Turtle Beach is no stranger to competitive-grade gaming keyboards. In recent years, it has focused on its mid- to high-tier Vulcan range, with the Vulcan II XP as its newest entry.

It has a lot going for it—Titan HS mechanical switches, easy modification and customization options, and a suite of pro-tier gaming features available through its support software. However, while it arrives as a full-size keyboard (NumPad included!), a series of trade-offs and compromises ultimately make it feel very middle-of-the-pack.

Measuring 462 x 153 x 32 millimeters, it looks undeniably sharp thanks to its low profile and floating-key approach, all sitting atop a premium brushed-aluminum top plate. Unfortunately, the first compromise is the disappointing underside: a cheap-feeling basic plastic shell basin. Thankfully, the legs feel sturdy when popped up, adding around 10 mm in height and a comfortable angle to the board.

I also like the included soft foam wrist rest, which snaps to the front underside and adds nice support when gaming or typing. It’s not memory foam, though, so I fear it might lose some of that cushion over time. The Vulcan also has integrated media controls on the top right with back, play/pause, and forward buttons, plus a media wheel with a push-to-mute feature.

It’s a $150 wired-only device (Turtle Beach is launching a wireless version, the Vulcan II XP Air for an extra $50) that connects via a detachable 1.8-meter USB-C to USB-A cord. A physical connection means zero input latency, which competitive gamers will benefit from.

Swarm Mode

The corded approach does make the Vulcan II XP a breeze to set up. Plug it into a Windows PC, and that’s it. But you’ll need Turtle Beach’s Swarm II app to get the most out of it, especially given that the default RGB lighting is a blinding rainbow cascade.

Swarm II brings out the best in this keyboard. Visually, it offers 10 built-in customizable light effects—you can adjust brightness, pattern speed, and colors for some templates. They’re pretty gimmicky—especially the Snake one—but it makes for a fun showcase. What’s cooler is that you can adjust every LED, perfect for the 11th “custom” slot where you can choose colors, speed, and one of six patterns. You can turn the LEDs off entirely, but only through the app.

Beyond the eye candy, Turtle Beach packs in an impressive slate of features. You can remap inputs down to the individual key and store those configurations as one of five onboard profiles—perfect if you want layouts tailored to specific games, or a more work-oriented profile.

Critical to the keyboard’s gaming credentials, it includes a macro manager that lets you create custom inputs and command combos, down to how many milliseconds of input it should take before activating a keypress. It supports dozens of popular games by default, from competitive favorites like Counter-Strike and Overwatch to single-player epics like Skyrim, which have popular modding scenes and can benefit from bespoke controls. It even has presets for office apps and Photoshop, adding to the Vulcan’s overall versatility. You can easily import new layouts, too.

Touch Typing

I’ve been testing the version with linear switches—Turtle Beach also offers a model with tactile switches, both available in black or white. If you’re new to mechanical keyboards, the main difference is that linear keys press all the way down smoothly, while tactile ones have a little “bump” of resistance as the internal switch activates, which you can feel as the keystroke registers. It’s ultimately personal preference.

For the most part, this is a joy to type on, with precise spacing between keys, and the keys themselves having a satisfying “clackiness” when fully pressed. The only small issue is that the factory-lubed linear keys are so smooth and silent until you get that clack as they hit the base, that it’s easy to accidentally long-press a key. Until you’re used to that, it can catch you off-guard—not an issue when typing, where the worst is an errant stretch of letters whennnnnnnn pausing to think mid-sentence, but it tripped me up a couple of times in games until I was used to it.

Unfortunately, unlike Turtle Beach’s earlier Vulcan II TKL Pro, the keys here aren’t Hall effect, but they are hot-swappable—another trade-off, exchanging long-term reliability and accuracy for the ability to replace or upgrade keys easily. The board supports three-pin or five-pin mechanical switch keys and makes swapping them easy. The flat keycaps also pop off without trouble, which makes cleaning simple. Turtle Beach claims the switches last 50 million keystrokes, which should be plenty, but only a third of the TKL Pro’s 150 million.

In gaming, the Vulcan II XP offers a 1,000-Hz polling rate for a 1-millisecond response time, which is competition-grade but falls short of the higher-end 8,000-Hz keyboards on the market. Hopping back to Swarm II, you can activate its more advanced features, like Easy-Shift, allowing for key duplication—basically putting commonly used features within easier reach—and ReacTap, assigning two commands to the same key, useful for games that require very swift inputs. (This might be banned in some competitive scenes under automation rules, though.)

These features can be a little fiddly to set up and map, but with a little experimentation, you can build layouts and input fields that work exactly as you want or need. I tailored a bunch of controls for Borderlands 3 and was dropping Psychos like never before. A minor annoyance, though: Reverting a specific input while trying to create a custom setup would sometimes revert the entire profile, which meant I had to redo everything.

Back to the Drawing Board

Photograph: Matt Kamen

While the Vulcan II XP offers great performance for the price, I do have concerns about the overall build quality. On the unit I received, the media wheel was inverted by default—turning it counter-clockwise toward the minus symbol turned the volume up. This was even after I updated the board’s firmware through the Swarm II app, and I had to remap the inputs for it to work as intended. It’s good that the Vulcan II XP’s customization is specific and nuanced enough to remap even the dial direction, but I shouldn’t have had to.

I also found that the LEDs below the “0” and “.” keys on the NumPad don’t seem to work properly, glowing a stubborn, glaring white no matter what color or pattern is assigned. I even tried turning off every other key’s light and manually assigning colors to just those—to no avail.

It’s another reason the board feels middle-of-the-road. Like the shiny metallic top plate hiding the cheaper plastic base, the Vulcan II XP dazzles at a glance, but the closer you look, the more flaws and small annoyances are revealed.

For the price, some of those annoyances are forgivable. For anyone who hasn’t upgraded to a mechanical keyboard, this is a decent entry without breaking the bank, delivering a lovely typing experience backed up by enough pro-tier gaming features to feel like a real upgrade—but more demanding or professional players will want to aim higher.