I think its accurate to say that Logitech has been a staple in the lives of many a PC gamer. My first keyboard that was actually worth the money I spent on it was a Logitech G11. The first mouse we had for our first computer at home was a rebranded Logitech S96. My first racing wheel? You guessed it, a Logitech Driving Force Pro. While the company has been withdrawing from many markets where it isn’t making money, PC peripherals is still their bread and butter and the G402 Hyperion Fury emphasises that quite well.

The G402 is generally available at stockists and walk-in retailers for around R799.

The G402 Hyperion Fury is a mashup of the design of the G502 Proteus with some pretty interesting sensor technology created in-house by Logitech. The low-profile design reminds me of the G9X that took the mid-range market by storm for FPS players a few years back. Logitech’s main competition here is the Steelseries Rival and the ASUS Strix Claw. Several sales of the G402 have also occasionally pushed it down to compete against the Steelseries Sensei RAW and the Genius GX Gila.

The G402 is covered in a matte black plastic finish in some parts and accented with some soft-touch gloss plastic. In general use it never feels hard to grip or use, though the parts of the palm rest that are plastic make it easy for your palm to slide off it. The thumb and finger grip area is covered in a hardened rubber with a lightly textured surface that allows for good grip levels. Greasy palms don’t make this rubber feel icky, which is great.

I discovered pretty quickly that the lack of a finger rest means that most of the time your fingers are dragging along on the mouse mat if your grip is relaxed. If your mat has a rough texture, the chances are that gaming sessions will be cut short to relieve any pain or tenderness in your fingertips. For this single reason, then, the G402 is far more suited to claw grip gamers.

Button response is great, with the primary buttons needing little pressure to be used, though that will often result in accidental mis-clicks. The buttons for swapping profiles alongside the left primary button as well as all the thumb buttons are well placed, but the feedback just isn’t all that great, leaving it feeling somewhat mushy.

The rubberised scroll wheel feels good, although it is not a free-wheeling unit, something that can benefit the Excel warriors out there. Out of the eight buttons available, six are configurable in Logitech’s software, and the on-board LEDs are configurable, allowing you to dim the lights or give them different lighting effects.

The Future is Fusion

The G402 is all about gaming and that’s mostly down to the sensor Logitech has used in it. Logitech has combined a traditional Avago optical sensor with an accelerometer and gyrometer, which, together with a 32-bit Cortex-A7 processor, form the “Fusion engine.” With a sensitivity range from 200 to 4000DPI, there’s little on paper to fault the G402 on.

Ordinary mice rely on tracking your movement on a readable surface so that it knows where it is in a 2.5D environment. If you move away from the sensor’s current position very quickly, information is lost as the sensor scrambles to figure out where you’ve just moved to. Some high-end laser sensors avoid this by using two lasers for movement tracking, but it is a much more expensive design.

With the Fusion engine, the gyrometer measures the intended direction of your movements, and the accelerometer measures the speed and distance your mouse hand has now travelled.

Effectively, there’s no real-world scenario where you’ll be able to overwhelm the sensor or make it lose its footing. If you play mostly twitch shooters, snap-aiming to targets becomes even easier. For precise image work in Photoshop, you won’t see the sensor compensating for what it thinks is movement in any direction, leading you to make mistakes. This kind of performance is usually found in optical sensors costing much more.

Most of my testing took place with games like Hawken or Civilisation: Beyond Earth, where the accuracy of the sensor really paid off nicely for finding targets or making a lot of decisions on the spot while fending off the absolutely terrifying siege worms.

Where the speed of the mouse was most apparent was in Unreal Tournament 2004, one of the last fast-paced arena shooters that still see a lot of online play in my circle of friends. It doesn't make me automatically better, but I'm a lot more accurate with the flak cannon than I usually am.

In the software, some drawbacks leave room for improvement. Button customisation, for example, requires you to only have one use for each button. There’s no long-press for alternative modes here like the Gamdias Zeus offers, although that can surely be added in later with some software updates. Logitech does however include G-Shift, which will allow for a second set of commands that can be added to the mouse so long as the G-Shift key assigned on your keyboard is held down.

Something that Logitech has also picked up on is that sharing customised profiles, macros and button layouts needs to be a thing. These are saved as text files on your hard drive and can be synced using cloud storage options like Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive, or carrying them with you on a flash drive. Unlike newer device managers like Razer Synapse or Steelseries Engine, you don't need to sign in to an account to make any changes or customisations.

Pros

Fusion Engine is great
Long cable
Simple driver software

Cons

Limited button customisation
No finger rest
Somewhat mushy button response

The Verdict

Overall, Logitech has done well with the G402 Hyperion Fury and it’s well worth the money for the performance you get in return. Its behaviour is very predictable, the performance is on par with mice costing a whole lot more and the software doesn’t let it down, which has been an issue with some Logitech mice in the past. It has the capability to be as game-changing as the G9X was and I look forward to the second generation of the Fusion Engine.