The last time I saw Attack Shark, I was singing their praises for sure over their lightweight X3 gaming mouse. Video card above if you wanted to check that out. Well, Attack Shark has recently reached out to us to check out their new AJ159 Apex Pro gaming mouse, and seeing as they’ve now got a website (yes I know a bit strange to claim because I definitely couldn’t find it before) we felt we wanted to check it out, to see if the quality of the X3 has been mirrored in the new AJ159. Here’s the review, let us know what you think in the comments down below.
The Attack Shark AJ159 Apex is classed as a lightweight gaming mouse. It’s not quite as light as the X3, but it still comes in at 56 grams and it feels very hollowed out and really nice when flicking it around a mouse pad. Of course you’ve also got to thank the smooth skates on the mouse for that too, but I cannot take away just how lightweight it actually is. It’s got no cables either and its battery life is actually very good. It took quite a while to give its initial charge, a 400mAh battery inside, but after that the mouse has lasted about a week’s worth of use before needing to dock it, of course depending on how much it’s been used. Do bear in mind I use the mouse a lot as I work from home on the PC the mouse is on, so up to 15 some days including work and some gaming in the evenings. So this mouse is definitely a brilliant and welcome addition to my gaming setup.
Even though it’s lightweight, the body still feels a nice build quality. For buttons you’ve got a left and right click, a scroll wheel and two thumb buttons. There’s a DPI switcher on the base, but why it’s there is beyond me. I do like flicking between a higher and lesser sensitivity when I’m playing FPS games, and it being on the bottom is too much of a burden to be able to change it on the fly. The mouse uses Huano switches which feel nice and clicky and tactile and they’re rated for up to a million hits. There’s a nice return rate too on the mouse so it feels like the clicks really follow your finger, and it doesn’t feel like you need much effort to press either. It connects to the dock via 2.4GHz but you do have Bluetooth or the option to use the included USB Type C cable too if that’s more your thing. I didn’t notice any kind of latency lag when using it wirelessly inside of games, but unfortunately I don’t have any real scientific way to test this except how I feel about it.
On the bottom you can find a PixArt PAW 3950APEX and however, doing a bit of research, it seems like a bit of a proprietary sensor, hense the Apex name. Advantages here can be a DPI level of 42,000, a polling rate of 8,000 which is set within the driver, and also power draw, of course being less than older sensors, which in turn extends battery life of wireless mice. The 3950 being a successor to the popular 3395, it has the ability to use Motion Sync at a higher polling rate, hence the 8000Hz polling rate the AJ159 can hit which helps immensely with dropped polls, which is the syncing of your USB polling rate with the sensor readings from the mouse. It makes the mouse more accurate, but really how much more accurate over the X3 that I’ve been using for a while now? I don’t know. But then I’m a casual gamer and not gunning for those pixel-peeping headshots so… take it all as you will.
Playing games though with the mouse like Overwatch 2 was a pleasant experience and I didn’t really have any issues with the mouse dropping out or me hitting my shots. And even on a faster title like Prodius, the AJ159 was a decent choice. I never felt uncomfortable either, and coming from my favourite Logitech G502X, which is a much larger mouse and one I find very comfortable to use, but this AJ59, everything was within reach and I never had to stretch and crimp my thumb for example to hit the thumb buttons, though I did have to adopt more of a claw grip rather than smoothing the mouse with my palm like I do with my 502X. The mouse glided with precision ac ross my mouse mat, which admittedly is a proper budget one from Amazon, but it does me fine.
Since checking out the X3 a few months back, a lot has changed with Attack Shark and their offering when installing software. It’s all done through the Attack Shark website now and all the products are there. Just find your product, and in this case, it’s the AJ159 Pro, download the driver, or firmware if you need that and away you go. It installed very quickly and gave me a myriad of options for customising the mouse.
Settings here won’t look too dissimilar to what gamers are used to, with the options to change functions of different buttons, you’ve got your DPI changer which can be customised to different sensitivities, your parameter settings which include things like your double click interval time, roller simulation button shake elemination and button simulation roller shake elimination, all of which sound like they might be super useful to proper gamers, but filthy casuals like me didn’t really touch them. I did however set my return rate to 8,000Hz which is huge. Finally you’ve got some macro settings, your share settings and some account settings if you have an account with Attack Shark. The charging dock also comes with some settings for the screen where you can have a clock, a single image or an animation that flicks between photos you upload with a minimum speed of 255ms, which is extremely fast to even take note of the images on the slide show. Bit rubbish really.
So let’s talk quickly about the dock because it’s unique in the fact it has a little screen on the front to show important information like your battery life or your DPI setting, but you can also upload images to it, which is obviously so much cooler than the mouse telling it’s using a 2.4GHz connection. You can either have a static image or a very fast-moving slide slow, which the slowest interval between images you can have is 244 milliseconds which is super rough and nowhere near enough time to actually look at your images. The dock is magnetic, so the mouse just sits in place quite nicely and is suspended at an angle. Makes for quite a nice piece on the desk actually. Very tidy indeed.
But what is wonderful is all of this is only £65 on the Attack Shark website, which I think for a wireless mouse of this calibre, with a decent and comfortable use, with a wireless dock too which is a bit flashy with a screen, is basically a mega steal. So go and buy one now. Replace your old cruddy gaming mouse and get yourself a fresh Attack Shark AJ159 Apex Pro gaming mouse.
