Review Razer Basilisk V4 Pro: This Mouse Has an AI Button, but Otherwise It's Great

I normally go in for ultra-light mice, but Razer's Basilisk series offers an interesting alternative in the same vein as the popular Logitech G502. You get a lot more buttons, a fancy scroll wheel, RGB lighting and high-end internals, all wrapped up in a heavy, wide and ultimately quite comfortable ergonomic shape. It's not ideal for fast-paced FPS mousing, but other gaming genres and general productivity work can benefit from all of these extra features. The last Basilisk I tested was the V3 Pro, while evaluating Razer's butt-rumbling gaming cushion, and now the V4 Pro has arrived.

What's the difference? The V4 Pro is a lighter mouse that nonetheless manages to pack in more features, with two extra buttons, an upgraded scroll wheel with tighter steps, a newer optical sensor, native 8000Hz wireless polling and nearly double the battery life. This comprehensive upgrade does cost more though, at £170 in the UK (£30 more than the V3 Pro 35K) and $170 in the US ($40 more than the V3 Pro 35K). For my money, I'd rather have the older model - or the even cheaper vanilla V3 Pro with a worse sensor - but as time goes on, the price difference will drop and the V4 Pro will be worth considering.

The most interesting bad thing about the Basilisk V4 Pro is that it comes with an extra AI button by default, which pops up a small window that lets you ask ChatGPT (or another AI service) to summarise text, compose emails or generate an image. You can also create your own custom prompts. Whenever I tried to do a text prompt, ChatGPT reported that "an error occurred during verification, please try again." Generating an image, by contrast, merely did nothing - no matter how many times I pressed submit or changed the request.

Thankfully, you can change the mapping to something more useful, eg the most interesting good thing about the Basilisk V4 Pro: it can spin you around 180 degrees. This works with a selection of FPS titles out of the box, but you can also add your own games - I did so with Tiny Tina's Wonderlands. There's a setting for exactly how far around you spin, and getting this to the right value required a few minutes of experimentation.

Once set, I found it pretty funny to be able to shoot an enemy ahead, immediately do a spin, shoot someone behind you, and then return to the original direction in the blink of an eye. It isn't quite reliable enough to feel like cheating - if you press too fast, it seems to get a bit confused and you end up facing sideways - but for single-player shooters it's fun to experiment with at least. The line is a little blurrier in competitive multiplayer games, as there is precedent for this as a feature - CS:GO included a quick turn button for controller users, and Battlefield 6 lets you bind this feature to any key - but being able to perfectly dodge flashbangs in CS2 or Valorant would offer a significant competitive advantage. Thus far, the feature hasn't been banned, for whatever that's worth.

Elsewhere, the Basilisk V4 Pro borrows a trick from the Naga V3 Pro by adding an extra button to the top of the mouse, this time in the corner of the left mouse button. Despite being quite small, its placement at the front of the mouse and a small ridge make it distinguishable by feel, and it's good for once-a-match kind of adjustments, like its default mapping to switch between different mouse profiles. Add on the thumb button that works like a modifier, and you have access to a huge amount of different functions - if you can get your head around them.

I spent most of my time testing the Basilisk V4 Pro in Wardogs, Hades 2 and Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, which are a competitive mil-sim FPS, an action RPG roguelite and a looter shooter respectively.

I found the Basilisk more useful than I expected in Wardogs, where the extra mouse buttons can be useful for triggering slightly awkward keyboard keys, like 4 or 5 for accessing equipment, or Page Up and Down for adjusting your zeroing when sniping. The shorter dimensions, reduced weight and better sensor in this generation makes the Basilisk feel a little more controllable in scenarios where you're surprised from an off-angle, but an even lighter mouse like the Viper V4 Pro is still my preference in competitive multiplayer games. It's worth noting that battery life here is excellent at 1KHz polling - 200 hours! - and the wide shape is quite comfortable, so the mouse is at least well-suited to extremely long play sessions between recharges.

Hades 2 can be a little more chill, but some builds can require reasonably fast and accurate targeting for your cast spell, omega moves and so on. Again, the Basilisk felt a little clunky here due to its bulk, but it's still an improvement on the V3. However, the extra buttons here are not very useful, given that you have only a few important keys (movement and your three attacks), with the rest tied to non-combat actions like checking your current boons, inventory or relationships.

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands was another positive surprise, as the 180-degree spin was fun to pull off as a kind of trick shot, and you do benefit from having some extra buttons handy for pulling up your map or inventory to minimise the time spent working out whether a new weapon drop is a genuine upgrade or where the next quest is. I could see the Basilisk V4 being a nice choice for MMOs like World of WarCraft or action RPGs like Diablo for similar reasons - though the Naga V3 Pro would also fulfill much of the same role, just with a slightly more side-focused button arrangement.

Ultimately, the Basilisk V4 Pro is a solidly-built mouse that ticks all of the feature boxes for high-button-count PC gamers, but it's only the huge battery life increase that makes a solid case for the new model over the similar V3 Pro. Moreover, when even the fanciest wireless version of Logitech's competing G502 is £85, it's hard to justify spending literally twice that on the V4 Pro - even if it is longer-lasting, higher-specced and more feature-filled.

Still, if you have the luxury of a practically unlimited budget, the V4 Pro is the best mouse in its class - it'll just take a while for value-oriented consumers to come anywhere near it.

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