Hi, it's Luke with out of darts.
Today we are checking out a brand-new high-powered springer:
This is the Trion from Game Face Brands.
Let's get going!
Game Face Brands has been around for a while,
and they've had a little bit of a rocky start as a blaster brand.
Game Face Brands is owned by Crossman, which owns a wide range of airsoft products,
compressed air products, and a variety of other sporting goods products.
Their previous offerings have been very much hit or miss, and I’m going to say mostly miss.
They started off with the Havoc Prime, which was,
essentially, a slight retooling of the Ceda from Jet Blasters.
Now the Ceda had a whole host of issues from performance to quality control and
manufacturing defects, all of which we've had to deal with here at the shop because
we did sell them on the shop, and we had to frequently repair and replace blasters.
Before we get going too far though, I do want to mention that this blaster --
Well, one of these blasters was sent to me by Game Face at no cost,
and we do intend to have these on the shop in the next month or so.
Maybe by the time you're seeing this video, it'll already be live.
The other blaster was sent from my buddy Thanh, so thank you for sending that over to me as well.
He beat them getting it to me because Thanh managed to grab it from the EndWar event.
The Trion is a pretty standard high-powered springer.
It's going to feel a lot like a Nexus; it's going to feel a lot like a Talon Claw or other blaster.
It is a short-dart-only blaster;
we've got an angled foregrip up front, and we've got a 15-round magazine.
Some really nice quality-of-life features throughout.
We've got an M-Loc barrel up here,
so we can actually attach all kinds of different attachments here.
We've got Picatinny rail up front, and we've got a twist lock front barrel nub
which means that people, like my buddy Thanh, have already designed
a barrel that can replace this with a SCAR-like barrel, which is pretty cool.
The breach itself does feature a skinny pusher which means that inside right here,
this pusher is narrow enough for the feed lips of standard magazines to fit inside.
While we're talking about the magwell, this blaster is compatible with the Trion magazines
from Game Face -- the one that comes with the blaster, and these are also available separately.
It is also surprisingly compatible with standard Talons, Tachis,
or -- if you happen to have Katana mags from Jet Blaster, they are also directly compatible.
I would assume that the Katana compatibility comes from their heritage with Jet Blaster,
where we've got their previous two offerings.
For anybody that bought those, they wanted to make sure that their old mags were still compatible.
I think they've done a really nice job with this magwell.
It's slightly flared, so I find that the mags go in there really nicely,
and that brings me to the biggest thing about this blaster.
I believe the designer's name is Chris, and they are very much paying attention to the hobby.
From my understanding, he did all the engineering and design work on this blaster,
and it is really a well-put-together blaster.
I think the styling is fabulous.
I like the two color schemes; I think it's got a very nice look and feel.
The darts themselves are also of note.
They're calling these Game Face pro darts.
Great name.
Lightweight for extra speed.
My initial thoughts on the darts just looking at them:
They seem like the build quality is quite good.
The heads don't rip off any easier than our best-in-class Worker gen 3+.
One thing I will note is that:
Looking down, while the length is identical,
the head is a little bit longer, and the foam is not as thick on the outer side as Worker,
so it doesn't feel quite as sturdy when squeezing it here.
It's hard to show on camera here, but basically,
the hole in the green dart is actually larger than the hole in the worker gen 3+.
I can't see these darts taking over as far as the hobby’s most popular, given the price point.
Worker darts are $16 for 200, and these almost never lose a head; they're just fabulous.
We're gonna do a video on this, but they've been my favorite.
These seem to be very comparable and good quality, which is nice to see.
I also really like the shape in the head.
It's almost a heart.
It's like an arrow/heart shape.
A couple of quality-of-life things beyond the skinny pusher:
This grip up front is a little small, but it does feel very good.
However, if you don't like it, you just take it off, and there's Picatinny underneath there.
So, you've got a lot of options as far as mounting.
In the back, we've got a buffer-tube-style stock,
and it is extendable, so you can take it on and off.
In addition to this sort of futuristic, sci-fi-looking stock (which I really do love
the looks of), you can take this entire assembly off with the screws here and on the sides,
replace the grip with a standard grip, and replace the stock with a buffer tube
(underneath here is a real buffer tube compatible stock point).
So you've got a lot of options as far as versatility.
That leads me to one downside:
The ergonomics for my average adult-size hands…
I just never really like thumb-hole stocks.
I would much rather see this part cut out.
It looks really nice; the styling feels great,
but I’m just always cramming my palm against this side of the thumb-hole stock.
So, while it looks really nice, I don't think it's quite as comfortable as I would like.
So, I will certainly be replacing mine with a buffer tube and designing
a custom grip for it that fills out my hand and fits my hand a little better.
The mag release feels great, although I could see adding an extension here just so
you can do it without having to use your off-hand, and I really like the trigger.
The trigger itself is extremely snappy.
Load up a mag here.
It is just a very small trigger pull.
It's probably the closest thing we've got in
the nerf blaster space or hobby blaster space to a hair trigger.
I think it's only got about -- what is that?.
