During a heated game of Marvel Rivals, my team raids the Asgard throne room. An enemy healer playing Dagger is in the distance, working their way down the stairs to the control point, so my job as Punisher is to pull hard and focus fire on them as soon as possible. My aim tracks their movement and I whittle away their health bar before they can retreat behind a pillar, securing an important elimination to start the fight.
I owe my success in that scuffle to the Inzone Mouse-A, a wireless gaming mouse which I tried out during an in-person Sony and Inzone joint press event at the OS NYC internet cafe in New York. I tested multiple new products while playing the hot new hero shooter on the block, including headphones, earbuds, a keyboard and a mouse pad -- but the Mouse-A stood out to me as the star of the show.
The Mouse-A helped me take down enemies at a distance farther than I can usually secure eliminations. I'm a massive fan of team-based hero shooter games like Overwatch and Marvel Rivals, but my aiming skills have never been as strong as my cooldown management or positioning.
I avoid hitscan heroes that require a lot of accuracy in favor of tank and support characters, but this mouse made me realize that my skill ceiling might be higher than I thought. Here's what makes the Mouse-A feel like a device designed for competitive gamers -- and how it leveled up even my casual, Marvel Rivals Grandmaster-tier gameplay.
The one big caveat about the Mouse-A is price, and at a whopping $150 it's far more expensive than most of the best wireless mice we track, but for deep-pocketed gamers, Inzone's new gaming mouse could be just the right fit.
The entire Inzone lineup is designed for ease of competitive use -- the keyboard has RGB lights but the Mouse-A is comparatively simple looking. Mike Sorrentino/CNET
What it's like using an 'ultralightweight' mouse
The Mouse-A, which Inzone developed in collaboration with the esports organization Fnatic, is novel in that it is what the company refers to as an ultra-lightweight mouse. Weighing in at only 48g, which is less than half the weight of the 110g Turtle Beach Kone 2 Air, for instance, the Mouse-A is easy to steer around a mat. I've never used a mouse this light before, and I felt myself lifting it off the mousepad far less often. It was less physically taxing to use than my own gaming PC setup.
My in-game performance felt quicker and more responsive, too. I felt like I had greater control over the flicks of my wrist when I had to quickly turn around to contest enemy heroes diving into the backline like Black Panther and Magik, for instance, and I'd imagine the mouse would perform similarly for gamers who enjoy clearing tight corners in more tactical FPS games -- Valorant and Counter-Strike come to mind.
Of course, trying out this so-called ultra-lightweight mouse might introduce a new learning curve to your setup. The Mouse-A has a maximum of 30k dots per inch (DPI), a precise metric of movement sensing, which is much more sensitive than my setup at home. If you're used to playing at a lower DPI, moving around this lighter mouse at the default settings will have you wildly spinning around the camera when you're trying to click on enemies' heads.
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