Logitech Pro X2 Superstrike Wireless Gaming Mouse review

I’ve been using the Logitech Pro X2 Superstrike Wireless Gaming Mouse (I’m just going to call it the Superstrike from here on) for a while now. I have a lot of positive things to say about it, and honestly I’m not sure I can think of much to complain about. The Superstrike brings forward some interesting technical feats that, at least as far as I’m aware, makes it the first of its kind and likely to be a trendsetter in ongoing gaming mouse design. The light weight, magnetic mouse buttons and a super fast polling rate give it everything needed for competitive game players to get more than they could ever want out of a mouse, The adaptability of the mouse buttons and wireless nature also allow it to be good for a general purpose mouse even when you aren’t gaming. It’s got a lot of good going for it, and it’s likely to be the only mouse you’ll want once you do use it.

Let me start out by saying that I am, historically, a G502 purist. I have sworn by my handy brick for over a decade at this point, and I have told myself (and others!) at many points in the past that there is no mouse like my G502. When I initially tested out the G502 at the Logitech booth in PAX East this year, I thought it seemed technically interesting, but I just didn’t think I’d be able to get past the fact that it lacked the shape, weight, and handfilling nature of the G502. Well, I sat there and played with the Superstrike enough at their booth that I eventually was considering “well… maybe. It is pretty nice” I returned, I broke their clicks per second record, and they gave me a free plushy shaped like a Superstrike. Eventually, the opportunity arose to take it on for a review, and I knew I had to complete the loop and give this mouse a shot.

So here I am, G502 boxed up for… two months now? I barely remember what it felt like to game on the mouse I swore by just earlier this year. I’ve left my sworn companion and I have been on and off swapping this mouse recently for another one I have for review, back and forth from office to home for gaming to compare how they work in different environments. Because you, just like me, probably use your PC for more than just a gaming machine, there needs to be a good balancing act. Well, the good news is, thanks to some fancy magic work by way of magnets inside, the Superstrike does a perfectly acceptable job as an every day mouse outside of gaming, and an excellent job inside of gaming. In my opinion, it’s arguably the best option out there right now.

The biggest thing that makes the Superstrike stand out in my opinion is this: the innovation of magnetic mouse buttons. The actual buttons atop the Superstrike are artificial. There is no actual click, and there is no actual button. When you click the mouse in while it’s not powered on, you get mush. Nothing happens. You might think this sounds weird, or like you’d be able to tell that it’s not a real button but… nope. In my opinion, my seasoned gamer fingers do not sense anything different in clicking from that of a mouse with standard buttons aboard. Thanks to the rumble pack beneath the click paddles, it uses a bit of magic to make you feel like you’ve just clicked in a button when nothing actually happened. The interesting part of this is that these magnetic switches inside allow you to do a lot of adjustments that just aren’t possible in any other context.

Through Logitech’s G-Hub application, you can change a few things you probably haven’t seen before. First and foremost being the “Actuation Point”, or: the ability to change the amount of pressure required to actually incur a click. You can set it on a scale from 1-10, 1 being enough to sneeze in the direction of the mouse and get a click (not literally, but I have some things to share about this setting), and 10 being a little too heavy for my brain to take comfortably. From my completely non-scientific analysis, 5 seemed about like what I was used to from my old G502. In my time spent with the Superstrike, I primarily kept the left mouse to a 1 and right mouse to a 5. I play a lot of shooters, so my thought was that I would prefer to be able to shoot as quickly and soon as possible at any given moment, so I’d keep it at the lowest setting possible. Aiming was less important for quick reactions, so I’d leave that a bit higher to avoid accidentally pressing it. And accidentally press I did. It took me a few weeks to acclimate, and I eventually got the hang of it, but phew; those two weeks were negligent discharges galore in my games. Civilians in Ready or Not beware, this officer had an itchy trigger finger. What I learned from this is that I have a tendency to slightly pre-press my left mouse when I think I’m about to have to fire, so when I’d do that on the Superstrike, I’d just fire anyway. Teammates, innocents, and enemies alike caught my fury for those two weeks.

