Roccat's Kone Pro is a relic. Turtle Beach bought the German company in 2019 and the brand, beloved by some enthusiasts, was retired in 2024. We'll never get a new Roccat mouse again with the brand name attached to it but you can still buy the 2021 Kone Pro and its wireless equivalent, the Kone Pro Air. Some dedicated fans still swear by its lightweight body, ergonomic shape and customisable RGB lighting behind its left and right clicks. So does this low-to-mid-range wired gaming mouse still hold up today?
Design and Features
I still like how it looks even if the component parts are nothing special. The Kone Pro has a deep, ridged groove for your thumb, a pointy bulge on the right hand side near your pinky finger, and a smaller, curved indentation up the middle. Lots of different shapes and textures add up to an attractive, distinctive shape.
The side mouse buttons are half gloss, half matte, and the left and right clicks add even more visual texture: the RGB lighting behind them reveals a translucent honeycomb pattern that's pleasing to look at. You can pick between six different lighting styles (breathing, blinking, fully-lit, etc) and separate colours for the left and right clicks. It's an impressive level of customisation that means you can make this mouse your own.
I found it mostly comfortable for long gaming sessions. The shape of the thumb groove is just about perfect: it's designed so that it's comfortable to move your thumb forwards and back depending on your hand size and preferred grip style. The bulge on the right is unusual but works for both fingertip and claw grip, giving a handy shelf for your pinky. But in palm grip, it's weird. You can really feel that bump, and I could never get my finger to either bend around it or sit on it properly. It wasn't uncomfortable, but I was always conscious of it.
The build quality is decent for a budget-to-mid-range wired mouse: the plastic body feels sturdy, doesn't rattle when you shake it, and the left and right clicks don't waggle side-to-side too much. There is, however, a bit of flex in the side panels, and on one side of my model the base wasn't fully flush with the rest of the mouse, leaving a slither of a gap. Also, while I like the level of flex in the cable, a few stray fibers are starting to come loose. But I wouldn't be too worried about the body or the cable giving out: I haven't seen any reports of that from long-term users. Despite being a relatively chunky mouse it's only 66g, so it's a good option if you want a lighter mouse, and glides easily across my mousemat on its PTFE feet.
The all-important left and right clicks, which use optical switches, are just okay. I never misclicked them and they always responded instantly, but they both sound tinny and cheap. The left click felt softer and mushier than I'd like – the right click feels and sounds snappier, but it felt a little creaky during pre-travel, which is the distance where you've started pressing the button but not registered a click.
The thin scroll wheel looks flimsy but feels solid. It's a touch stiffer than I normally like, but you can feel the satisfying bump between each incremental spin. It never registered more or less scrolls than I intended. The two side buttons are well-placed – I never accidentally hit one when I meant to hit the other – and they react to a light touch, just in case you don't get your thumb across them fully. The Kone Pro lacks a DPI switching button, which most mice now have. There is a spare button on the base but that changes your "profile", which you can configure in the Roccat software. An odd choice, but it's easy to remap it so that it switches DPI.
Performance and Gaming
Kone's 19K Owl-Eye sensor wasn't top of the range in 2021 and it certainly isn't now – you'll find mice that can go far beyond its 19,000 DPI and handle higher tracking speeds than 400 inches per second. But in all honesty, it's still more than you'll probably ever need: this is a great sensor for all types of gaming, from competitive shooters to strategy games.
I tested it in Fortnite for twitchy shootouts, Doorkickers 2 for precise click-and-drags, and Citizen Sleeper 2 for relaxed pointing and clicking. It felt smooth and responsive every time, with no erroneous movements or delays. The same is true for the clicks themselves: while I don't love the main buttons they both did everything I asked of them, relaying my inputs instantly without any phantom clicks or false double presses.
The mouse's polling rate – the frequency it reports its position to your computer – caps at 1000Hz. Again, most recent mice are going to beat that: many have 2000, 4000, or even 8000Hz polling rates. But 1000Hz is more than enough for most people. To notice differences above that you'll need a high-end PC and a high refresh-rate monitor of at least 144Hz – and even then, the benefits are small (even many pro Counter Strike players still stick to 1000Hz). Basically, it's all you could hope for in a budget-to-mid-range mouse.
Software and Customisation
The Kone Pro doesn't work with Swarm 2, Roccat's latest software hub, so you have to install the original Swarm instead. The UI is dated – it reminds me of 2000s PC programs – but the whole thing is refreshingly old school. There's very little bloat, just simple sliders for the settings you need. There's even an option for adding trails to your windows mouse pointer – how very retro! You can customize five DPI levels to switch between: again, there's no DPI switch button on the mouse, but you can remap the button on the base to do that.
You can also adjust how far on a page the scroll wheel scrolls, how fast you need to click to register a double click, and the distance you lift the mouse before it stops registering. It's all fairly basic and it lacks some of the snazzy adjustments of, say, Razer Synapse – where you can change the default axis of your mouse for perfect horizontal swipes – but it at least works, and it's easy to understand.
Button remapping is simple and you can set one of your buttons (a side button is best) to be an "easy shift", which you hold to unlock separate functions for each button. If you're using the mouse for work, it could be useful: using shift and right click to open a new tab, shift and scroll wheel to close a tab, etc.
RGB customisation, under an "illumination" tab, is detailed. As well as different patterns and separate colours for your right and left click, you can adjust the brightness and speed of patterns too. I enjoyed fiddling with it. Twice, when the software was already running in the background, reopening it revealed only a black screen with no way to shut it down apart from killing it in Task Manager and relaunching. It's a reminder that this is older, no-frills, unsupported software.
