The Tesoro Excalibur V2 arrived in a fairly typical box, with the same purple colour scheme as is common with other Tesoro products.
The box is compact as inside there is just the keyboard and a quick-start guide.
As you can see above, the Excalibur features a very simple and understated design. It would not seem out of place on an office desk, and personally I prefer the ‘back-to-basics' design, as I find many gaming keyboards can seem overly aggressive or garish.
Tesoro's approach is reflected in the lack of dedicated macro keys which I find helps keep the keyboard relatively compact – compared to other full-size gaming keyboards, at least.
The Excalibur is made entirely from plastic, which is probably to be expected. However, one thing I found is that the keycaps tend to show up greasy marks left from your fingers. It is a simple job to clean the caps, but I found this happened regularly despite my hands being relatively grease-free – which made using the Excalibur slightly frustrating at times.
The actual switches are provided courtesy of Kailh's blue variant – a tactile, clicky switch. On the next page I will assess how they fared.
You can also see that each key is individually lit, which means the lighting is even and strong. Admittedly, this would be expected from any decent mechanical keyboard with a backlight – but it is good to see Tesoro have not skimped out on the backlighting in their ‘back-to-basics' approach.