 You can reach what? 20, maybe 23 keys on your gaming keyboard? Garbage. Get a load of this. The Azzuron Cyborg puts over a hundred key bindings and macros at your literal fingertips. With up to one, two, three, four, five, six functions per finger, you are gonna need a bigger action bar. 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. 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 Belkan to Razor 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 thumb stick. 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. Plut plays a lot of first and third person shooters. And while he's much more accurate with a mouse than a thumb stick, 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 play time 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 you 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. We've got a lot of adjustments here. You got your length, you got your spread, got your angles here. 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 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. 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, yeah. Let's start with the thumb sticks. 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 thumb stick 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? 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, thumb sticks 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 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 too, 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. 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 a 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 two, for example, Z is your hang glider, H is heal, M is map, and C is crouch. So wait, now the control key that you had mapped for crouch and CS go, doesn't work in this game. And bloody hell, where did you map Z again? If you're the kind of gamer, you know who you are, who plays that game, just that one game, 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, Azzuron software was pretty intuitive and bug free. It supports an unlimited number of profiles and can store two of them on board 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 Azzuron 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, you've 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 too 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 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'm gonna play as you this match was kind of gone. You can pay for Rewazd, 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 Omron D2-F01 switches are not too hard to press and 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. 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 Ploof 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. But for this one, after a few minutes, I can actually kind of see what he means. The forum on Azzeron's website has a guide about using lizard skin on the switches, and then you can buy grip tape for the palm rest from Azzeron 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 it 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 Data Hand 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 self-paw gamers who are notoriously underserved by existing keyboard options. And even if you're not a self-paw 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. 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