Driver

The driver for the Horde AIMO and other recent ROCCAT peripherals is aptly named ROCCAT Swarm, and the latest version, 1.9311 at the time of the review, can be downloaded here. The installer is 179 MB in size, and the installed driver takes up 245 MB on your hard drive. System utilization is minimal, so there is nothing to worry about on that end.


The driver scales well with high DPI displays, and if you have the keyboard connected, the home page automatically detects it and activates the AIMO lighting system as seen above. The driver keeps track of other ROCCAT devices you have previously used even if they are not connected, so it would have been nice to get an option to only display connected devices. As it is now, I already know what is next on the agenda before we get to fully exploring what Swarm does with this keyboard.

ROCCAT had just pushed out another driver update when I was getting ready to demonstrate it, but what you need to do for the sake of this keyboard is to get its device-specific update from ROCCAT's update center. Swarm will point out updates for other devices as well, if applicable, which of course does not matter for this review. Once the module has been added, as opposed to the driver coming with support out of the box, you can go through the other settings and see if a firmware update is also available for the keyboard. It just so happened that ROCCAT had also pushed out a firmware update for the Horde AIMO during my testing process, so that is shown in the second video. Everything happened smoothly here, and disconnecting followed by reconnecting the keyboard finished the process and had everything else proceed normally.

As we saw with other ROCCAT devices before, there is a pinned settings menu that acts as a shortcut to specific settings you want on a single page. You are free to unpin the existing ones or pin some more across the other menu pages, but given there are a total of three menu pages, I ended up just leaving everything unpinned after my first look. The video also demonstrates the very useful profile manager as it allows for multi-user customization or a single user with profiles for multiple programs. The keyboard relies on software profiles here, so note that you need to have Swarm installed and running for these to work. Next to this is the macro manager that works as expected with delay options available as well. These macros can be saved and then assigned to specific keys, and the dedicated macro key column is perfect for this. The general features menu has the character repeat options we already saw pinned, and along with it comes the option to add a virtual sound to each keystroke. You can take a look at some of these in action here. Personally, this is not my cup of tea, but I will never say no to having options. Finally, there is the all-important option to reset the keyboard to its default state. Missing here is LED feedback, which I would have liked to see again, but I suppose the whole point of AIMO lighting is to have the keyboard automatically do that as well.

The next menu is all about key assignment, and we have the option to go with a virtual keyboard or list. You can pick from among the vast majority of keys, especially those associated with a membrane switch, and quickly preview its default assignment. If this is not to your liking, you can re-assign the key based on a set of options on the left, including some application-, game-, and even OS-specific options. You can drag and drop them to the two assignment slots available. This second slot is the result of Roccat's Easy-Shift[+], wherein a key can be assigned to toggle (or activate when held) a second set of options for other keys. If you have a compatible mouse, you can use a mouse button for this also as this will work for the keyboard as well (and vice versa). This opens up a huge number of possible custom keys and assignments here, especially in conjunction with the software profiles.

The final menu page is for key illuminations, and a quick glance confirms that there is no per-key lighting here. This is in line with what we saw on the previous page, wherein backlighting takes place through a multizone, multicolor scheme instead. By default, you are in AIMO lighting mode, as seen before, and a drop-down menu on the left helps with picking another available option. These include a colorwave, static lighting, heartbeat, and a custom mode with specific sub-options pertaining to each lighting effect seen in the video above. There are six zones in total you can change the lighting of, or even assign different effects to each individual zone, with full control over the R/G/B channels in 256 brightness steps each for a total of 16.8 M RGB color options. ROCCAT would rather you leave AIMO lighting on and have it improve over time, but there is little information provided on how exactly AIMO gets better, and there are definitely occasions where you want complete control over the backlighting rather than having it respond to what's on your screen.