Creative as a company has over 30 years of engineering experience in creating audio solutions for the average consumer and saw an opening to get into the bloated but still profitable gaming peripherals market. They had a lot of good ideas for their first keyboard even if some were not executed well. That ends up being the summary for the Creative Sound BlasterX Vanguard K08, with a name so long most already shorten or tune it out completely.

The hardware product itself is really good for the price, although it must be noted that the MSRP was $179.99 before it seemingly went on a permanent sale. The dedicated media buttons and volume scroll wheel work great, and the macro buttons add to the experience once you have spent some time on configuring them. The placement of the USB pass-through port aside, it remains a positive. The choice to go with these particular switches is interesting as well, but does enough to merit consideration by simply being different from the crowd of Cherry MX switches and MX clones alike. The LEDs are bright and more accurate than most others. The stock keycaps are also better than most, and thus get a pass this time. The thick plastic panel pieces and steel plate make for a very solid keyboard too.

It is the software that is the big let down here. If this review were in March, it would have been even worse as it would have been a few months until any macro/key assignment support for a keyboard that has dedicated macro buttons. That not being ready at launch itself is a shame. Now that it is, the focus goes back to the Aurora Reactive lighting, or lack thereof. Simple lighting modes with some variations repeated to fill the numbers do not look good, and neither do the various small bugs I encountered right away, after only a few days of testing. The wrist rest is another example of a nice idea executed imperfectly as you have to rest your hands in a limited area to prevent it from coming loose. I tested this with two samples to make sure it was not a one-off, and unfortunately, both had the exact same loose connections.

At this point, I would urge Creative to work on their software driver. There is little reason to get this over the Logitech G810, for example, and then there are the numerous other Cherry MX style keyboards with years of software updates behind them. There is the skeleton of a very good keyboard here, but Creative needs to flesh it out further. The good thing is that they do seem to be aware of it already and are working on getting a major update out in a few weeks time. But that does not affect the score of the product as it is now.