Software

The driver for the Horde AIMO and other recent ROCCAT peripherals is aptly named ROCCAT Swarm, and the latest version, 1.9364 at the time of the review, can be downloaded from here. The installer is 155 MB in size, and the installed driver takes up 152 MB on your storage drive, but as we will see below, there is a catch. System utilization is minimal, so there is nothing to worry about on that end if you have a decent processor for 2020 from either camp.


As with some of the previous ROCCAT peripherals here, Swarm is a collection that needs add-on modules specific to the product. When the keyboard was plugged in and the software initiated, it detected the Vulcan 120 AIMO and walked me through downloading and installing the module as seen above. After this, the keyboard firmware was also automatically updated with a notice of the same to let me know. The module added another 5 MB to the installed size of Swarm, so for AIMO products, there is a lot of common functionality in the base driver itself.


Now that everything is good to go, we see things have been moved around since the last AIMO keyboard review. There is no dedicated homepage for AIMO, with ROCCAT giving us a separate menu to choose from at the top. Here, we see general toggles for AIMO, as well as ROCCAT Talk FX and AlienFX, which are alternative lighting systems. For the Vulcan 120 AIMO and other ROCCAT AIMO peripherals, just use AIMO, which the company has developed more recently and continues to give more attention to, unless you have Alienware products to use with AlienFX. The driver also scales well with high DPI displays and stretches to fit ultrawide displays, which is nice to see after testing a few keyboards recently that were hard to even see on a 4K display.

As we saw with other ROCCAT devices before, there is a pinned settings menu that acts as a shortcut to specific settings you may want on a single page. You are free to unpin existing ones or pin more from other menu pages, but given there are a total of three menu pages, I just left everything unpinned after my first look. The video also demonstrates the very useful profile manager because it allows for multi-user customization or a single user with profiles for multiple programs. The keyboard relies on software profiles past the first four, so you need to have Swarm installed and running for these extra profiles to work. Next to this is the macro manager that works as expected and has delay options available. 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 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. Finally, there is a mobile app that allows for some monitoring of your system, but only with both devices on the same wireless network and after you've given the app permission to do so.

The next menu is all about key assignment, and we have the option to go with a virtual keyboard or list. You can pick any key 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. 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 also use a mouse button for this, as it will work for the keyboard as well (and vice versa). This opens up a huge number of possible custom keys and assignments, especially in conjunction with the multiple profiles. Many of the games here are quite dated, so ROCCAT needs to update this list to keep up with other competing solutions, although you can always just create your own as seen above.

The final menu page is for key illuminations, and you are by default in AIMO lighting mode. A drop-down menu on the left helps with picking other available options, which include a rainbow wave, 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, with full control over the R/G/B channels in 256 brightness steps 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, except for the part where you have a level indicator for AIMO that increases when you buy more AIMO products, of course. There are definitely occasions where you want complete control over the backlighting rather than having it respond to what's on your screen, and I would much rather have easier per-key backlighting control instead.