I picked up the SteelSeries Rival 3 in July last year when my Cougar Minos X3 bit the dust. I gotta say, I haven’t looked back. For the price of $39.99 CAD I had to give it a try. So here today I am including this mouse in this years roundup of gaming mice reviews.
It has a similar but slightly lower profile than that of the Logitech G203 and this makes it fit my hand absolutely perfect. I mean perfect. I thought the G203 was pretty good too but now when I go to use it it feels like I have a ball pushing up on the palm of my hand even though I use a claw grip lifting my palm somewhat off the back of the mouse.
The plastic feels good in the hand and the curved in sides give a superb amount of grip. The SteelSeries designed mechanical switches under the left and right mouse buttons feel direct and require just enough force that discourages accidental clicking unlike the Razer Deathadder Essential I reviewed previously. The side buttons while narrow still feel good and work fine. The scroll wheel is quiet and has slightly less harsh detents that that of the Logitech G203.
The mouse floats along my mouse pad quite nicely and the rubber cable attached to the front is flexible enough it never gets in the way.
There is a centre button behind the scroll wheel to change the “CPI” (counts per inch) levels. The mouse comes with default settings but they can be completely customised in the SteelSeries’ Engine 3 software. You can also customise the RGB lighting on the mouse in the Engine 3 software. This is by far one of the biggest value prospects here. If you like RGB you will like this mouse. It has multiple zones of lighting and can be customised to almost any colour of the rainbow. I have mine fading from white at the front to a frosty blue at the back. It looks really cool and the software makes it really easy to do.
SteelSeries’ Engine 3 also writes those changes directly to the mouse so if you prefer not to keep the software on the system you don’t need to. Be warned though if you install the software again it my revert the mouse to defaults and you may need to reconfigure it once again. Thankfully the software is simple to use and this doesn’t take much time.
Performance in World of Warships is great. No accidental firing of guns. Which is great when the reload time on a battleship can be upwards of thirty seconds. It’s also great in Outriders which I have been enjoying a lot lately.
At $39.99 CAD there is no way I can deny the value of this mouse and I highly recommend it to anyone that wants something well made, has great RGB and sensor control and has smaller hands like me.
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