8Bitdo Retro Mechanical Keyboard, Wireless or Wired, Hot Swappable Keys

For me, this is a 7/10 keyboard, but I can't give it 3.5 stars here... Reviewing this is a bit challenging because value is generally an important metric to scoring. However, mechanical keyboard pricing is all over the place, this is far from the most expensive keyboard, but also far from the cheapest. I think that if someone is dropping $100 dollars for a themed keyboard, it's fair to expect some level of polish in the execution. Which brings me to my pettiest negative as well as the one that bothers me the most. --- The petty stuff If you check the first picture, you might notice there's something off about the LED labels, particularly SCRLK. If you can't see it, the print in the key cap might give it away - it appears that the LED label wasn't fully printed, missing a few rows of ink, perhaps. I'd also say the "design" for this labels need some help as well, it's basically impossible to read them at a normal distance due to the combination of tiny font and the low contras. In practice this isn't much of an issue as you can just memorize which is which, but I find it slightly annoying nonetheless. --- The important I would say the most important aspect of a keyboard is how it feels, and I'd say that, for the most part*, this feels great, but when it comes to feeling's cousin - sound - I'm not so positive. I don't consider myself to be particularly sensitive to sound, and I've never gone out of my way to buy a silent variant of any product, but in this case I'd say the keyboard is a bit too loud, I definitely don't recommend it if you plant to use it close to someone else, unless I want to piss them off. * The exception for this being the big red buttons that come as an accessory. I'm no expert, but I think the switches used for them just aren't strong enough to handle the button's weight properly and pressing them isn't satisfying, unlike the main keyboard. --- Connectivity While I couldn't really test the battery life as I almost always use it wired. That doesn't mean I haven't used bluetooth. BT was one of the reasons I got this keyboard as I sometimes "need" it for the deck, as not having to worry about disconnecting and reconnecting cables seemed like a nice quality of life for me, and for that purpose it works perfectly fine. I move the switch and 1-2 seconds later I'm typing on the deck without incident. -- Annoyances First one is on me for not noticing that this keyboard lacks a context menu button, I don't think I had ever seen one before this one, but in here it is replaced for one of those "macro" A/B buttons. The other one I don't know if it's the keyboard or my computer as I recently started fresh, but even when scrlk is turned on, it doesn't work in programs it used to like spreadsheet and notepad++. The fact that it is non-functional in both windows and linux makes me think it is a keyboard issue, but I can't be sure of it until I get another keyboard to double-check.