UK Nerf 's BOOMCo. Reviews

Thanks to UK Nerf, we have some initial reviews for the three smallest blasters in Mattel's initial release. Sadly, not all things are positive.

On the quality of the toy build:

In terms of quality, I cant really fault BOOMco. The plastic has a really nice matt finish and with the exception of the flappy bits on the Farshot and Twisted Spinner, they don't rattle and they feel really solid. You don't get the creaking you get when playing with a NERF blaster and they all have a good weight to them.

Darts:

The darts are not made of foam. Instead they are made of a rigid plastic tube with a soft rubbery tip (more on that later). They remind me a bit of drinking straws albeit, a lot thicker so as not to be as flimsy. This makes them a fair bit lighter than the foam darts we have come to love but the distribution of mass makes for much better flight characteristics. This means that the darts have incredible accuracy over their range and so far I have not seen any fishtailing or excessive swerving. Sadly the darts don't take too kindly to being trodden on. Unlike their foam counterparts, they crush easily and become unusable.

The major, major downside to these darts is that they are a lot thinner than conventional foam darts. This means that you couldn't adapt these blasters to fire NERF darts without a lot of work. All of you out there who were interested in these blasters purely for aesthetics are going to be gutted with this news.

Overall, the blasters perform as advertised, but with the dart incompatibility issues, small size of the blasters, and high prices (in the UK, at least - we'll see how things are priced stateside), this line may not be the competitor we were looking for. Who knows, though - perhaps some clever modders will make these even better than they appear.