In the past few years, the gaming mice industry has shifted from heavy and feature-driven models to more barebones designs focused on performance and weight. Accordingly, the once abundant "feature mice" that are heavy on buttons, customization, and comfort have lost some of their popularity, and outside of Logitech, Razer, and SteelSeries, not many manufacturers still offer this type of mouse anymore. With the Kone XP, ROCCAT throws their hat into this ring, and offers a very straightforward product. Essentially, the Kone XP is a Kone Pro, just with more buttons and RGB lighting.

Accordingly, in terms of performance, the Kone XP does just as well as the Kone Pro. PixArt's PAW3370 performs virtually flawlessly, with low CPI deviation, low motion delay, good general tracking, and stable polling across the board, even with the RGB lighting turned up all the way. The optical main button switches provide incredibly low latency while being innately immune to double-clicking. Both the cable and mouse feet too are familiar from the Kone Pro: The cable is among the more flexible ones, and the feet glide exceptionally well without much if any required break-in. As with the Kone Pro, a set of replacement feet is also included, which is always a handy addition. In short, I have zero complaints in this department.

When it comes to button quality, the Kone XP is somewhat of a mixed bag. The main buttons are firm and quite snappy, but on my sample at least, click feel is rather dull and muted on the right one, which unfortunately isn't uncommon with optical switches. For the other buttons, mechanical switches are exclusively used, and the switches are of high quality without fail. While the four side buttons have impressively low post-travel and their click feel is quite pleasing, they don't feel entirely stable, and their actuation isn't exaxctly even for the most part. The buttons next to the left main button suffer from above average pre-travel, and the shift button on the thumb rest doesn't feel all that great, either. Still, button quality is decent overall, and far better than on the Glorious Model I, for instance. The scroll wheel has great tactility and remarkably low noise levels, but scrolling is a little too stiff for my liking, to where some may even find it strenuous. Ultimately, this is a matter of taste, and most people prefer controlled over light scrolling, but for office work in particular, the mere act of scrolling soon became rather tiresome for me. This is unfortunate as the horizontal scrolling is otherwise quite useful for productivity work.

Finally, there is a shift button on the thumb rest, which can be used to almost double the number of button functions. The idea is to keep this button pressed, which enables a second set of button mappings. As such, the shift button needs to be located someplace that is readily accessible and doesn't involve any of the other fingers that would be used to press a different button. Naturally, the thumb rest fits this description perfectly, which is why ROCCAT chose to put the shift button there. While sound in theory, I'm somewhat split on how I feel about this decision in practice. I've found myself accidentally hitting that button quite a few times during play, which is certainly suboptimal. On the other hand, the shift button needs to be in reach, otherwise it defeats its own purpose. Overall, I don't think there is a perfect way to do this, and one simply has to settle with less than perfect.

On top of the second set of button mappings, the Kone XP also has five profiles readily accessible at the press of a button. Customization is possible within ROCCAT Swarm, which is clearly showing its age these days. On the Kone XP, using Swarm wasn't too much of a hassle as all settings can be stored on the mouse without issue, but both RAM footprint and resource usage are higher than I'd want them to be. Thankfully, with the Kone XP having this many customization and storage options, keeping Swarm installed (let alone running) isn't required anyway.

Of course, this much functionality comes with a price, which is the weight. At 98 g, the Kone XP weighs roughly 50% more than the Kone Pro. While I'm hesitant to call the Kone XP overengineered, keeping the weight down clearly was no major concern for ROCCAT when designing the Kone XP. At the same time, many people actually prefer a feature mouse like this one weighing a bit more, and in terms of build, the Kone XP is nearly flawless. On my sample, there is a spot at the left front that caves in a bit when pressing with full force, but other than that, the Kone XP excudes the tanky feel one would expect from this type of mouse. Furthermore, the RGB lighting indeed is very impressive, and arguably some of the best looking lighting I've seen on a gaming mouse in a decent while without it coming across as tacky or overdone.

While the Kone XP does have its flaws, I do feel it gets many things right, and what it doesn't get right isn't all that meaningful for this kind of mouse or simply a matter of taste. At $89.99, the Kone XP is no bargain, but largely in line with other mice with a similar feature set nevertheless, and a premium of $10 over the Kone Pro is reasonable. Accordingly, the Kone XP gets our Recommended award from me.

When it comes to alternatives, not that many are worthwhile. ROCCAT's own Kone Pro shares the shape and performance, but has fewer buttons and less impressive RGB lighting, yet weighs much less, for $79.99. The Glorious Model I too is much lighter, but suffers from a lackluster right main button, poor side buttons, and an even more resource-heavy software, while offering similar performance and fewer buttons, for $59.99. The SteelSeries Rival 5 has plenty of high-quality buttons, but isn't exactly lightweight, either, and has issues with motion delay, polling stability, and click latency, along with a resource-heavy software, for $59.99. Lastly, the ASUS ROG Chakram Core too struggles with its software, which is headache-inducing, weighs roughly the same, but comes with hot-swappable main button switches, excellent performance, a joystick, and stiff cable, for $99.99.