Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought three of these from Toys R Us as Christmas gifts for my kids. I decided to open one up one night to test out its performance and make sure I was getting what I thought I was getting. The gun is fairly good sized, and smaller children (three to four years old) might find it a little unwieldy to pump and tote around, although weight isn't too prohibitive even for that age group. It takes 23 pumps to fully pump the gun up. There must be a release valve somewhere because you can hear it let the extra air out if you continue pumping after it's fully pumped up. This is probably a built-in safety device to keep dart velocity at a safe level. There is a selector switch on the side that allows you to switch between fully automatic and semi-automatic. Actually, the semi-auto setting is sort of a slow automatic as, if you keep the trigger pulled, the gun will continue firing at a rate of about two shots per second. On the full-auto setting, the rate of fire is surprisingly fast for a toy--about seven or eight rounds per second. That means you can empty the gun of all 20 "micro darts" in about three seconds. It was enough to put a smile on this big kid's face. I quickly began scouting my house for targets and found a large-screen TV makes a great one as the darts have suction cups on the end and will stick to a smooth, flat surface such as a screen. Darts are loaded one at a time into their individual launch tubes on the end. When firing, the end rotates in a circle the way a Gatling gun does. The gun produces a very audible noise each time it fires and releases pumped up air. It isn't excessively loud, though, and I actually found it a welcome sound effect that added to the fun of shooting. In fact, kids could play with this toy without any darts and still have some fun with just the sound it produces (which it does even when no darts are loaded). Firing straight and level, the darts go about 15 feet before they run out of gas and hit the ground. If you angle them up a little, they'll go about 20 to 25 feet. The previous reviewer who claimed this has a range of 30 to 40 feet either has an exceptional gun or is just mistaken. Frankly, I think he's mistaken as the velocity required to launch a dart that far (especially if firing straight and level) might make safety an issue. As it is, I don't think the darts have enough velocity to do damage if they hit a kid in the eye at close range, but it wouldn't exactly feel good, either. The darts are made of flexible styrofoam and have soft rubber suction cups on the ends. I don't see the need for any kind of eye protection with this toy, but I'll still remind my kids not to aim for the face. Build quality seems fairly sturdy as long as kids don't drop the gun a lot. If anything were to break, I think it would be the pump, but it should hold up pretty well with normal use. I'd clasify this as an 'indoor' toy since kids will probably lose the small darts quickly if they shoot them outside. Even indoors, you'll probably be finding darts in cracks and crevices every time you vacuum. You can buy bags of 10 darts from Toys R Us, but they're $5 per bag. Bottom line--I had a lot of fun just testing this thing out by myself. I'm confident my kids will get a kick out of shooting it out with Dad around the house on Christmas day and for some time to come.