, nobody really wanted to daily drive the Cyborg
but Plouffe from the writing team
made the mistake of saying, that looks kind of cool,
during our weekly writers meeting.
So he was voluntold to take it home, set it up,
and game on it for a month so that we could give
the power glove of the future a fair shake.
Spoiler alert,
at the end of what ended up being actually two months,
I offered it to him for free.
For real, you can have it.
- [Plouffe] No, no thanks.
- And he won't take it which is troubling for Azeron.
But hold on, it's probably not for the reasons you think
and he did find a lot of potential benefits
if you're willing to unlearn what you have learned.
The Cyborg is hardly the first game board on the market.
Everyone from Belkin, to Razer, to Red Dragon
has at least dabbled in the space
but the main differentiators are that unlike its competitors
it has no support for WASD movement.
It relies instead entirely on the thumbstick.
And unlike others, it has the ability to mold to your hand.
Dramatically reducing the distance between your fingers
and your wide repertoire of abilities, potions, and spells.
Plouffe plays a lot of first and third person shooters,
and while he's much more accurate
with a mouse than a thumbstick,
his left hand does legitimately get tired
from holding down forward or back
for hours during a lengthy gaming session.
With three school age kids,
I can hardly relate with these problems
or feel bad for him at all.
But it can be a legitimate issue,
especially for people with accessibility concerns.
To represent FPS games then,
he briefly tried Valorant, briefly, more on that later,
but ended up logging most of his playtime
in Dying Light 2.
For a third person shooter,
he finished Leon's second run in Resident Evil 2 remake.
Then, to make sure that we had a game
that benefits from a lot of key bindings
he played a bunch of Dota 2.
First of course though, he had to set it up.
I mean, it's not ergonomic
if it doesn't fit in your hand, right?
They ship it with this little hex key
and actually really nice feeling aluminum driver handle,
that unfortunately uses this non-standard freaking bit
so you can't use anything else in it
and can't use it for anything else.
Kind of a bummer.
You know what can be used for anything though?
The LTT screwdriver from lttstore.com.
(ratchet spinning)
We've got a lot of adjustments here.
You got your length,
you got your spread,
you got your angles here.
Oh okay, so is that... Yeah, that's locked.
Lots of adjustment on the thumb here.
You can have it here, here, here
depending on the length of your thumb.
Even the thumb arm has like a second hole,
so it can be out farther-er than this adjustment range.
Okay, this thumb one is a little funky.
Very 3D printed, in terms of build quality.
I don't mean that as like an insult, it just is.
Oh my God.
Yeah, I can see why this took you so long to configure, man.
- [Plouffe] Literally took me at least a half hour.
- Now that it's dialed in
it's actually like pretty darn comfortable.
This feels good.
But one thing to note,
is that they actually have a compact version
that instead of having these
scorpion tail style switches for the fingernails,
actually has a button on the tops of these towers.
And I think that Plouffe and I are on the same page
when I say that we would probably prefer that, yeah?
- [Plouffe] Yes.
- Yeah, let's start with the thumbsticks.
Using a stick for WASD is hardly a new idea
and has some very real-world benefits,
especially when it comes to comfort.
But there are situations, particularly for PC gaming
where the keyboard is still king.
The problem with a thumbstick like this is twofold.
You can't press multiple opposite directions at once
and it's not as easy to hit the exact direction you need.
This first problem is basically
why Plouffe couldn't play Valorant or Counter-Strike
or any competitive shooter with this thing.
Wanna get into a strafe battle?
(laughs) I mean, you can, but good luck.
Wanna stop on a dime by inputting the opposite direction
while holding your current direction?
Not happening.
Plouffe managed to finish just one match of Valorant
before he completely gave up on it,
and I can definitely see why.
As for problem number two,
it can't really pull D-pad duty.
WASD can at least kind of act like a D-pad,
allowing you to activate each direction individually.
And this is the kind of thing that mostly doesn't matter.
I mean, thumbsticks are superior to D-pads in many ways
but in Resident Evil 2 for example,
the D-pad is used in a number of puzzles
and for things like lock combination entry
and we ran into many situations like the statue medallions
in the police station where accuracy became a problem
because of how easy it was to
accidentally hit left or right when trying to go up or down.
There is this little nub in here
that you could rebind to WASD,
depending on which version of the Cyborg you get
but isn't all that comfortable to reach,
even for my tiny baby hands.
Our last point about the joystick
isn't specific to the Cyborg,
but it is something to keep in mind.
Because nearly all joysticks have a sizable dead zone
or an area where they move but don't register an input,
they can feel pretty unresponsive
compared to a high quality keyboard
with a clear tactile actuation point.
And this can make fine adjustments to character position
a little bit challenging.
Which comically resulted in Plouffe (laughs) walking
into a lot of door frames and walls.
User error?
Absolutely.
But the bottom line
is that he missed his keyboard in Resident Evil 2.
With that being said,
he loved having the Cyborg in Dying Light 2
because you're almost constantly holding forward
while parkouring through the city.
Unfortunately though, this game
is where the cracks started to show in the software.
For someone who doesn't want to use a keyboard
but wants to keep their mouse,
the Cyborg is a dream come true.
I mean, 29 programmable buttons,
a profile for every game.
(delighted kiss)
But that's also its biggest problem.
Sometimes your main profile, right,
the one that's just on there by default,
is gonna work perfectly with the new game,
right out of the box.
But because of the non-standardization of controls on PC,
a lot of the time it won't.
In Dying Light 2 for example,
Z is your hang glider, H is heel,
M is map and C is crouch.
