Infinite fun
We're happy to report that we're back in very familiar territory: reviewing the latest flagship blaster from Nerf. However, instead of upping the range, speed and power of one of their dart flingers, Nerf has this time decided to pay attention to the way the blaster is loaded. What? Read on, and check out what we made of the Nerf Infinus.
Straight out of the box you can tell that the Infinus is a tech-packed piece of kit. Unlike the Hyperfire that simply fired foam darts exceptionally fast, or the Rival Nemesis that had a huge round capacity, the Infinus' selling point comes from how you put the darts into it, boasting an auto-loading function. Sounds dull, but actually it really isn't.
You see, loading Nerf Elite darts into a clip or magazine can take a lot of time - fiddly time. It basically means that you have to load up a tonne of clips prior to your Nerf battle starting and lugging them around with you. That's a lot of bulky plastic. The aforementioned Nemesis avoided this by way of a hopper that you manually dropped Rival balls into, therefore all you needed was a big (yet light) bag of balls (or a 'ball bag' as we call ours).
The Infinus does the same, as darts can be fed into the rear of the blaster, at the top behind the sight, to be mechanically loaded into the included 30-round drum. Poke in a dart one at a time and the Infinus will take care of the rest, loading them in correctly. This means you no longer need to lug around all those other clips for quick reloads - you simply feed in more darts as and when you need them.
It's an impressive function to behold. The blaster sucks in the darts quite quickly, and you hear a satisfying crunch as each is fed into the drum. Speaking of which, that drum is actually removable and can be replaced with any other Elite dart clip or mag. You could even slide a six-round clip in there if you wanted to totally change the aesthetics of the weapon.
Oh, and the Infinus itself. Well, much of the exterior look of the blaster reminds us of the Rapidstrike, and that's no bad thing. It's a tad thicker, however, and that must be to accommodate all that auto-loading cleverness, and the angled fore-grip might take some getting used to. Still, to hold it, despite all that extra weight of the mechanism, this four D-battery powered blaster feels sturdy and tough.
But... how does the blighter shoot? You could get so carried away loading your clips with this thing that you might forget to fire it. Well, the Nerf Infinus achieved a range of about 60 feet which was pretty much what we expect from larger fly-wheel Nerf Elite blasters. However, we were somewhat disappointed by the rate of fire. We expected it to perform like the Hyperfire and throw out four or five darts per second. Instead you get a respectable two darts per second. That's still good, and if anything it allows you to aim a little more and prolong that 30 dart drum (or whatever clip you have attached).
Even if all that puts you off purchasing the Nerf Infinus and using it as your primary blaster, you might still want it to use for loading all your clips for other blasters. We could imagine hard-core Nerf modders disassembling a few of these to use the loading functions separately, all lined up to load their clips. Loading does get a little hypnotic, and we're happy to report that of the many hundreds of rounds we've already put through it, we've only experienced one or two jams. Pretty good.
So, although the Infinus didn't blow us away in terms an overall Nerf primary, the technology used to make this thing load itself neatly did. It changed the way we fought our office-based battles, as it allowed the wielder to reload even after shooting off only a few darts, without wasting a semi-loaded clip. That's cool, and something Nerfers will love. And let's be honest, the Nerf Infinus will be one of the top toys of Christmas 2018.
£69.95 (although expect that to come down quick)
Available from www.amazon.co.uk
