Hasbro has made many cool franchises, but my favorite is Nerf. Nerf has many sub classes, like; Mega, Doomlands, Elite, and Zombie Strike. Here recently though, they have come out with a new line called Rival.

The Nerf Rival line brings a whole new armory to the game. Instead of using darts, they use foam yellow balls. This causes the ammunition to be more aerodynamic. It also comes in two colors, which are red and blue (typically).

The Nerf Rival gun I will be reviewing will be the Nerf Apollo. This gun is in the Rival line and uses a stick like magazine to load the weapon. The magazine holds 7 Rival balls. The gun itself is spring loaded, which means it uses a spring to shoot the ball out instead of air.

The way you prime/cock the gun is you pull the handle on the top of the gun back then push it forward to load the ball into the chamber. When the spring goes back, a little nick in the plastic holds it in place, so even when you push the handle forward, the spring will stay back.

The nick in the plastic is connected to the trigger, so when you pull the trigger the nick in the plastic releases its grip on the spring, which sends the ball flying out of its chamber.  There are these machines called “chronographs,” which can detect the speed of anything that passes in between its antennas. A YouTuber named”Coop772” did a review on this gun, and used a chronograph to test the speed of the Rival ball ammunition being shot from the Apollo. From ten shots, he got an average of 97 feet per second.

Regular Elite nerf guns are getting an average of 70 feet per second. This gun is unsurprisingly a hard hitter. I really like this weapon because of many things. It hits hard, it is sleek and cool looking, and it also is a new and cool idea for a weapon.

There are some bad things, though. First of all, due to the ball being foam and light, the ball can swerve off the path it was shot by even the slightest of wind. Also, the gun is really loud when being primed and shot.

Lastly, this gun is really hard to prime, due to the spring being so strong. Over all, I prefer this gun to experienced Nerf players, but if you think you can handle it, go ahead and buy it.

Its retail price at Wal-Mart is 25 dollars, which is pretty cheap for a new Nerf gun.