The Roccat Vulcan II Mini offers great gaming performance, nifty features, and some modding capabilities in its compact and lightweight frame.
Great news, fellow keyboard modders. With the Roccat Vulcan II Mini (and the much-lauded Vulcan II Max (opens in new tab)) legendary Vulcan line, one of our favorite gaming keyboards, has finally entered the modding world, and it’s about damn time.
Not that we’re minimizing the Roccat Vulcan II Mini’s many merits, of course. This tiny but mighty mini gaming keyboard is packed with features that prove crucial to gaming – its Game mode and Easy-Shift features, for example, will quickly give you access to game macros and key assignments without disrupting the keyboard’s default functions that you’ll want to use for non-gaming stuff.
There’s also its 65% form factor, which means you can have a compact keyboard without losing those vital arrow keys. And finally, those low-profile keys combined with that incredibly vibrant RGB lighting makes the keyboard an easy sell.
Still, its modding capabilities are a welcome addition as they add another layer of customizations to this already multilayered keeb. The switches still aren’t hot-swappable, sadly, but you can now slot in third-party keycaps with cross-shaped stems and use a coiled cable, sprucing things up and making it your own (and, that’s exactly what we’ve done, making our Christmas-themed using keycaps from Drop.)
That’s a lot of customizations for a keyboard that sits in the mid-range market. Now all we need from Roccat is to tighten up that still unnecessarily complicated software – and perhaps produce fun, low-profile keycaps in different colors and designs while they’re at it.
Admittedly, the Roccat Vulcan II Mini isn’t what we’d categorize as “cheap,” but hear us out. It’s slightly more affordable than the competition at only $149.99 (£129.99, AU$259.95). Top rivals like the Razer BlackWidow V3 Mini HyperSpeed, the Corsair K70 Mini Pro Wireless, and the SteelSeries Apex Pro Mini will set you back $199.99 (£179.99, AU$299.95), $179.99 (£169.99, AU $299.00), and $179.99 (£169.99, AU$399.00) respectively.
Granted, each of those mini keyboards have its own set of strengths as well, but looking at the price tags alone, the Roccat Vulcan II Mini is certainly the most affordable of the bunch. Plus, it comes with a terrific feature set and is decently comfortable to type on as well, which make it an excellent value for your money.
