ROCCAT Isku Illuminated Gaming Keyboard Review

Testing and Software
Down to the nitty gritty. The Roccat ISKU gave me a flashback to my old MS Sidewinder keyboard (good thing). I actually enjoyed the membrane panel over the mechanical key switches I’ve become so used to. It seemed as if my fingers were doing less work to accomplish the same keystroke. What can I say, I have lazy fingers… All in all the ISKU felt really nice to use.

My biggest gripe with the ISKU was solely based around 2 things. First was the location of the Macro keys set on the left side of the board. I know I raved at the number of keys that Roccat included in the design but I became quite irritated at how close they are to the regular keyset. I constantly hit the ‘M5’ key when attempting to hit my ‘L. CRTL’ key. I’m not the best fastest typist nor do I type properly in respect to where I place my fingers but sometimes in order to locate a key like the ‘L. CTRL’ key I guide my finger to the further key on the keyset in the bottom left corner. Due to the close spacing of the macro keys my finger finds the wrong key and I want to punish it every time. Spacing the key just a few millimeters further to the left would have been much better from a design perspective and would have me not wanting to tear my pinky off.

Second is the LED lighting of this keyboard. Typically when you see a membrane style keyboard the keys are only LED backlight which sucks. The ISKU, on the other hand, features individual LED lights for each key. Why is that a bad thing? Well, it’s not. The problem lies in how they place the LED in each key. When looking down on the keyboard from above the keys look fine, it’s when you sit back in your chair and are looking at the keys from an angle you start to notice the issue. The LED looks too recessed in the key and the light on illuminates half of each key. The only way to improve this problem is to set the ISKU on the brightest setting and even then the keys just don’t look right. Even in light of this issue I think the ISKU illumination still looks better than almost all backlit paneled keyboards.

ROCCAT Isku Illuminated Gaming Keyboard ROCCAT Isku Illuminated Gaming Keyboard

I can’t stress this enough. The software for the ISKU is very in-depth. So instead of me taking a million screenshots of the software I figured I’d make a video overview of all of its capabilities to ease the pain of looking through this review.