Turtle Beach Burst II Air Review

When you’re looking for a recent gaming mouse, it’s basic to get lost in a sea of ​​RGB colors and mice with more buttons than you could ever know what to do with. But every once in a while, a gaming mouse comes along that focuses on being fun to exploit and performing at an exceptional level. That’s exactly what the Turtle Beach Burst II Air offers—performance over style.

When unboxing the Turtle Beach Burst II Air, I can tell that this mouse isn’t designed to be a showpiece in your gaming setup. Instead, it focuses on simplicity and performance. The Turtle Beach Burst II Air box simply includes a USB-C to USB-A charging cable, a USB transmitter, a USB-A to USB-C adapter, and extra anti-slip tape and rollers.

While the Turtle Beach Burst II Air and its packaging may not feature the most exhilarating design, it is refreshingly lightweight, weighing in at just 47g. So much so that it glides along effortlessly, making it a great choice for competitive gamers.

While I can happily say I’m a fan of the basic, lightweight design, the plastic casing seems to attract fingerprints, which makes me have to pristine the mouse more often than I do with other gaming mice. The plastic casing also feels a bit affordable, but that’s often the case with ultra-light, competitive gaming mice.

When it comes to wireless gaming mice, one of my biggest gripes is the battery life. There are so many wireless gaming mice that boast impressive, long-lasting batteries, but Turtle Beach comes out on top, offering up to 120 hours of battery life. Even after a few days of exploit, I haven’t had to charge it once so far. Even if the mouse runs out of battery, which the Turtle Beach Swarm 2 software will warn you about in advance, you can simply plug it in and continue working in wired mode.

Speaking of the Swarm 2, for a mouse that seems plain at first glance, the Turtle Beach software allows for a lot of changes: from the DPI resolution, which ranges from 50 to a whopping 26,000 dots per inch, to the response time, which lets you change the speed of click detection.

While the app is incredibly useful and basic to exploit, the ability to set up multiple profiles may make you exploit it less often once you have everything set up the way you like it.

However, if you prefer to make changes on the fly, Swarm II is an intuitive software that requires virtually no technical knowledge and just a few moments to change your mouse settings to suit the game you’re playing.

In addition to that, you can customize macros, change the polling rate (in four preset steps ranging from 125 to 1000), there’s also a setting to change the standby mode to make saving your device’s battery life easier, and even a motion sync mode that’s designed to augment the sensitivity of the sensor.

The Owl-Eye 26k DPI/650 IPS (16.5m/s) optical sensor seemed to offer impressive accuracy, but as usual, I ran it through MouseTester to see how good the tracking was.

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We look for polished arcs in the graphs, and we have them. There are no real surprises, as you can see from the images above: the sensor tracks rapid movements well, with little variability, and the polling rate is exactly 1000 Hz. No complaints there.

We encountered an issue with the first test unit and an apparently faulty sensor, but after replacement there were no issues.

While some gamers might prefer a polling rate above 1kHz, personally, when I’m playing competitive games, I want the best possible fps, so I couldn’t fault the Turtle Beach Burst II Air for having a maximum polling rate of 1kHz. Higher polling rates not only tax the CPU more, but can also drain the mouse’s battery. Considering that the Turtle Beach Burst II Air’s battery lasts such an impressively long time, it wouldn’t make sense to add a feature that could ruin the battery life, as well as the performance of some games.

It’s also worth noting that the Titan Switch Optical’s pre-loaded buttons offer incredibly satisfying clicks, similar to those of a mechanical keyboard. Some gamers may prefer something a little quieter, but I found them both responsive and satisfying to exploit.

Speaking of buttons, the mouse has six programmable buttons, including a DPS button on the side for quickly changing DPS settings without having to access the Swarm II software. Another useful feature is the ability to create up to six different profiles, allowing me to completely customize the mouse, its settings, and its buttons, making it basic to quickly switch between mice depending on the game I’m playing.

After using the Turtle Beach Burst II Air for a few weeks, I’ve gone from someone who never considered using a simpler, lightweight mouse (and probably still won’t, since I don’t play competitive games often enough) to someone who now has a deep understanding of their place and the benefits they offer competitive gamers.

As for whether I recommend the Turtle Beach Burst II Air, the answer is plain: if you are a competitive gamer, yes, this mouse is lightweight, comfortable, fun to exploit, and most importantly, it won’t let you down halfway through the game. But if you are more of a casual gamer, they are better gaming mice with more programmable buttons and functions.

While there are plenty of other competitive gaming mice out there, all with tons of features and much better designs, sometimes less is more. This is where the Turtle Beach Burst II really shines.