Main Review
Build quality
This is probably the Hermes P2 strongest category because the build quality is outstanding. The entire keyboard is extremely solid showing absolutely no signs of flexing when I tried twisting the sides. The keyboard is made out of a thick plastic with a metal cover over the top adding to the sturdiness of this keyboard.
While the P2 doesn’t have Cherry switches it is a mechanical optical keyboard using Gamdias own switches with a 50 Million press lifespan and the switches are really well built being made with study feeling plastic and keycaps that will easily last a really long time.
The impressive build quality continues with the cord and USB plug featuring a gold-plated plug, braided cabled and a ferrite bead to help against electrical interference. While these are all things that should be expected with a keyboard at this price point it’s still a great plus that’s worth mentioning.
Overall the build quality is one of this keyboards greatest strengths leading me to rate the build quality of this keyboard 5/5 for being one of the sturdiest keyboards I’ve ever used.
Included features
The P2 has some pretty good features but nothing I wouldn’t expect from a keyboard at this price point.
Software
The keyboard has fully programmable per key RGB lighting meaning you can make every individual key it’s own color if you choose by using the supported Hera software.
When the software works it lets you customize a lot on the P2 but I had a lot of issues trying to get the software to work on my main gaming PC.
The picture above is what the software does on my main PC. It is completely unresponsive and nothing shows up in any of the blocks and even after a few restarts and reinstalling the software it stayed the same, but luckily I was able to get the software up and running on my laptop so I was able to mess around with some of the included options for the P2 keyboard.
When the software works this is what you’ll be greeted with. The first screen lets you customize what various keys do as well as choosing what key activates the currently selected Macro key.
On this screen, you can also choose a few other options from the drop-down menu. I’m not entirely sure who would need some of these options like changing one key to another’s function but that option is there if you want to use it.
While listing off everything you can customize on this page would take more pages than most readers would want to go through a few highlights are being able to customize keys to launch a specific application or website, being able to make keys perform windows actions like shutting down your computer. You can also make any key a media control key but the function buttons already do that so this option is a bit redundant.
All of that customization is only on the first page!
The second page lets you customize the macro keys and record new one while listing the keys that have been pressed. There’s a ton of menus and submenus on this page that I don’t have space to get into but some highlights are being able to create and rename the names of macros in order to keep track of what they’re for as well as being able to edit and add key presses into macros after they’ve been recorded.
This page lets you customize a lot of stuff but nothing is really well explained so you may have trouble figuring out what everything does until you spend some time messing around with the different options
On the third page, you can control the lighting colors, brightness and animations for the lighting on the keyboard. All pretty standard stuff but it’s still quite impressive.
This page is where you can customize the per-key lighting by dragging the cursor over each key with a certain color. As an example of what you can do, I tried to make the keyboard look like the American flag since it’s an easy pattern to do and it turned out quite well on my keyboard.
Please note that my camera isn’t great with picking up colors but as you can see the pattern translates pretty well onto the keyboard. One weird thing that I noticed was the number pad 4 key, Home key and F10 key wouldn’t light up when using the customizable mode as shown below. It isn’t a hardware problem since the same keys light up when turning all of the lights to one color so I’m not sure what the issue is but hopefully it can be fixed in a future update.
On the same page, you also get the option to choose lighting animations as shown below but you, unfortunately, can’t use the lighting animations with your own custom color options, the lighting will only be animated if you have the keyboard one color so you’re forced to choose multiple colors or animations. Even with that though you can still do some cool stuff with the animations. Below is the list of lighting animations supported by the P2. I will upload videos showing all of the lighting options on its own page after the conclusion in order to save data so please check that out if you want more information on how the animations look.
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