Nerf is joining the modern era with the best official blaster ever made

When Nerf declared “it’s Nerf or nothin’!” in 1993, it wasn’t exactly a debate. For decades, Nerf had been the choice for flinging foam projectiles.

But as the Nerfing community has exploded, Nerf has increasingly needed to earn a place in its own backyard. I’ve been to battles where no player uses an official Nerf blaster or dart. Some have moved on to more powerful gear that fires more accurate half-length darts, thanks to both 3D printing enthusiasts and rival retail brands catering to the foam arms race.

Nerf brand owner Hasbro has never seen fit to follow their lead — until today.

Hasbro has just revealed the Nerf Pro Stryfe X, the first half-length dart blaster Nerf has ever made. It’s launching October 15th for $120, including one 15-round magazine, a lithium polymer (LiPo) battery, USB-C charge cable, and safety glasses. It’s available for preorder on Amazon now.

I was skeptical when I first heard Nerf would try short darts. The company has previously tried to foist problematic proprietary ammo on its customers — including DRM for darts — because it seemingly cared more about Chinese knockoff ammo companies cutting into its profits than keeping up with the times.

But after spending several days with the Nerf Pro Stryfe X, I’m ready to believe. This thing kicks ass.

As you can see in my image slider above, the Stryfe X is fundamentally a Nerf Stryfe, the magfed blaster that’s been a mainstay of the hobby since 2013 due to its compact, modular, and easily modded design. Externally, the new blaster has the same exact lines — it simply adds an extended grip, short dart magwell, trigger lock, and hobby-grade rails, while removing the barrel extension lug. (Sorry, fellow Stryfle fans.)

But inside, Hasbro’s designers have essentially modded this blaster themselves with most everything a hobbyist would want. We’re talking oversize 180 motors for speed, concave flywheels that are injection molded out of glass-infused nylon for consistency, a higher-crush cage for a tighter grip on darts, full-size microswitches for faster trigger response, no more magazine safety cutout (keep the blaster spun up while you reload!) — and perhaps most importantly, an 11.1V 1,000mAh LiPo battery with a USB-C charge port.

I believe it’s only the second LiPo blaster Nerf has ever shipped, following the company’s first gel blaster last year, and it’s the key thing that allows for rapid-fire play.

It all adds up to a blaster that fires darts half the size at more than twice the velocity, all at a moment’s notice. When you pull the rev switch, the motors spin a pair of flywheels north of 30,000rpm in under a second flat. Pull the trigger, and those wheels spit out Nerf’s new darts at well over 150 feet per second.

And even though those motors don’t have neodymium magnets inside like some hobby-grade cans, they were enough to keep dart after dart flying through as fast as I could pull the trigger. Angled, I measured ranges of over 125 feet, roughly the same as the Dart Zone MK-3. Nerf says the battery should last 1,000 shots, and won’t sell extra batteries separately.

I haven’t even gotten to the best part: the Nerf Pro Stryfe X fits magazines and darts from other brands. Hasbro had an opportunity to reinvent the wheel — but incredibly, it’s embracing the Talon magazine that’s already become a community standard.

Not only does the bundled 15-round magazine look like a Talon but also your own straight Talons should fit! My Worker Talons fed perfectly, as did Out of Darts’ 29-round Tachi. As for darts, my Dart Zone Ruby, Adventure Force Pro and Bamboo darts, and X-Shot Pro and Worker half-lengths all blazed through my Stryfe X review unit at 140 feet per second or better, with varying levels of accuracy.

To be clear, Nerf is not making Talon magazines itself. Eric Listenberger, Nerf’s VP of product development, says the bundled 20 x 47mm magazine is designed specifically for the Stryfe, and I am indeed finding it oh so slightly easier to slap in and out of the blaster than my Worker mags. It seems to fit my community blasters, too.

But Nerf’s 15-round mag doesn’t quite stay locked into its rivals’ products: I tested with the universal mag adapters that come with some Dart Zone blasters and the excellent Zuru Longshot, and they didn’t click in. That’s a shame: Nerf will be selling two of these magazines for just $10 at retail, an unheard-of price, and I’d gladly buy a basketful if they were identical to Talon mags.

Nerf’s first stab at half-length darts also has an interesting compromise: they’ve got a big head! Instead of following the competition’s lead with a miniature tip, Nerf is simply cutting down its Accustrike long darts with their hefty flat-head tips.

