Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

"Take a step away from membrane keyboards!" they said. "You'll enjoy it!" they said. I did. Until I didn't. See, for the most part, I love it; mine's got the HyperX Red switches, and they feel really nice, other than I would've liked a little less resistance on the keypress for typing and stuff. The RGB is pretty, the keys are stabilized well, overall the keyboard made the first two weeks very pleasant. And then the problems began. At first it was minor, one press in ten, the 'c' key wouldn't actually register. Then one time in 5, then one in 2, and then it would take several keypresses to actually get it to register. "Surely the switch has failed." I thought. So, I rang up HyperX support, and they had me troubleshoot the issue, and lo and behold, it's a simple fix, a driver update via their NGENUITY software. Great, easy enough, except many people start getting a sinking feeling when you talk about peripheral hardware and driver failure in the same sentence. Fast forward a month or so, and all of the sudden, I press the 'm' key, only to have nothing happen. I press it again; it works. A fluke? No, now it only gets one in ten presses, if that. Alright, I'll just update the drivers again right? WRONG. Because now NGENUITY can't see the keyboard. Restart? Replug? Nothing works. Alright then, uninstall NGENUITY and everything will work great, surely? As it turns out, this is just one layer of the failure onion that HyperX, a generally reputable division of Kingston, has created. So let's approach this layer by layer. First off, we have keys randomly failing due to driver issues. This begs the question of what the he** the drivers are doing that individual keys can fail and leave all other functionality unaffected. What is going on under the hood that permits this. Then we have the NGENUITY software, which at first glance, isn't all that bad. It's at second and third glance that it gets really bad. Now we have another key failure, but now NGENUITY can't tell the keyboard is there. The logical option is to reinstall, but HyperX decided, in their infinite wisdom, "Hey, let's make this install exclusively through the Microsoft Store. That definitely won't make the software a complete pain to troubleshoot.". Well, funny story, you can uninstall it, but thanks to Microsoft's garbage "store" software, it, in my case at least, cannot be reinstalled. It just throws error 0x80073D05 ad infinitum. Normally, if you uninstalled something and then couldn't reinstall it, you'd just purge every mention of it in your filesystem right? Well in this case, you can't. Store apps are kept in a hidden file that it appears even administrator accounts can no longer grant themselves access to, so as much as I'd like to simply purge everything associated with this software and have another go, I can't. Even if NGENUITY worked, I wouldn't have a way to install it. So now I have a keyboard that has, in my definition, failed. Keypresses go in, letters come out. If letters don't come out, the keyboard has failed. Somehow, HyperX has made great hardware, then kneecapped it with awful software that installs through a worse platform. I'd love this keyboard, but it doesn't work, and I can't even blame the keyboard for it. Hardware failures I can understand, a certain number of units are going to be DOA, that's life, but software rendering hardware unusable? That's just sheer incompetence, nothing less, especially when you're pushing unstable versions of software to customers who already have the hardware, which then renders it unusable. This has really degraded my confidence in HyperX as a whole, and just as Razer's DeathAdder and Logitech's G502 left a bad taste in my mouth over their hardware (thus, leading to me looking elsewhere for a new keyboard), HyperX has demonstrated an egregious level of incompetence I've never encountered.