The Kailas Fuga EX Pro has some of everything, but is it worth $300?

Introduction to the Kailas Fuga EX Pro

REESE: This is the first Kailas shoe I’ve ever run in or reviewed. I’m only aware of this brand because of their running vest, the Air IV, which I reviewed last Fall. After doing some cursory searching on their site, I learned that Kailas, founded in 2003, is a Chinese climbing equipment and apparel brand. They got into the trail running game around 2016 and have been dialing in their lineup, technology, and fit ever since. And it shows with this shoe.

I’ll admit the design isn’t my favorite, and a high-stack shoe is generally not something I gravitate toward, but I was pretty keen to try this one out. I was mostly curious if it would live up to its $300 price tag. It blows my mind that I think a $200 shoe is semi-reasonable; a price tag over $200 calls for a fine-tooth comb and a magnified glass type review. However, once a shoe reaches $300, the microscope comes out. The shoe needs to have some seriously high-caliber comfort to call for that price tag.

SAM: Earlier this summer, I spent a week camping at Assateague National Seashore with my family. Assateague is a specific kind of place, a true “if you know, you know” of Mid-Atlantic national parkland. It’s almost entirely beach and scrub bush, flat and wild and barren in a way that not many places two hours from major metropolitan centers on the East Coast are.

The beaches are a haven for wild horses, you have to fight to keep ahold of your food, birds you sometimes have to fight for that same food, bugs you have to fight to keep your blood in your body, and horseshoe crabs that are generally just cool reminders of prehistoric life. The weather is unpredictable, the sun in the summer is punishing, and the ocean surf creates invisible rip currents. If I tell you it’s an amazing place despite all that, would you believe me?

I’ve tried to explain why this is to several people over the years, and I think some of it is nostalgia. It’s where I went every summer as a kid. To be back is to, in small glimmers, revisit that kid screaming into the surf and sleeping on the sand under a picnic table. I get to taste what it was like to dig a pit and feel the cool sand at my back, and to ride bikes through the loops shoeless and shirtless, hoping our abandon would impress any girls we rode past.

Then, too, camping on the beach is nothing to sneer at, as difficult as it can be. Walking over the dunes at sunrise to a beach that never gets crowded is majestic. Shrinking your life to a small campsite, a long beach, and an endless ocean breaks you off from the rush of life, and the lack of cell signal only helps matters.

But this year, I noticed that part of the allure is the lottery of days in an Assateague week. When you’re there, every tomorrow is a chance at an incredible day of sun, curling waves, and cool breeze. Or, that tomorrow could be a shattering thunderstorm or a still, windless day that allows the insect hordes to descend and feast.

In this way, I’m drawn to the potential of Assateague like I’m drawn to the potential in a new shoe I have to review (how’s that for a transition?). Anytime we get something like the Kailas Fuga EX Pro to test, it’s like waking up in a tent that’s just starting to warm in the sun, and going to unzip the flap to see what the day will bring.

What we like about the Kailas Fuga EX Pro

REESE: If this shoe were a meal, it would be one with all my favorite ingredients. This is both a good thing and a bad thing — more on the latter later.

The makeup of this shoe is really stellar. Let’s start with my favorite part, the midsole. The Fuga EX Pro boasts a supercritical platform with an X-shaped carbon plate. We get a 5mm drop (35mm/30mm), which is right in a comfortable zone for a thicker midsole. Even though midsoles scare the hell out of me/my ankle, I felt this shoe actually was fairly stable. The midsole was compliant enough that when I stepped ever so wrong on a rock, I wasn’t launched off, nor did my ankle snap to the side; the shoe didn’t overreact in any way.

Before I even looked at the specs, I could tell this shoe had a carbon plate. The forward propulsion was noticeable, in a good way. Carbon plates, when used in moderation, can be a lot of fun. I struggle to enjoy the feel of a full-foot carbon plate; it’s just too stiff for me. Maybe it’s because I’m on the smaller side? (I’m 5’3″ on a good day) The supercritical midsole, combined with the X-shaped carbon plate, was responsive and fun, not stiff and tough on the ol’ lower leg, as I had with the Nike Ultrafly.

It’s a Vibram party on the outsole. The Kailas Fuga EX Pro outsole features Vibram MegaGrip with Traction Lug and Litebase with lugs of varying heights (4mm-6mm), which provide the ultimate traction (most of the time). I mostly loved this and always felt like I was secure on technical terrain. However, it wasn’t perfect. More on that later.

SAM: Reese has covered the basics of how this shoe performs, and she’s right when she calls the Kailas Fuga EX Pro a full meal. This shoe has everything, and it’s impressive. A proprietary breathable, durable mesh upper, which Kailas calls XDiMESH, wraps your foot and secures with their AWS (Adjust Whole Sole) two-part lacing system. It seems like Kailas wants to position this as an analog to more advanced upper materials like Matryx, and I’m happy with how this performed.

It has a sandproof liner on the inside that didn’t screw with breathability much at all. I do think I’m a bit more of a fan of this package with the AWS system than Reese, as someone who has often had to tie lace locks into narrower shoes so that my toes don’t get crunched up. Sure, I also fall into the camp of “what’s wrong with some plain old laces,” but Kailas’ system has two features that set it above other slide lacing systems out there.

One: the top hook that lets you pull the show on and off easily is simply brilliant. There is no fiddling with tightness or readjusting the whole lacing system every time you put the shoe on. Two: I often struggle with lace systems like these tightening the lower part of the lacing chain as I run, and this system neatly prevents that. It’s, well, pretty neat.