So wait, now the control key
that you had mapped for crouch in CS:GO
doesn't work in this game.
And bloody hell.
(Gaming screams)
Where did you map Z again?
If you're the kind of gamer,
you know who you are, who plays that game,
(drum strike)
just that one game,
(disappearing poof)
this might not be a problem for you.
But if variety is the spice of your life,
the Cyborg may feel a little bit like
the next day on the toilet.
I mean, to be clear, Azeron's software
was pretty intuitive and bug free.
It supports an unlimited number of profiles
and can store two of them onboard
for gaming events and the like.
But this sky's-the-limit flexibility
can also take the joy out of
just sitting down to game for a bit
when each and every game you play
requires going through this process where you launch it,
check the default key bindings, tab out of the game,
double check your Azeron profile bindings,
cross reference the two,
accounting for any new functions
that this game might have that the last one didn't.
Then go back into the game, test drive it a bit, tune it,
and then finally begin the process
of committing that profile to your muscle memory.
And the worst part
is that while this does get easier over time,
(laughs) he put in literally dozens of hours on this thing.
I'm giving you credit for it
because you really took one for the team there.
Even for the games you play regularly,
there's always going to be a small learning curve
when you take a break.
Maybe your friends went on vacation
and you haven't touched Dying Light 2 for a few weeks,
a prompt comes up
and it's labeled as a key that you mapped it to.
Can you remember where Q is on the Cyborg in this profile?
Maybe, but more likely you're gonna end up
leaving the software with the profile map
up on a second screen (laughs) so that you can reference it.
Which is pretty immersion breaking compared to
how naturally I suspect most of us
would use a keyboard or a controller.
There are some shortcuts to this.
Profiles, for example, can be imported or exported.
And the surprisingly vibrant community around the Cyborg
has created profiles for many of the most popular games.
But as with the Steam Controller,
this isn't the silver bullet
that you might hope it would be, either.
And Dota 2 presented us with a fresh problem.
Plouffe ended up having to make custom profiles,
not just for the game,
but also for different heroes
depending on the usual items he bought
and their number of abilities.
To be clear, once it was all set up and working,
he actually loved
having everything at his fingertips like this.
But the ability to just on a whim
click on a different hero and say,
yes I am gonna play as you this match,
was kind of gone.
You can pay for REWASD
which will apparently detect the game that you launch
and swap profiles for you automatically.
It's a nice little quality of life thing
but it's gonna cost you another $25 for that functionality
at the time of writing.
And it doesn't solve the
every-hero-needs-a-different-binding problem.
Only the, I-play-a-lot-of-different-games one.
But hey, at least it's comfortable, right?
Well about that, we found that over long periods of time
it was a bit of a mixed bag.
The shape is actually quite pleasant after adjusting it.
And you can get the palm rest
in a couple of different styles.
With the curved one being right, I'd say, for both of us.
The Amaron D2F01 switches are not too hard to press and
(easy clicking)
have a nice clicky sound.
And while you can fumble during some more intense sessions,
overall it does feel kind of right
to just rest your hand in this other hand. (laughs)
However, something about the plastic material
used for the switches,
particularly the bottom ones that your fingers rest in,
feels distinctly greasy after as little as 20 or 30 minutes.
And honestly, when Plouffe told me this,
I thought he might just be being a whiny pants about it.
Like seriously, dude?
Tired from holding down W for too long. (laughs)
- [Plouffe] It's sore! It gets sore.
- But, but for this one, after a few minutes I can actually
kind of see what he means.
The forum on Azeron's website has a guide
about using Lizard Skin on the switches
and then you can buy grip tape
for the palm rest from Azeron directly.
So it's not like these problems aren't solvable
but it's just yet another thing to faff about with
and pay more money for to have a non-slippery experience.
And remember that all of this cost
is on top of whatever mouse and keyboard you already have
because this is not a full replacement for either of them.
So you can't exactly just sell them to recoup some cost
unless you plan to just use the default name
for every character in every game from now on.
I mean, I suppose it would be an option to get two
of them for a total of 58 programmable keys
plus additional layers and like type on them.
But unless you're used to similar systems
like the DataHand Personal,
I would strongly recommend against it.
I think the more obvious benefit of that right hand version
is that it could be great for Southpaw gamers
who are notoriously underserved
by existing keyboard options.
And even if you're not a Southpaw gamer,
it could be great for you.
I don't want this to come across harsh or overly critical
especially because the product does do what it says
on the tin and they certainly have a lot of happy customers.
It's just that it is our job to make sure that you're
up to speed on the potential downsides before you
commit the desk space, money,
and I'd say most importantly, time that it takes
to adopt a peripheral like this into your gaming routine
or to adopt our sponsor.
- War Thunder.
War Thunder is a free to play online military
vehicle combat game available on Windows, Mac, Linux
PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S and X with cross-play.
War Thunder features 10 playable nations
and an incredible arsenal of more than 2000
historically accurate playable tanks,
aircrafts, and ships.
From the 1910s to vehicles still in service today
you'll compete in massive combined arms battles
on over 100 major battlefields
from World War II to modern environments.
War thunder's vehicles are implemented with a high level
of authenticity and detail, so their speed, armor,
firepower, and model are as close to real life
as possible without compromising on gameplay.
And their damage models are realistic and dynamic
adding a huge amount of depth
that's rarely matched by other free-to-play games.
Head to link below and start playing War Thunder for free.
You'll also get a free bonus premium vehicle for signing up.
- Thank you for watching.
If you liked this video, make sure to check out
that DataHand video we made last year.
That one is meant to replace your keyboard
but has an even steeper learning curve.