The Epomaker GK96LS was the first review sample to arrive in my new home country, so it took a good while for me to finish this review. In some ways, it ended up being more challenging to wrap up than the most complicated split/orthogonal keyboard thus far, and I have one of those here, too! Everything was going smoothly in the beginning, with initial unboxing a pleasant experience which had me holding that keyboard to marvel at. I then got to using it and suddenly had to re-learn typing after months of more typical keyboard form factors. Even so it was all gravy until I realized it had software support, and this is when things got really hard. Hard in that my really positive opinions about this keyboard until then were being dissected each time I opened the software and spent time online and in the program in an attempt to make sense of it.

Knowing that this was a re-purposed program that was not originally the official one for their GKxx keyboards did not help, and seeing potentially newer versions on GitHub (which may or may not work with this keyboard, let alone improve things) I couldn't use for this review made it somehow worse. I truly want Epomaker to go back to the drawing board here, that is how much I feel the software is letting down the rest of this great package. It has promise but is nowhere near good enough to be marketed as a feature for a brand that is looking to grab attention globally. After I finished writing this review, Epomaker uploaded an extended manual here), which addresses a lot of my concerns on the usage of the keyboard. However, it unfortunately does not change the software user experience much.

That really is the only major complaint I have, with the other two listed above being specific to the version you choose. There are so many permutations of the G(S)K96S keyboard that you may well go with one that has a more typical 96% form factor, which is easier to adapt to, and doubleshot-injected legends that make better use of the 16.8 M RGB backlighting on offer. Personally, I would still take the PBT keycaps but thought you should know that the backlighting may as well be nonexistent if you do. Build quality and the switch, color, and connectivity options make the GK96S a fantastic keyboard offering, especially with some SKUs coming in at the $99 mark!