Turtle Beach Vulcan II TKL gaming keyboard review

Hello you. Welcome to Quick Kits, a new series of PC hardware reviews for people who just want to know, with minimal preamble and probably zero bar charts, what a piece of gear is like to use. I’ll still be testing everything as if it were getting a full-length writeup, but shrink-raying the wordy parts should help us bring you more hardware advice, more often, and across a wider range of component and peripheral types.

I’ve got just the thing to get us started with, too: a three-month-old keyboard. You’re welcome.

I might be late to appraising the Turtle Beach Vulcan II TKL, but during that delay, it’s very much become part of my PC furniture. Keeping the feathery half-height keycaps of the older, consistently excellent Roccat Vulcans (Turtle Beach bought Roccat in 2019 then fully absorbed them in 2024, gaining their powers), it’s a fast, smooth, and accurate WASDmasher that’s quiet enough for typing too.

Those keycaps do sit quite high up, which was especially noticeable coming straight from the low-profile Logitech G515 Lightspeed TKL. If a nerdy terrorist – radicalised by years of watching performatively angry tech YouTubers – forced me to choose at gunpoint, I would lean towards the sharper, even nimbler feel of the G515. As a logical cash purchase, though? The Vulcan II TKL is a fair bit cheaper, even accounting for its lack of wirelessness, while offering a sturdier aluminium build, hot-swappable mechanical switches, and a volume dial, all of which the G515 lacks.

It also has Snap Tap-style rapid trigger support, something that’s never done much for me – on this keyboard included – but can apparently provide such a slippery strafing advantage to quick-fingered Counter-Strike 2 players that Valve banned its use. You just don’t get that level of illicit feature-stuffing on the G515 Lightspeed TKL; you’d have to divert to its wired cousin, the G515 Rapid TKL, and that’s pricier than Vulcan II TKL as well.