Razer’s new RGB gaming chair kept my butt comfy but was a serious pain in the neck

The Razer Soma Chroma is the latest gaming chair from Razer, taking up the mid-range mantle between the pricier Razer Iskur and slightly cheaper Razer Enki. The Soma Chroma has one major party trick: not satisfied with its usual black and green motif, Razer has added RGB lighting for maximum elite gamerness. The Soma Chroma also boasts Razer’s usual premium design and build quality, a super thick seat cushion and comfortable arm rests.

Unfortunately, it’s let down by a few glaring omissions. Razer seems to think a slight bend in the backrest constitutes lumbar support, and that neck support isn’t as important as RGB lighting. So while your butt might be comfy, your back and neck certainly won’t be without further purchases. There’s also very limited adjustments on offer. Oh, and the companion software, Synapse, is terrible.

All in all, if you want a gaming chair that’s all about looks, this could be the one. But if you’re planning on spending long hours in the hot seat, I’d advise you look for something with more support and adjustability.

Find out more in my full Razer Soma Chroma review.

Razer Soma Chroma review: Cheat sheet

• What is it? A mid-range gaming chair from Razer
• Who is it for? Gamers who want an RGB-clad chair
• What does it cost? $499 / £499
• What do we like? The comfy base and arm rests, premium build, attractive styling and ease of assembly
• What don’t we like? Virtually no lumbar support, no neck support, limited adjustability and an awful companion app

Razer Soma Chroma review: Specs

Razer Soma Chroma review: The ups

The Razer Soma Chroma has a few things in its favor, like premium build quality, a striking aesthetic, a comfy base and squidgy arm rests, plus a mostly cable-free design.

Premium build

There’s no denying the Soma Chroma is built well — unsurprising if you have any experience with Razer products. The fabric used is high quality and soft to the touch; there’s thick foam on the seat pad and arm rests; and there aren’t too many scratchy plastics (with the exception of the arm rest tubes.

The chair’s recline mechanism also operates with a very satisfying mechanical clunk — it feels like there’s some heavyweight machinery in there holding it together. It’s a far cry from the janky mechanism used on my Boulies EP460.

Easy assembly

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The Soma Chroma was pretty easy to assemble. My team reviews lots of chairs, and I’m usually the one building them — even when my colleagues are the ones reviewing them (I guess that’s one disadvantage to being handy with a wrench).

The Soma Chroma was in the average difficulty range. It was nowhere near as simple to build as the Boulies OP180, which only took me 10 minutes. There were also some heavier components, like the back rest, which may necessitate a second person to help. Other than that, it’s simply a case of putting the bolts where needed, all of which is detailed in the very thorough included instruction sheet. I built the Soma Chroma on my own in about half an hour.

I love that Razer supplies the Soma Chroma with a set of black gloves to wear when building the chair. I've never seen that from other brands before, and it's a nice touch.

Dashing design

The Soma Chroma looks rather fetching, too. It sports the typical streamlined gamer chair design — not a million miles away from the ubiquitous Secretlab Titan Evo. A cutout near the neck and distinctive contouring on both the back rest and seat give it a sports-car-esque vibe. It looks straight out of an esports competition.

With the lighting disabled, The Soma Chroma boasts Razer’s usual sleek, blacked out aesthetic, with striking green accents. With the lighting turned on, it looks about as sophisticated as RGB lighting ever does. If you’re after that particular aesthetic, I’m sure you’ll think it looks great. It’s not for me, but that’s down to personal preference. And besides, Razer has applied the RGB fairly sparingly around the wings.

Comfy base and arm rests

Sitting on the Soma Chroma for the first time, I was very pleasantly surprised at the seat base. I suffer from a type of immuno-arthritis that affects, among other areas, my coccyx. In short, butt comfiness is high on my agenda.

With other foam-cushioned chairs I’ve used, like the Autonomous ErgoChair Pro, seat pad foam usually compresses, applying too much pressure up into my lower back — I often have to use a special coccyx relief cushion with a cutout to relieve coccyx pressure. It’s for this reason I usually choose full mesh chairs like the Boulies EP460, as mesh seat pads provide the best butt support.

The Soma Chroma, though, has probably the comfiest foam base I’ve sat on. The foam is super thick and very squishy. I haven’t had to use my coccyx cushion at all. Also impressively squishy are the arm rests. So often, manufacturers leave arm rests hard and uncomfortable, causing elbow pain. Not so here. The Soma Chroma has about an inch of foam padding on each rest.

Overall, even after longer gaming/work stints of 8 hours, I’ve had no butt and no elbow pain. Unfortunately, as I’ll cover later, I had other types of pain from the lack of back and neck support.

Not fully wireless, but tidy

If you choose to use its lighting, the Soma Chroma needs to be powered via USB-C as there’s no built-in battery. You can either plug it into a wall socket or your PC, or use one of the best power banks.

The latter is the tidiest method — there’s a zip pocket at the back of the base, which will fit a small-ish power bank like my Iniu Ultra Mini ($31). That means no power banks dangling down or cables getting snagged in the wheels as you move the chair.

