Hi, I'm Luke. Today on Out of Darts, we are going to check out the Aeon Pro,
the next great offering from Dart Zone. This thing's pretty incredible; let's get going!
Most of you probably already saw my Nexus Pro review and have seen some of the nexus pro parts
that I've designed. I love this blaster. I think it is a really incredible offering,
and I was very excited to get my hands on the Aeon pro, Now it did take me a little while to actually
locate one because they kept selling out; I kept going to different WalMarts and finding that they
were not in stock. BrickSeek lied to me over and over, and no one seemed to be able to locate one,
but I finally did get my hands on one for review. As expected, this blaster is another fantastic
offering, and I have to say I'm really, really impressed. The Aeon Pro is a standard top prime
springer a little bit like the retaliator or more recently the echo and we'll get back to this
in a moment it's very easy to use it's simple prime fire prime fire and you've got a safety
in the back you've got a removable muzzle in the front which happens to be identical to the nexus
this does of course mean that the scar barrels and other options on my shop will of course be
interchangeable between the two blasters and that's great news on the back end
you'll notice it's considerably different but not really that different at all it's just
like someone took this stock point and hacked it right off and then moved the slide up top another
great feature that a lot of other reviewers have pointed out it's also on the back of the box but
it's this uh d prime lever up here and what that allows you to do is i've already primed one here
i can hit this little d prime button and i can actually load another one in for a shotgun blast
so that gave me two and you can do this multiple times so you actually can get i
think three darts yeah three darts and it's just peeking out of here and that will still fire
quite well for a really fun little shotgun blast when i'm in the middle of game and running around
i just don't have the muscle memory to remember not to prime a second time even though i generally
would leave my blaster in the prime state when i'm out in the field it's just one less thing to worry
about so i like that that button is there now if you want to remove it you definitely can get
rid of that lock completely so that it'll always do that the blaster hits very hard surprisingly
almost the same numbers as the nexus pro despite a slightly different plunger tube and certainly
a different spring now that's really welcome to see because at twenty five dollars that
makes this blaster an incredible value there is nothing you can buy out there not a kit not a part
not a upgraded blaster probably not even a used blaster for 25 dollars that's going to perform
as well as this blaster does now while i'm talking about performance it is worth noting
this like its older brother the nexus pro is not really a toy it is not meant for young kids
you really shouldn't play without eye protection ever and uh it's probably not the most
useful blaster around the house because of how hard it hits i could definitely see this damaging
things like a computer monitor or an lcd screen or your television or glassware and other things
like that so certainly don't uh use this lightly and be careful when you're using
this definitely wear eye protection and it's probably best outdoors or in an arena setting
that said this blaster is rock solid the grip is very comfortable ergonomically the blaster
is very good it's reasonably comfortable to hold up here i still have the same general
gripe about the dual magnet mag releases but i am working on a little shorty one here that will
prevent you from doing the accidental magazine adapter removal i find that i just out of
habit i always want to do this and i pop the whole adapter out rather than just getting
the actual mag out itself so i think getting rid of that will help alleviate that considerably
that said that is a really minor grievance for a 25 blaster that shoots above 140 fps
with the included short darts on top of that this blaster will seemingly take just about every dart
type we typically use it will fire standard elite darts it will fire short darts it will fire long
darts bamboo darts it will take waffle darts and connect starts uh really the only thing i can
think of that this won't fire is the wider head darts such as the ones that come with the crusher
from xshot now that said those aren't going to fire through any tight bore barrel like this
blaster so that wasn't really much of a surprise the magwell adapter is also very similar to the
nexus pro and that's a really good thing because again thank you dart zone this works with talon
mags so if you've got talon mags you can buy more talon bags or you can buy the upcoming release of
the nexus pro or the dart zone pro mags oddly this doesn't work with the mags from the mark 1 or the
mark 1.1 but i think that was probably a decision based on the quantity of blasters out there there
are tens of thousands of talon mags out there well there are probably only a few thousand of the 1.1
and 1.0 editions so i think they've wisely hit the widest market the largest market that they
possibly could and i am so happy to see another super solid offering from dart zone at half the
price it's a little difficult to compare this directly to the nexus pro but you sort
of have to because they're practically the same blaster in function you're moving your prime up
here which of course is never going to be as accurate but you also get a nice tight
compact blaster that at least to an adult could be magnetically holsterable possibly some other sort
of holster that accommodates the magwell and the magazine itself but it's a very solid buy at 25
and it would definitely make my top five this year for a christmas list let me know if you'd
like to actually see a video on top five that's a kind of video i've never made before but i feel
like i know a lot more about blasters and about what people are actually buying and interested in
so it might be a different perspective so i'd love to hear what you think about that in the comments
a few things that are missing now obviously you do not get a stock point or buffer tube stock
like you do on the other blaster you don't get the full length magazine but who cares because
honestly if you're playing at this level you're playing with short darts there's no way around it
if you go play with this blaster against the brand new elite 2.0 echo the echo is getting smoked my
only other minor complaint which was the same with the nexus pro was that it is also missing
