While I was looking for a couple of water bottles at my local Five Below I ended up stumbling across something a little unexpected. That something claimed to be a gaming mouse, and needless to say my curiosity was piqued.
The gaming mouse in question is brought to us by U Youse, which is a brand that pops up quite frequently at Five Below. Interestingly, this isn’t the first time that this exact model of mouse has found its way to their shelves, even though most of the tech that passes through Five Below is never ordered again after the stock runs out. Apparently it was popular enough to warrant a bit of special treatment.
Now let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. Like virtually all of the tech (and many of the other items) at Five Below, this mouse is an imitation of an existingg product. It’s an angle for angle reproduction of a generic gaming mouse that you can get from quite a few Chinese manufacturers. It goes by many names, but for the sake of this review I’ll focus on the M102 from Lingyi. What’s really funny about the detail put into the reproduction of the M102 is that U Youse even reproduced the bolts on the side. I don’t mean they put bolts where Lingyi did. No, I mean that they have faux bolts molded into the plastic. It’s actually quite hilarious.
Despite the care taken to imitate the M102, there are two places where U Youse seems to have dropped the ball a bit. First off, the M102 and all similar mice have a pair of extra buttons on the left hand side of the mouse. These extra keys are set to “forward” and “back” by default, but the M102 in particular allows you to reprogram these buttons for use in your games of choice. There are even buttons that allow you to change the DPI settings on your mouse (which controls the cursor speed), while this mouse is fixed at 1200 DPI.
The other difference is the scroll wheel. Where the M102 has a nice rubberized wheel with gaps that allow the LEDs to shine through, the mouse for U Youse has a piece of plastic garbage that is hands down the worst scroll wheel I have ever used. The entire wheel is plastic without any type of rubberized coating, and you can tell by the way it grinds that it was not designed for the mouse’s shell.
Speaking of the shell, the back of the package claims it’s made out of high quality ABS plastic. It may or may not be ABS (I don’t know for sure), but it is far from high quality. It deforms quite easily when squeezed, and I highly doubt it would survive if you’re prone to raging while you game. The thin shell also means that the mouse is very lightweight, which goes against the current trend in gaming mice where they include interchangeable weights.
After all of these negative points I bet you are expecting me to say that you shouldn’t buy this mouse, but you’d only be half right. If you are looking for a cheap gaming mouse, I would definitely tell you to look elsewhere since you can get better gaming mice online for the same price or just a little more. However, if you need a quick and cheap replacement mouse for your computer then this wouldn’t be the worst choice. Getting a computer mouse in my area is typically more than $5 for the cheapest models, and those don’t have a neat color changing LED effect. Of course, maybe paying a few dollars more would be worth it to not have to deal with this scroll wheel…