The RGB lights aren’t too power hungry either. We ran the RGB for 2-3 hours on our product photoshoot and the charge on my 10,000mAh Iniu only dropped by 1%.

Once powered, the Soma Chroma does have wireless connectivity. It comes with a USB-A Wi-Fi dongle, so you can hook the chair up to your PC and control the RGB via Razer Synapse. There are controls on the chair itself, but these are a little clunky unless you keep the instructions with you. I’m not at all keen on Synapse either, which I’ll get onto below.

Razer Soma Chroma review: The downs

Unfortunately, without buying further accessories, the Soma Chroma is downright uncomfortable thanks to no neck support, minimal lumbar support, no included support accessories and limited adjustment. Then there’s Synapse…

Poor neck and lumbar support

Razer claims the Soma Chroma has lumbar support. What it really means is that the Soma Chroma has a slight arch in the backrest. It provides about as much lumbar support as propping one’s self up against a plank of wood. There’s also no neck rest, and no additional neck cushion included — if you want one of those, you’ll need to pay an extra $50.

After my first testing session — about four hours of gaming — I started noticing a slight pain in my neck and upper shoulders. On day two, after another eight hours, I was experiencing full blown neck pain on both sides, up into the back of my head.

As I mentioned earlier, I have a form of immuno-arthritis, and there’s no way in hell I’d sit in this chair on a daily basis, at least not without some neck support. I have pretty good sitting posture (I have to make sure of it) but without anything to support your neck, it’s very hard to achieve that.

Admittedly, the Soma Chroma isn’t alone here. If you know anything about computing chairs, you’ll know that gaming chairs are usually designed for style over comfort. Most of them use the same flat back shaping, like the Secretlab Titan Evo and DXRacer Craft, for instance — the thing is, those two chairs at least come with a neck pillow for support.

If you want proper support, though, you’re better off looking at the Razer Iskur V2 NewGen, with its much better (i.e. existent) lumbar support and neck pillow. Or, a hybrid mesh chair like the Herman Miller Vantum. Or consider an office chair as, believe it or not, gaming chairs are mostly marketing. You can game just fine and much more comfortably in a mid-range mesh office chair like my Boulies EP460.

Limited adjustability

On top of the discomfort, the Soma Chroma offers very limited adjustability. You can do the bare minimum: recline, seat height, arm rest height and swivel. But there’s no way to slide the seat forward or back; no forward or backward arm rest sliders, and no lumbar adjustment.

You can set the chair into a free recline mode, but the mechanism was so stiff on my chair that I had to push off from a wall to get it to actually recline.

The Soma Chroma is also a little low, with the seat height maxing out at 16-20 inches. My Boulies EP460 maxes out at 23 inches, for comparison. A taller maximum seat height is more comfortable for those with long legs.

Synapse really, really sucks

Razer’s Synapse software is one of two ways to control the Soma Chroma’s RGB, in addition to the onboard button controls, which are a little basic. Given the RGB is such a major feature of the chair, Synapse is therefore a pretty important element.

Now, I’ve used Synapse before, so my expectations were tempered. But man oh man, I’d forgotten quite how much Synapse sucks — like, more than any other mainstream companion software I’ve ever used after testing and using dozens of peripherals. I’d honestly prefer Asus’ Armoury Crate, which is seriously saying something.

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Firstly, Synapse is incredibly annoying to set up: you have to download the installer; then download Synapse (fighting off the extra bloatware it tries to download at the same time); then install Synapse; then fire up the installed app… and then download Synapse again. Like, what? I can’t even. It’s so needlessly complicated. It also kept failing to install, getting stuck at 45% three times, though that could’ve been a Windows issue.

When you do get Synapse installed, it’s slow, laggy and often takes ages to recognize the chair after booting up your PC, if it even manages to at all. Every time I rebooted, I had to un/re-plug the Soma Chroma’s 2.4G wireless dongle from/into my PC, otherwise Synapse wouldn’t recognize the chair.

The changes I made in Synapse regularly failed to apply, despite the app saying they did — I switched the lighting to static purple, which it changed to for around 30 seconds before defaulting back to unicorn puke RGB. And to top it all off, the moment you close the Synapse app, the lighting switches back to the default rainbow effect anyway. That means you have to keep that crappy piece of bloatware running while you game, if you want RGB.

Oh, and if you want any advanced effects you then have to download Razer’s Chroma RGB controller anyway. Eurgh. It’s not worth dealing with such terrible software for a couple of measly RGB strips on a mostly uncomfortable chair.

Razer Soma Chroma review: Verdict

I’m pretty disappointed by the Soma Chroma. I’ve awarded credit for its premium design, comfy base and arm rests, and its ease of assembly. Unfortunately, my three pros up top are tempered by four pretty major cons, so half marks for this chair is arguably even a little generous.

The Soma Chroma is really rather uncomfortable thanks to its lack of a neck cushion and only a semblance of lumbar support. Meanwhile, the adjustability is pretty scant and the companion software, Synapse, is nothing short of terrible.

So why bother? Just buy a Secretlab Titan Evo and be slightly less uncomfortable. Or do it properly and buy an ergonomic office chair (guess what: you can game in one of those). Before long, your neck will thank you.