Wolf King Timber Wolf

Approximate Price - £23 (€34)

Wolf King Timber Wolf Gaming Keyboard

Wolf King is a company that is all about the shooter fans. I looked at the Wolf King Trooper in a previous article on gaming mice but keyboards are what they focused on first. The Timber Wolf breaks out the default area keys surrounding the WASD set and puts them into an easy-to-reach circular configuration on the left side of a regular keyboard. Those keys are duplicated on the main keyboard but you lose the numpad pad and the home, end, page up, page down, delete, insert and arrow keys are moved in with the other keys like a laptop keyboard and not set apart. Aside from the circular configuration of the keys there is nothing else exceptional about this keyboard. It doesn’t have any multimedia controls (although it does have some internet hot keys) and there aren’t any extra keys added for gaming.

For shooters having all those keys clustered together is nice, but it’s not like they are spread out all over the place on a regular keyboard. They are slightly easier to get to but the problem is the muscle memory associated with a standard keyboard after years of use. For instance, in World of Warcraft, I remapped all the abilities and movement keys so I could use them all on the circle. But because the keys were in a different place than I’ve been used to, I had to look at the keyboard to hit them. This may not be a problem with a newer game like BioShock where you may not have built up the muscle memory for where things are, but on older games you may have to essentially learn how to play them again for the sake of arguable convenience. The good thing about the Timber Wolf is that it’s only about $10 more than a standard new keyboard so the added ease-of-use for shooters (and maybe MMOs or other games you’d use WASD for) might be worth a look if you need a new keyboard.

Wolf King Warrior

Approximate Price - £18 (€26)

Wolf King Warrior Gaming Keyboard

The Warrior represents the same basic idea as that of the Timber Wolf, but it’s only the circular set of keys and you use it alongside your existing keyboard. It’s heavier and sturdier than the Timber Wolf with a softer touch to the keys so I liked it better. The same problems exist with using it on games you’ve trained on but it’s easy to acclimate to the controls on new games. The problem with the Warrior is that since it doesn’t come attached to its own keyboard you need to have the space to set it up. Depending on the game, you could just move your existing keyboard and use the Warrior exclusively while gaming (it includes an Esc button and volume controls, which are not on the Timber Wolf’s gaming area). But setting it up alongside a keyboard and a mouse requires a wide desk.

To its credit, the Warrior is comfortable and takes what’s good about the Timber Wolf and loses the sub-par keyboard component. My problem with it (as well as all of the gaming keyboards for that matter) is that the keyboard doesn’t change the experience drastically. When I first moved from a mouse that used rollers and a ball to an optical mouse, it was a dramatic change. The same can be said for moving from a low dpi mouse to a high dpi one. You’ll notice the change immediately. With gaming keyboards, there’s a slight difference - better or worse depending on personal preference - but it isn’t as noticeable as with mice.

I don’t mean to discourage anyone from gaming keyboards and I’m not claiming that they’re all crap. All I’m saying is that they won’t dramatically enhance your gaming experience above a standard keyboard. Gamers who are really into customization may get more out of them and shooter fans may get some advantage from softer keys or more optimal placement. However, the benefits are slight. I will say that all the gaming keyboards have gamer interests in mind and none of them was worse than a standard keyboard. Either the keys are there or they aren’t and either you can reach them or you can’t. Anything else is just frosting and sometimes too much frosting is a bad thing.