Asus ROG Strix Flare II Animate Review – Friday Night Lights

Between Logitech, Corsair, and Razer, fans of mechanical keyboards are spoiled for choice these days. The hardware genre is full of quality products, and if you’re planning to offer your own line of satisfyingly click-clacky keyboards, you’re going to need a little something extra to stand out.

Asus reckons that it has that special sauce with its ROG Strix Flare II Animate mechanical keyboard. Out of the box, it’s certainly an appealing piece of tech thanks to its rugged design, enough RGB lighting to tastefully illuminate an entire aircraft hangar, hot-swappable PCB to make changing switches a breeze, and a dot-matrix LED light panel to add a flair of customization to the package when using Asus’ Armoury Crate or Aura Creator software.

This is a good-looking keyboard, one where the RGB effects are highlighted by a brushed steel aesthetic and added mechanical extras. There are dedicated media playback buttons and PBT keycaps, but it’s slightly held back by the lack of a detachable power cable as the Flare II uses –understandably for power needs–USB 2.0 passthrough via a pair of cables. N-Key rollover, anti-ghosting, and per-key RGB lighting round out the package, with the media keys in the top left coming in particularly useful for my Photoshop work once I’d done some fine-tuning and assigned functions to them. Otherwise, they’re great for watching media on your PC.

Then there’s the aforementioned animation display, comprised of 312 LEDs that can be used to blast your face with custom text, images, and animations. It’s fun, but it is a gimmick with limited use and it’s in desperate need of more fine-tuning in the software department. There’s only so much that it can display, and not consistently either, plus it’s handicapped by the software only allowing a single mode to be active per profile. This kind of undercuts the entire point of this feature, as customizing it is an absolute pain. It’s honestly something I preferred to switch off or leave in default mode, as the novelty wore off quite quickly. If I can’t accurately program it to transmit “UP YOURS, GEOFF” reliably, then I’m not interested.

But where the Flare II misses the mark on niche-interest LED gimmickry, it more than makes up for it with a superb selection of keycaps. The Asus Red keys, which are in essence the same as your regular Cherry red keys, feel fantastic and rest on top of the sound-dampening foam. What this means is that the audio experience is dampened somewhat, but I actually fell in love with a typing experience that didn’t make my eardrums feel convinced that they were in an active warzone. I’m a hard typer, having gone through several keyboards over the years as if I were Clark Kent faced with a newspaper deadline that could challenge even Superman, and this more subdued approach was a pleasant surprise.

For enthusiasts, there’s an option for hot-swappable switches, provided that they’re the three-pin model. You can essentially use any number of Cherry-compatible third-party switches in this technical range, and swapping them out is no problem thanks to an included keycap puller. This also extends to the printed circuit board, so a combination of customizable PCB and keycaps opens the frame of the Flare II up to an exciting world of unique possibilities. Would I buy this and import a selection of custom Final Fantasy VIII keycaps? You bet your buns I would.

On the RGB lighting side, there’s nothing too revolutionary here. Install the Aura Creator software, and you can set a number of lighting schemes that suit your specific tastes. These can range from subtle breathing effects to early-2000s warehouse rave parties, and there’s a surprising amount of small detail that you can program into the keyboard. Or not, if you’d prefer to plug this device in and start hammering away at a few rounds of League of Legends.

Other than that, the only other noticeable extra is a leatherette wrist rest–try saying that five times fast–but attaching it can be a pain. You have to remove the magnetic light strip at the bottom of the keyboard so that you can slot the wrist rest in; so if you find yourself often adjusting, adding, or removing such extras, it’s going to become quickly tiresome to do.