They’re easily the fastest darts I shot through this blaster, hitting 160, even 170 feet per second on my Caldwell chronograph, but it may come at a cost: while I haven’t lost any dart heads yet thanks to good glue, even a single volley put visible wear on the head and small tears in the foam.

The large tip could also make them less suitable for spring-loaded blasters with long barrels due to the friction — should they arrive at all. “I think the expectation is there may be some issues,” says Listenberger. He says that Accustrike was specifically designed for motorized blasters, and there are no springers currently in development.

In my early tests, the Stryfe X also spits official darts a bit more inaccurately than other popular half-lengths. While I could hit targets at 70 feet with every type of short dart given enough shots, only a quarter of the official Nerf darts hit the mark when I put 15 darts of each type I own through the Stryfe X in an anecdotal test. Meanwhile, my hit rate with Worker and Dart Zone was over 50 percent.

But the wonderful thing about the Stryfe X is that I could do that at all — and by extension, that I could play an entire game with an official sporting-grade Nerf blaster without convincing my friends or local Nerf club members to invest in a new type of ammo. It fires what we’ve already got.

While the community has certainly built custom blasters capable of much more than Nerf is offering today, the Stryfe X is a huge step in the right direction. “For Hasbro, the largest and most popular blaster brand to get into this space, it’s nothing short of monumental,” says Luke Goodman, the community armorer I featured in 2021 who Hasbro recruited to help promote the Stryfe X launch.

While Goodman has a conflict of interest — he says the 26-minute video above is the first time he’s ever accepted a sponsorship — he also sells hundreds of Stryfe modding kits every month from his online shop. So I wanted to get his insight into how much the Stryfe X was inspired by the Nerf community.

Goodman says Philip Sweeting, one of the driving forces behind the community’s Open Flywheel Project to launch darts faster with open-source flywheel cages, worked for Hasbro on the Stryfe X as well. Goodman also points to the Stryfe X’s concave flywheels: years ago, hobbyists adopted similar flywheels like the Eclipse and Daybreak to literally squeeze out more performance from darts without destroying them as you go — but Hasbro’s never quite done it this way before, says Goodman.

Many Stryfe modders made room for similar 180 motors by modifying their blaster’s shell with covers that look similar to the Stryfe X. Even the Stryfe X’s new battery bump hearkens back to 3D-printed battery doors that the community designed. Goodman and I agree: this is effectively a modded Stryfe, only it comes from the factory this way.

But just to be clear: “Hasbro is opposed to any modification of Nerf products. Modified blasters are in no way sponsored, authorized, or affiliated with Nerf or Hasbro,” the company responds when I ask.

Nerf SVP Adam Kleinman won’t tell me if half-length darts are the future of Nerf. He won’t say if any more Nerf Pro blasters are coming or any accessories for their rails. And he won’t say whether the company’s safety standard has changed to allow for faster flying foam — but points out that every 14+ blaster ships with safety glasses and recommends everyone wear them. (Faster speeds are more about the blaster than dart length, by the way: short darts are primarily more stable in flight and easier to carry around.)

Kleinman also insists that nothing the community or rival brands are doing has spurred Hasbro even a little bit. “We’ve been talking about half-lengths for quite some time,” he says. “It was 100 percent a decision based on where we’re going, not based on anything else that’s happening outside of Hasbro.”

Where Nerf is going: Hasbro plans to launch “Nerfball,” an attempt to turn Nerf into an organized team sport, later this year. Between that and the 10th anniversary of the Stryfe, it was simply the right time to finally produce a half-length 150-foot-per-second blaster, Kleinman tells The Verge.

But to have this one semiauto blaster be the center of an entire sport? I’m willing to bet more half-lengths are on the way.

At 150 feet per second, the Stryfe X doesn’t quite have the reach or sophistication of today’s cutting-edge hobby blasters, and $120 feels like a bit of money for a semiauto blaster when Dart Zone just began shipping the $90 select-fire Omnia Pro. But competition is good. I don’t even mind that the Stryfe X’s new rails and lack of barrel adapter break compatibility with a decade of body kits — many of them styled it more like real-world guns, which is a dangerous look for this hobby.

Bottom line: I can’t wait to run this blaster in a game with a throwback yellow Recon stock, and that’s more than I’ve been able to say about an official Nerf product in a while.

Photography by Sean Hollister / The Verge