Gamester Gear Cruiser P3210 Review
Games are better with headsets – that’s an almost universally accepted fact. When you play a shooter, and the gunfire cracks like Zeus’ knuckles in your ear, or you’re creeping through the shadowed halls of a survival horror, and you hear that rasp of cloth on stone off to the right somewhere, your enjoyment of the game is directly proportionate to your level of immersion, and a good headset makes all the difference.
Speaking as a gamer, and from a purely functionality-based standpoint, Gamester Gear’s Cruiser P3210 headset is a great piece of hardware. The in-built rumble technology is great, vibrating in your inner ear just enough to feel real, like the sound is right beside you, trembling against your lobes. It’s an adjustable feature too, which is handy when you’re listening to a bit of dubstep (or whatever your aural poison may be) and the bass is just a bit too intense for enjoyable consumption.
Designed to work with PC and PS3, I also used them with my Vita and to play music through my phone, and they’re perfectly functional with any device – but if you want the full effect of that rumble you’ll need to set them up properly. Connecting to a PC is fairly simple, as you do it all with a USB and jack, but the PS3 is more complicated. It’s not a major complaint, but it’s way more convoluted than it needed to be. In fact, this is mostly true of the headset as a whole. Simply being able to plug it in and use it without fiddling with the settings every time would have been a huge boon.
The included mic provides a fairly decent means of communication once it’s optimised, but the audio capture capabilities are less considered. Without a good software suite (Audacity works pretty well), noise cancellation can be a problem, as it will pick up every noise available, which is hugely annoying if you work near a busy road or in a houseful of people. It’s not helped by the feedback from the headset itself, largely caused by the integrated amplifier. It’s not a major pain in the backside to adjust the settings to suit, but it could have been avoided with a little tweaking during manufacturing.
Aesthetically, the Cruiser P3210 headset isn’t particularly attractive. A reasonably-sized set of cans sit comfortably enough on the head, but the padded bar doesn’t seem to sit right on my dome, arching to high above my pate and making me look like a bit of a tit. Compared to other models that adjust to fit the contours of your cranium, the Cruiser is a bit of a disappointment. But that’s all down skin-deep, and if you’re only using them at a desk or in front of the TV, it’s not going to matter much.
Overall, the Cruiser P3210 Headset is a solid model that suits gaming more than listening to music and makes up for its lack of glamour with a decent asking price. It may not be rocking the prettiest cans on the market, but it won’t let you down where it counts.