Next item on the list in G-Hub is the Rapid Trigger function. I find myself torn on this one. It strikes a fine line between unfair advantage and “It’s just a better tool” for me that I’m not sure where I land on. I kept it enabled the entire time though, and I’ve gotten a bit used to it and… at least for the short level 1 actuation point setting, I felt it was almost necessary to avoid overtravel clicking and then undertraveling back. What this setting actually is is that it allows you to not have to fully release the mouse click in order to click again, you merely need to release back up by a set amount of pressure that you also choose. This means that you can theoretically click again way, way, way sooner without much thought going into it. This would probably make sense for why they used it at PAX East as a click speed testing booth. Personally, I find this function nice and helpful to compensate for some of the oddities in the use of a mouse button that clicked at 1/10 of its actual physical travel distance. But I would not be surprised if it went the way of the notorious Wooting keyboards, which were all but deemed “cheating” in the competitive gaming scene.

Last on the unique G-Hub settings line up for the Superstrike is the Click Haptics. This setting allows you to adjust the intensity of the click feedback. Essentially, you can make it give a soft but responsive click (which was my preference) all the way up to a sturdy thump that just can’t be good for the battery life of the thing. I think this is interesting in a technical sense, just being that it’s modularity to a function that is impossible to adjust on basically every other mouse in existence, but I’m not sure that many people are likely to bother going very high. The lowest setting without being turned completely off feels like a normal mouse to me, but I’m sure there are some people that would appreciate the more solid than standard feedback. I’m not sure it’d be worth the trade-off in battery life, though.

Which, speaking of battery life, this actually seemed like a pretty positive spot for the Superstrike. In my experience with it the single time I used it without my handy dandy power play mat in conjunction, it lasted me a solid two weeks. In actual hours, I guesstimated it to be about 70 total. This is lower than Logitech’s listed 90 estimate, but it does have that at “varies with use conditions” and I was using the higher polling rate setting, so I was likely not in a standard power mode. However, I do use Logitech’s Powerplay mat, as I mentioned, and would recommend in general for anyone using a lightspeed mouse, so I did not have to really worry about it in action. If you’re unfamiliar, the Powerplay mat is Logitech’s wireless charging mouse pad that also helpfully seconds as being the actual wireless adapter communicating with your mouse. It is important to keep in mind for anyone that does get a Superstrike though that you will want to pay attention to which generation the Powerplay you’re purchasing is. The Gen 1 Powerplay only supports up to a 1000hz polling rate, so if you want to get the absolute most out of the Superstrike, you’ll want to make sure you get a Gen 2.

The Superstrike’s 8000hz polling rate is another place that it gets its big boons to speed. 8000hz polling means that despite being a wireless mouse, it will be communicating any action back to your computer at what is essentially instantaneous for all intents and purposes. 8000hz means it relays once every 0.125 ms to your PC, and that is not an amount of time I can properly demonstrate, so please just consider that the same as immediate. Logitech also claims in their advertising that the mouse can “cut up to 30ms off your reaction time”. In my tests, I’m… not really sure I can agree, but I’m also positive that this would be likely to vary from person to person, so don’t take it as a fact. It did improve my reaction time a little bit in testing from the Human Benchmark site, but it was more like 10ms for me. That’s by no means a small improvement, it’s still a great cut to go from about 170 to 160 entirely thanks to the Superstrike, but it’s no 30 reduction. Like I said, this is probably heavily subjective, and of course even in the way they wrote it, it’s “up to 30”, not claiming everyone or even most will actually see that.

The only real “complaint” I have (and I’d struggle to call it a complaint, it’s just a preference) is that there is no sideways scroll buttons on the mouse. I never realized just how much I used that function on my G502 until it wasn’t there. What I’m talking about is a function that I really feel like is underutilized in general: when you can push the scroll wheel left or right to scroll side to side in a window. It’s realistically a button I feel like nobody uses, but it matters to me! I won’t forget you little sideways scroll buttons.

Overall though, the mouse is great. Sideways scroll aside, I’m likely to be sticking with this mouse as my primary for a while with the G502 on the shelf as backup for when I’m ready to get back to ol’ reliable. But I’m not currently feeling that draw, so I am sorry to my fellow G502 purists out there when I say that you might want to consider giving this one a shot. It offers a lot of good, and it gives bonuses in places that no other mouse on the market that I’m aware of can claim. It’s a little pricey at $180, and paired with a powerplay mat, you’re staring down the barrel of a $300 bill. But it’s something that I use every day for years on end. I think it’s worth it. I already paid about that amount when I bought my G502 Lightspeed and Powerplay to begin with.

Note: Logitech provided us with a Pro X2 Superstrike Gaming Mouse review for review purposes.

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