Product Review: The Feenix Nascita 2014, AKA the Classiest Gaming Mouse on the Market
Spoiler alert: it's pretty great.
Have a whole bunch of money you want to spend on a gamer this holiday season? The Feenix Nascita 2014 gaming mouse might be your best option. It’s easy to use, comfortable to rest your hand on, and endlessly classy-looking — if you can get past the expensive price tag, of course. Check out the rest of our review for more.
Here are the official specs from the Feenix Nascita brochure:
First of all, it’s a fantastically balanced ergonomic shape. Writing for the Internet all day will make a person’s hand start to cramp something fierce, but placing it on the Nascita definitely relieves some of that pain. We can see this mouse coming in extremely handy (pun intended) for long gaming sessions in particular, which is kind of the point, so it works very well in that regard.
You can also change the dots per inch — and thus, the speed of your cursor as it flies across your screen — with just one easy click, using the two silver buttons right underneath the scroller. It goes as low as 800 dpi and as high as 8200, which is probably higher than it ever needs to be for some people. I find that for general web browsing and working, 2400 dpi is a nice comfortable range, but people who play a lot of precise shooter games might prefer something a little higher than that. You’ll always know what dpi you’re currently set on, because there’s a little light-up screen on the side of the mouse that tells you the setting.
The scroller, by the way, is also very easy to use. When you rest your hand on the mouse, it fits perfectly under your middle finger, making it simple to maneuver. Unfortunately, you can’t use it to click from side to side on screens like the Apple launchpad, for example, which we’ve seen on other mouses (mice) in the past. Still, you can do this great thing where you can close tabs on your Internet browser just by clicking the scroller down, which is surprisingly much more useful a function than it sounds when you have a billion tabs open at once.
There are also these buttons. To be perfectly honest, I’m not actually sure what they do yet.
Once I do figure out what these buttons are for, though, it’ll be real easy to get to them — they sit right where your thumb goes.
Along with the dpi screen, there’s also a light-up Feenix logo on the lower part of the mouse, just where the inside of your palm rests. It’s a cool feature that’s especially useful for telling when the mouse is actually plugged in and running. Of course, we haven’t actually had any problems with the mouse losing power or anything like that, but occasionally it takes a few minutes for the mouse and my computer to recognize each other at first. That’s probably more due to my computer than anything else, though. It kind of hates me sometimes.
Most importantly, unlike so many other gaming mice on the market, the Nascita is just so professional-looking. There’s no annoying neon lights or weirdly shaped pieces jutting out of the body of the mouse, so it’s the sort of thing that you actually could bring to work without getting any weird looks from the other people in your office.
It’s not wireless, which, while not a dealbreaker, would certainly be a lot more useful in cutting down on the cord clutter on an office desk — particularly if you’re like me and use the mouse primarily with a laptop. The braided cord is pretty sturdy, at least, and I haven’t had a problem with tangling at all, so your mileage might vary there.
At $97 before shipping and taxes, it’s also not exactly something you can buy on impulse, either. Which isn’t to say that it’s not an amazing mouse, of course, but $97 is a whole lot of money. You could buy the new Beyoncé visual album for six of your friends and still have a bunch of money left over with that kind of dough. You could buy, like, 370 chicken nuggets from McDonald’s. You could buy two Logitech Wireless Marathon mouses for only $40 each, and that mouse is wireless. So, it’s really up to you to decide if it’s worth the money. I’ve played around with Logitech mouses in the past and like the Nascita a lot better, but I also spend 40+ hours on the Internet for my job, so depending on how often you’ll be using the Nascita, your mileage might vary.
We should also point out that the mouse also came shipped to us with the Dimora, a special “gaming mousepad.”
Of course, this item also has its own special specs in the brochure:
As great as the mouse is, the mousepad honestly feels like sort of a hindrance. For one thing, it’s larger than the laptop I currently use and wouldn’t even fit in my backpack, so I couldn’t take it home to test it out further like I could with the Nascita. The low-friction surface took some getting used to, but that could be because our desks here in the office are already pretty low-friction in and of themselves, so having an extra surface on top of that felt off. After ten minutes or so, I’d pretty much adapted to it, but I still didn’t quite see the need to have a pad in the first place, especially one that costs $36.
We’ll say one thing for the mousepad, though — it doesn’t slip at all. Once you put it down on your desk, it stays right there unless you deliberately pick it up and move it. That’s definitely a huge plus, and if you are looking for a high quality mousepad and don’t mind forking over the cost of a brand new Nintendo 3DS game to get one, it’s certainly the best kind of pad you could hope to get. But if you have a good enough surface to put a mouse on already, it might not be worth the extra cash.
All in all, the Feenix Nascita is a great mouse and definitely one of our favorites that we’ve ever encountered. If you’ve got a whole bunch of cash saved up and don’t mind shelling out just under a hundred bucks for a quality item, then we say go for it. It works just fine with or without the Dimora mousepad, too.
(images via Feenix, others my own)
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