Endgame Gear's first mouse, the XM1, features an ambidextrous form factor with side buttons on the left side only, a low profile, and the hump in the shell in the back. The mouse can pretty much fit all grip styles, which is highly dependent on preferences and hand size as the XM1 features a very versatile shape. Its surface materials are even across all main gripping areas; the whole top and sides share the same, matte coating. This feels pretty nice to the touch, though at the cost of collecting fingerprints rather easily.

Build quality is one of the strong suits of this product as I found absolutely no issues with it. Everything is aligned perfectly, both on the outside and the inside. Some coil whine affects my units, and numerous other people reported the same, but it is very quiet on my copies and can only be heard when the mouse is right next to my ears. Moving on to the weight, we've arrived at one of the main selling points of the XM1: it's incredibly light, sitting at 70 grams with a few centimeters of cable. This mouse was built for eSports-grade users and enthusiasts, who mainly prefer lighter mice nowadays, and it's also better for your wrists in the long run.

Buttons are really good objectively, especially the main ones. They are nice and tactile, snappy, and of medium resistance. They can be spammed very well and don't have any unnecessary pre-travel—they have some post-travel after the actuation, though, but it's a negligible amount in my book. The main switches (which are Omron D2FC-F-K models with a 50 million rating) are pre-sorted by the manufacturer as they can have a variance of up to 30 gf, which would lead to very uneven clicks. The scroll wheel is very tactile and has really well-defined steps, which is no wonder as it uses an Alps scroll wheel encoder and their encoders are considered some of the best in the market. The middle click is stiff for my taste, but it's far from unusable, so I cannot call that a negative. The side buttons are good as their overall click-feel is satisfactory. There's also a small button at the bottom of the mouse for CPI and polling-rate changes.

Endgame Gear went with one of the best optical sensors currently available, the PixArt PMW3389, a very raw and responsive sensor with a high maximum framerate and perfect control speed, and it has a maximum resolution of 16,000 CPI. What's unique here is that it doesn't feature the usual smoothing on and above 1,900 CPI as it was disabled at the firmware level (it can be re-enabled in the software, though). This is very impressive from Endgame Gear, and I wish companies would take note of it! There's another unique performance feature with the mouse, which is the analog key response technology. Endgame Gear allegedly pretty much eliminated chances of premature double-clicking with its main switches while keeping the response time incredibly low.

Mouse feet are made out of nearly 100% pure PTFE, so they will last you a long time. They are smooth and even, with a moderately low friction, but their contact edges could have been rounded a bit better in my opinion. There are also no replacements in the package. Overall, they're still really good, far better than most of the competition has to offer after you break them in with a couple days of use. The same can be said of the cable: it's very light and flexible and doesn't generate too much drag resistance. I'm not saying the mouse feels as though it were wireless, but it's not that far removed. The cable is 1.8 meters (5.9 ft) long, which should be enough for most users.

While the mouse is as plug-n-play as it gets with physical buttons for CPI and polling rate, there's actually a software driver available. It is pretty lightweight, but doesn't really involve too much customization. You cannot re-map buttons, only disable them—there are no macros or profiles, so it's very basic overall. I hope this will change in the near future, as even though the mouse is built for professionals, such features are always a nice touch. There is no RGB or any sort of lighting.

At $59.99, the XM1 is definitely not the cheapest option, but if you take a glance at what it provides and look at the competition, I'd say it's priced more than fairly. It's an extremely well-designed mouse with a lot of great features, and I'm perfectly happy to call it an Editor's Choice, as well as an Innovation because of the analog click-registering technology.