A few months ago, I bought another dart blaster, this time an off-brand one called the Adventure Force Battle Blazer, from Walmart because it was cheap ($10) and kind of interesting with being a manually operated belt-fed pistol. However, it actually hits quite a bit harder than my Hammershot, and shoots farther. The Adventure Force darts are also astoundingly both vastly cheaper ($10/200) and more accurate than the Nerf darts.

Finding this out was quite a shock to my system, because I'd always thought of non-Nerf blasters as knockoffs. This led me down quite a rabbit hole, with the end result being I found out Hasbro is deciding to "innovate" with patented darts and anti-consumer practices and absolutely getting their lunch eaten by their competitors.

The end result is that I wound up buying this.

The Adventure Force Aeon Pro ($25) and 100 pro darts ($10). Unlike Nerf, which made "pro" darts by taking crumbly foam, molding it into a DRMed shape, and charging $0.50/dart; Dart Zone instead made half-length darts, which the community had been using as their high-performance solution for over 10 years.

The Aeon Pro comes with a 12 dart magazine for short darts, a magazine adapter whiich fits it into a full-sized slot (the Aeon Pro inherits from its big sibling Nexus Pro the ability to fire full-sized darts), 12 short darts, a muzzle brake which according to other reviewers allows for all kinds of Stupid Dart Tricks, and 2 spare O-rings.

I don't even know the last time Nerf has included spare darts with its blasters, much less spare parts. Recently, Hasbro has taken to sealing them with solvent welds in place of screws, which modders feel is a corporate middle finger upraised at them.

Anyway, the Aeon Pro shoots pretty damn hard and far. I shot myself in the hand to test it, and it actually stung. I also took pictures of the range they fire at.

Here are the regular Adventure Force darts (known as "waffleheads" by fans) and the Pro darts:

I fired some of each from the sidewalk, loading the waffleheads from the top because I don't have a magazine for them yet. First, the full lengths:

And then the pro darts:

The latter go much further. The primary disadventage I've noticed is that they're also much more difficult to find later. I only found 7 of the 12 pro darts I shot that time. Other fans have apparently gotten good results from just chopping down waffleheads, so I may just do that if I decide to do enough shooting.

Alternatively, I was thinking when I next have funds of getting an Adventure Force Arsenal. It's $20 and comes with two magazine-fed blasters and three full-sized magazines. And aside from doing the obvious, I'll also see what happens when I introduce short darts to the other blasters.

There's kind of a bitter irony in the fact that I'm getting into this hobby while the pandemic makes it impossible to engage in it with other people. I've been plinking at used medicine bottles because they're free, and slowly improvihg my aim, and losing pro darts at a shockingly unhealthy rate.

All in all, I highly recommend this, both because it's a great toy in and of itself, but also because it sends a message of "We want to see things like this more!"