any sort of sling attachment point so i'm going to do one of two things it's either going to be
something that you have to do with some cutting and insert in the back here a little bit like
how the t-pole is done for the kronos that we sell or i think the easier might actually be to
just replace the whole grip now it almost seems a shame to do that because this grip really is
quite comfortable for a 25 blaster i mean it's better than every single offering from hasbro
this entire year and when it comes to comfort at least for my adult hands and i would suspect that
even kids would find some of these sharper edges and other things you're seeing on
both the elite 2.0 line and others just undersized and a little less comfortable than the adventure
force pro line now that said it's really cool that adventure force made these little panels so this
is actually totally separable from the blaster i believe they did this both for manufacturing but
also for aesthetics being able to have the color pattern without having to do additional paint
this blaster does use a completely different size spring and we are of course working on
springs for it as well we'll have both a high power and a low power spring the one thing to
note about this blaster when comparing to the nexus is that you cannot hot swap the springs
in seconds you will have to remove every screw take the top slide off take the blaster apart pull
the plunger tube out to swap the spring that's starting to sound like a lot of work just because
of how easy this one is but in all reality it's how you mod every single blaster luckily for us
dart zone has continued with the no solvent welds nothing's glued together so it's very
easy to get the blaster apart to maintain it and upgrade it the blaster has a really solid uh air
seal and i'm kind of kind of blown away by that let's see probably shouldn't shoot myself in the
in the hand first, but if I just plug this, which I know drake did in his video too, but
I'm actually I don't know if you can hear that you probably can because of my mic but let's try this
you can actually hear it holds the pressure for
like a quarter of a second, maybe half of a second, and then I release it with my finger, and
that's as good of an air seal as you need as far as I'm concerned you're not going to get any more
out of this specific barrel in this breach by trying to seal it better because it already is
virtually airtight it's not so tight that you can literally stop the plunger tube,
but at some point, a 0.1 loss in air volume or something when you're firing the dart
is not going to affect your velocity in practice firing the blaster is really simple
you, of course, do not have slam fire, but you can get a pretty substantial rate of fire out of this,
and with its compact form factor I'm really going to like playing with this blaster
i will say however that this blaster again is not for kids the top prime even with the stock spring
is quite a bit tighter than the nexus pro and that's really just due to leverage and being able
to push into your shoulder it's just a different feel one other design i think i'm going to work
on is a couple variants for the top slide the top slide design is nice but it's pretty basic
and i think it could be a little more comfortable specifically i think it could use a little lip to
actually hold your hand a little better especially with a higher spring load so i'll be working on a
little design for that as well probably over the holidays in real reality because right now our
printers are ramping up to be pretty much backed up through the holidays with a new product and
that in mind i will probably also design a version of this top slide that has a picatinny rail and
you're going to have to come subscribe and check back in uh maybe two three weeks to see
the reasoning for that because we have an upcoming product that could uh possibly mount
right on top of there really effectively you can't talk about this blaster without talking
about all of the other blasters that are similar to it and this is everything from the game face
brands variant of the seda to the regular ceta to the dart zone pro mark one and one mark 1.1
to a standard retaliator which is where this all started and that also includes variants like the
recon and the new echo this is the latest blaster we've been given that is very very similar to this
blaster in fact if i take off this ridiculously short stock that nobody can actually use at least
no adult because my hands don't go that way we've got a very similar blaster here they
function very similar this one shoots about 65 70 fps you obviously can mod it however parts of this
are solvent welded so it's a real pain to open up and modify it also has a very poor air seal and it
comes in at 29.99 which means it is five dollars more expensive for a far worse far more flawed
and just a poor value overall from a modding perspective i guess if you were a kid
or a parent and you didn't want your kids to have high-powered blasters because they're playing with
all their friends with regular blasters you might have to get this but other than that
rest in peace echo i don't think people are going to be buying this blaster to mod
not when this exists out here i will say i like the shell and coloring but i'm going gonna do
another video on the nerf elite 2.0 series because i'm really really disappointed with 2020 as far as
hasbro offerings go thankfully dart zone and walmart have done a really fantastic job with
this blaster i give this a 5 out of 5 especially considering the price point i think it's a home
run and i can't wait to see more of these on the battlefield thank you so much for watching i know
i've been doing a lot of review videos recently and i really don't want this channel to be just
reviews we have a big product launch coming and we've already filmed most of the video for that
so that will be coming fairly soon and the proton pack boards are hopefully on their way from china
and that product will be coming out pretty soon along with accompanying really fun videos and
backstory on how that came together we're also moving, and I'll have another video about that
because that's a big update in itself. And I'm really, really excited for the holiday season
and to see what 2021 can offer, hopefully in the form of actual games in person with
all of you, because I miss it so much! Thank you again for watching. Do leave a comment down below
if you have any questions about this. We're trying to do a better job of actually monitoring,
and reading the comments, and responding because I know that's something that I
frequently run out of time and don't get to do. Until next time, I'm out of darts.