Probably 2mm of travel -- 2.5mm of travel at the lowest point.
So, it's really a nice snappy trigger, and it's not a heavy trigger pull, either.
As expected, we do have slam-fire, so you can hold the trigger and fire
as many as you want as fast as you can pump that prime.
I'm not going to say you're going to do that very accurately, however.
Up top, we've got some sights.
I think they're of moderate use.
You can definitely get them in the right position to actually make them functional,
and there is enough room to get my eye line down low enough to actually see that.
Up top, we've got a slide lock here as well.
So, if you have primed and you need to get the slide back, you can simply push this up,
and you can slide back again, which actually should let me double and triple load.
Let's see if I can load three.
Okay, I should have three darts in there now.
They work pretty well.
So if you want to work on a little shotgun-style blast or multi-shot
scatter-blast, you can certainly do that.
As I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of familiar designs here, and it's very clear
that they've been watching what the hobby is doing and where the trends are going.
The most obvious being: this blaster comes with spring spacers right out of the box, and they
look pretty much identical to the fairly obvious design of the spring spacers I made for the Nexus.
It's really cool to see companies actually watching what we're doing and improving.
So with a simple quarter-turn, you can take this out, you can put one
or two spring spacers on there, and this adds more pre-compression on the spring.
Just like that, we've gone from 130 FPS all the way up to 200 FPS.
If you put a single spacer in there, you'll get, I believe, somewhere around 170-180 FPS.
Essentially this blaster is ready for the entire range of performance
right out of the box, which is a fabulous feature.
I really think that is such a fantastic way to do it.
Now one comment that my buddy coop made on
a review is that there's nowhere to store these spring spacers
So, that's something to keep in mind.
He actually said he lost both of his.
I have not lost mine yet, but I would have loved to have seen somewhere in here…
It seems like you could have had little holes to tuck these in or something,
or perhaps in the base of the grip.
I could certainly see somewhere where these
could go because when you're not using them, they’re pretty easy to misplace.
Should you misplace yours, hit us up.
I'm pretty sure these are almost identical to the Nexus size,
so we probably have something available if you ever do need to replace them.
This is the spring.
I think there's going to be pretty little reason to actually upgrade this spring
because the only reason you'd want to do that is if you were trying to get above 200 FPS.
But, we will do some testing, and if we have any springs that sort of match that to get this up to,
say, the 250 FPS range for those playing in that upper echelon, we will certainly do so.
More on that later or in the description if we figured it out in the time in between.
One of the biggest pros to this blaster to me is the very slim profile.
It just feels like a skinny boy.
It's very slim compared to a lot of the other blasters; it's hard to describe.
Additionally, I feel like the build quality is just fantastic.
It feels very solid.
What I’m seeing overall is thicker shells across the entire blaster compared to others.
It's a little bit hard to measure because of how things are tapered.
But it's got to be a little thicker than, say, the Rival shells or the Nexus shells.
It's either that, or there's just good rigidity throughout,
with a lot of additional webbing and a lot of additional overhangs.
I have no doubt that this is going to hold up very well in actual gameplay.
I think these colors are really nice.
You've got two different options,
and they're different from other things that are on the market.
I'm personally loving this sort of teal color that's definitely in my realm.
Coming in at $79.99, I think this is going to be a very popular blaster.
We will have these on the shop, so -- as I said before, disclaimer:
This is a product that we will ultimately have on outofdarts.com.
I am thrilled to see another company like Game Face in the
hobby space making blasters for us and really pushing things along because….
Dart zone started it off with the dart zone pro and the Nexus, but I really think it's nice to
see more competition because we don't want a single company dominating the entire space.
That leads to, well….
The only thing I can think of is Elite 2.0.
I'm so terrible.
We don't want to see innovation stagnate, and the more competition that's out there -- whether
it's in small hobby sellers or large companies, the better for all of us.
We get more offerings, more competition, better products,
improvements, and grow this hobby overall.
At the end of the day, I think this is a stellar offering.
My only minor detractor can basically be fixed by replacing this grip.
While I almost don't want to give it five stars, I think it deserves five stars.
It's a solid blaster, it's very reliable, it's consistent, it shoots well, and…
Even though it's a couple of years later, I do think it's a very strong
contender against the Nexus -- or all of the pro series, for that matter.
Again, my only minor complaint is just the feel of thumb-hole stocks,
and that's very much a personal preference.
I know people that just love thumb hole stocks, both in looks and how they feel.
So definitely, that part of it is certainly a personal preference.
I'd love to hear from you in the comments down below.
Let me know:
What do you think about having more competition?.
It's interesting to see to me, but I want to know if
this is a blaster you're interested in picking up.
Do you have too many springers already?
Do we have too many springers on the market, period?
Let me know down below, and until next time I’m out of darts.
If you enjoy our content and the shop, please sign up for our newsletter.
There's a link down in the description.
We've got a monthly newsletter that has shop news, hobby news,
and product releases, as well as upcoming projects and things we're working on.
We promise we won't send you any spam -- just a single email per month,
and we'll keep everything short and to the point.