The visuals of the Fuga EX Pro are notably shark-like, which definitely had something to do with how I started my intro, before I lost that thread somewhere in my meandering about nostalgia. It’s an aggressive, busy, almost futuristic look. The whole package isn’t awful, but it isn’t exactly eye-catching, nor is it refined enough to wear casually. It does feature plenty of overlay protection without compromising breathability.

That whole sharky package secures a combination of supercritical TPU foam and X-shaped carbon fiber plate to the bottom of your foot. The foam isn’t dissimilar to foams that I’ve really liked from other brands, like Craft’s PX Foam or Reebok’s Floatride. Here, it has a lot of rebound and works with the plate to propel you lightly forward at faster paces, but it’s soft enough to feel comfortable if you’re taking a trail a bit slower. The plate seems to mainly function to stabilize the foam, while allowing for confidence in slightly rougher sections.

We don’t see a ton of variations on the tried and true nature of Vibram rubber, but in the Kailas Fuga EX Pro, the Megagrip outsole sports zoned lug shapes and depth to allow the shoe to grip on a wider variety of trails. This is a cool idea, and one that I saw pay off in how the shoe performed on vastly different surfaces, like on pavement (surprisingly ok), and wet, muddy slop (also surprisingly just great). I’m interested in how this could play out on other trail shoes in the future.

What we don’t like about the Kailas Fuga EX Pro

REESE: Now, when you hear that all your favorite ingredients are going to be in a meal, you think, “Great!” But what if it’s a weird mix of your favorite things? Like salted cookies and cream ice cream, basil, cinnamon, olives, and butter. Then it’s a little weird, and the experience isn’t as good as you would have hoped. That’s kind of my experience with the Fuga EX Pro. On paper, it has everything. But it felt like it didn’t totally come together for me. Especially for a shoe that is priced at $300. I mean, I’ve been dragging my feet to write this review for like… a month or more now. Because I just wasn’t all that blown away by it.

The things I mentioned in the previous section are indeed really good. And I am sure that this shoe will work for a lot of people, but for some reason, I just felt like I was eating ice cream with olives. A little off and confusing.

The fit of the toe box did feel a bit narrow for me, and I had some slight tightness/mild scrunching of my pinkies. And because the toe box tapered in, on the uphills, I felt like the traction on the toe, which is pretty key, was just not there. Again, surprising given all the outsole ingredients. I had a similar problem with the Mizuno Neo Accera. The toe shape just doesn’t let the Vibram do its job.

Aside from the whole shoe just not really coming together to blow me away, I could not get over the laces. Can we all just agree that normal laces are fine? Please stop trying to reinvent the shoelace. These pull cord laces were impossible to cinch down and keep secure. I normally need to use the extra lace hole that never comes laced. What can I say, my little heels like to try to leave shoes? Not possible with these drawcord-type laces.

SAM: I, too, feel a bit of the “this doesn’t quite come together” that Reese did here. I’m all for a weird experience, but the Fuga EX Pro is mostly just a step short of its promise. My biggest issue was that I couldn’t help but feel that that whole last of this shoe — the entire underfoot platform — was just too big. A little too long and a little too wide, and the upper just couldn’t hold my foot in position properly on top of it.

Some of this is due to a slightly lackluster lockdown, and some of it is because I’m having a harder and harder time being convinced by plates on trails. Sure, it’s fun and exciting to have a carbon fiber plate jammed into the foam of your shoe, but that fun slips away quickly when you’re twisting over a root mass and that plate feels like it’s working against you.

As cool as I think the variable lugs are, I had some traction issues on toe-off like Reese did. It felt like I couldn’t apply the right pressure through the toe of the shoe to get the lugs to bite.

The bigger knock of the whole package here is that the discordance does not help justify the price of this shoe. Sure, there’s plenty of cool tech featured here, but there isn’t anything either in the upper or underfoot that shines brightly enough to warrant $300.

Final thoughts on the Kailas Fuga EX Pro

REESE: On one hand, this shoe has all the fixings to make an amazing shoe, but it just didn’t happen for me and my particular foot/shoe wants. They are close to an amazing shoe, but for $300, I expect dang perfection from a shoe. I’m excited to see where they take this shoe, and I’d love to test out other shoes in the lineup. Sometimes the high-end shoe just cobbles together all the expensive materials, and all I really need is, like, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Know what I mean?

SAM: So the Kailas Fuga EX Pro ends up being kind of a middling day at the beach for me. The weather is good, but man, do we have to deal with some mosquitoes. I love all the tech in this shoe, and I wish that it came together just a little better. There’s great underfoot feel, and a fun sense of propulsion on easier trails. All these materials are durable and should provide a long lifetime of miles; you can protect them beneath the TPU midsole. In those ways, this shoe does what it needs to and provides some fun at the same time.

But at $300, “what it needs to” is not close to enough. We need excellence from that price point, and some lingering fit issues and a general discordance in the overall feel of the shoe make $300 seem exorbitant. The other issue for me is that, as cool as these materials are, they don’t signal “this is a top-dollar trail shoe.” The foam feels great, but I can get the same feel in shoes that are less than half the cost. The upper seems plenty durable, but doesn’t have the allure of top fabrics like Matryx or Dyneema. Maybe tariffs are enough of an issue that they’re partially responsible for what seems like an inflated price. Whatever the case, the Fuga EX Pro slightly misses the mark.

You can pick up the Kailas Fuga EX Pro for $300 from Kailas by using the button below.