Tesoro Excalibur V2 Gaming Keyboard Review

Performance

Setting up the V2 is nice and easy, just hook up the USB cable and you’re good to go. All the main features can be toggled right from the keyboard, and macro recording can be done on the fly too, but if you really want to get all the finer details customised, you’ll want to download the desktop software. If anything, the software is most useful for setting up the five onboard profiles and once your settings saved to the keyboard, you’ll likely not need to load it very often, if at all.

The built-in LED lighting is only a single colour, but you do get a per-key lighting engine and a range of effects to play around with; lighting, trigger, ripple, firework, radiation, breathing, wave marquee, custom and macro. Personally, I like the custom mode most, as I like just a few gaming focused keys lit while playing and I like the full keyboard to be illuminated while working. Although I must admit the effects do look quite cool sweeping across the board, they rarely offer any practical benefit for day-to-day usage.

The Kailh switches certainly don’t disappoint when it comes to their gaming prowess, they’re light, fast and have that tactile click that you’ll be familiar with from any other blue style switch. There is one downside, of course, they’re quite noisy, but anyone who’s used a blue switch before will already know to expect this. The durable housing of the keyboard stays firmly planted on your desk while typing and even with a good bit of bashing at the keys and shunting the space bar, it didn’t want to slide around at all; good news for all your rage quitters.

The macro recording works perfectly and while you can pre-configure them, I like the ability to record it on-the-fly as you can create contextual shortcuts for certain fights or sequences in a particular game. Either way, it’s always nice to have extra features and if you save them back to one of the five profiles available, you can take them with you stored on the keyboard; perfect for LAN gaming events.

Overall, the V2 is a lot of fun for work and gaming. It doesn’t have a lot of crazy features, but at the end of the day it doesn’t really need to.