Over the past decade, as professional gaming has become more commonplace and PC gaming as a whole has continued its steady trudge alongside its flashier console cousins, peripheral makers have had to expand beyond the age-old tactic of touting DPI numbers to attract new buyers. In the process, they’ve purchased licenses to use the word Teflon to advertise their mouse feet and they’ve added remappable buttons and adjustable weights.
RGB lighting is one of the more recent battlegrounds of peripheral production and it seems to have strayed over into the world of mouse mats too, as Razer has announced a new pad called the Firefly that comes equipped with its own brand of RGB backlighting, known as Chroma.
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That is to say, it has lit up edges. The main body of the Firefly remains black, but you can at least make the bottom, left, and right hand sides glow a particular color of your choice. There are also options for reactive lighting patterns that change depending on certain scenarios, or you can select wave and ripple effects if you prefer.
Of course one downside of having a powered mouse mat is that it requires power. That means yet another cable trailing over the back of your desk. It is however very light, weighting in at just shy of one pound.
In terms of its more traditional “features,” the Firefly has a 14″ by 10″ footprint and is only four millimetres tall. It’s also made of a hard material, which Razer describes as having a “micro-textured” surface, allowing for fast, friction-free movements without sacrificing accuracy. The underside is coated with rubber, to ensure that no matter how hard you swipe your wrist across the surface, it shouldn’t go anywhere.
