Team Fortress 2
First up is my perennial favourite, the cartoony Team Fortress 2. Good Times! This frantic team based first person shooter relies on equal parts constant movement (constant holding of the keys) and split second decisions (quickly pressing the right keys). In this game I found it hard to quantify the benefit of the Warrior Xxtreme.
The first thing I had to do was go through the process of re-mapping some of the controls for TF2 to their intended positions on the game pad. Once this was done, I found that the Warrior Xxtreme was a mild improvement over the standard keyboard I was using. The keys were definitely responsive, and I had very little issue with reaching them. I did indeed find that the position of some the keys made for a much more comfortable experience, as I didn’t have to contort my hand into weird angles to reach particular functions.
Now since this is a team based multiplayer game, communication is very important. Voice chat is built in, and is typically mapped to the V key. I of course remapped it to K to follow the spec outlined, which worked fine. However there were still some situations that necessitated text chat. For that I would use the right side of the keyboard, which was rendered difficult by the layout of the keys. This split QWERTY design is truly neither familiar nor ergonomic.
Crysis
I thought I’d try a different FPS game, and switched over to Crysis. Unlike TF2 where you are always on the move, Crysis has a great deal of sneaking and standing still. This type of game benefits a lot more from a good mouse than a specialized keyboard. Granted the same thing could be said about using this keyboard as could be said about using it in TF2. The keys on left hand side were well placed and responsive. The keys on the right were relatively useless, which meant I needed to find a game that would truly make use of the entire Warrior Xxtreme.
Supreme Commander
Unfortuntely that game is World of Warcraft; a game I quit a long time ago. So I turned to the one genre we haven’t touched on. Supreme Command is one large real-time strategy game, and you indeed need a few extra controls to get a handle on everything. This is one area where you would think the Warrior Xxtreme would find itself very useful. Unfortunately that was once again a half truth. This time the unfamiliar layout of the right hand keypad was the Warrior Xxtreme’s downfall.
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