Setup, Design & Observations
Setting up is fairly easy and works well via plug & play using a default profile from the internal memory. Installing the Swarm driver is painless and it does a great job making sure all the firmware and drivers are up to date for all your ROCCAT devices.
In the hand, from a claw grip, I felt that the mouse clicks were a little narrow and forced into position to make way for the smart cast buttons. Though the smart cast buttons are relatively easy to reach, I felt that my particular grip style caused me to have to spread my index and middle fingers as if I was telling someone to jog on. Overall the feel of the mouse was cool and smooth and felt very good quality, noticing that the frame of the KOVA uses a similar high quality resin as we have seen with the NYTH, which makes us believe that the precise 3D design of the frame may in fact be professionally 3D printed (can this be confirmed?) This may be what allows for the sleek design aesthetic to shine through so accurately. Unfortunately, the KOVA is a little narrow to be friendly to a true palm grip, though whichever your preferred grip the symmetrical design feels good. The KOVA is a little on the lighter side at 100g, and is
Performance
In testing, at the overdrive dpi of 7000, the KOVA was flawless on standard black fabric mouse mat, black paper, white paper though struggled on glossy coloured surfaces. Each button click felt good quality and reliable including the 2D Titan mouse wheel. The lift off distance was relatively high compared to what we recently experienced with the SteelSeries Rival 100, but seemed to top out around 3mm at an estimate.
Jumping into some games I was able to observe an interesting downside. The buttons on the mouse are only registered as pre-existing commands or macros and there was no option for independent, standard 'mouse buttons'. This means that by default I could not in-game assign the side thumb buttons (default profile has them set to 'easy aim 200dpi' and 'EASY SHIFT[+]') without reprogramming them to an existing key (such as browser forward/back) then having to go back in game to again reassign them. This became incredibly long winded to setup. It would be better to have the mouse set to a 'standard' profile which required the EAST SHIFT[+] function to be enabled as this would be significantly more convenient for gamers who just want to jump in and play, where as gamers that will choose to make use of the advanced features and commands such as EASY SHIFT[+] will undoubtedly be roaming through the drivers anyway. As it stands, you are forced to dive into relatively advanced features just to get the mouse to work 'as standard'. On that note, by default the Smart Cast buttons are set to PG UP and PG DOWN.
