Hi, It's Luke with Out of Darts. Today we're going to check out the newest line from Rival:
the Curve Shot. I'm really excited about this one, so let's get going!
Hasbro has done a lot to disappoint us in 2020, but it looks like 2021 might be just a little bit
better. I am obviously a huge Rival fan so when they announced new Rival blasters I was of course
very excited these ones have sort of a special spot in my heart because one of the earlier
mods that I did five entire years ago -- actually over five years ago, was making a rotating hop-up.
I did this with both a Zeus and with the Jupiter. It is a feature that you've been able to do for
a while. Hasbro came out with the curve shot line and they have two initial offerings with a
third announced the first is the flex it is a one shot single shot blaster not unlike the knock out
the second is the side swipe this is a 12 shot blaster with an integrated
magazine really interesting styling and again same rotating hop-up this rotating hop-up allows you to
give a slight curve left right down as well as fire straight they're designed in a way that you
could technically get a little bit around corners but what I found so far in practice is that the
amount of turn on them is not quite how they make it appear in their marketing videos I will say the
marketing videos for these two blasters have been phenomenal it is some of the best marketing and
video work that I think Hasbro has done recently and it was a lot more fun kind of seeing these
animations of of balls flying very video game reminiscent and that I thought was a pretty pretty
nice marketing push starting with the build quality both of the blasters feel very solid
they feel nice in your hands they're the thicker shells that we've come to expect and
the better build quality we've come to expect from the rival line both blasters come in the
transition packaging which is the 99 cardboard with just a small amount of tape inside so
Hasbro has made a commitment to get rid of all plastic packaging I'm not sure if this is the
final destination or if it is truly a transition where eventually they'll lose the packaging tape
but this is a nice step to see from such a large company um because they've gotten rid of
the plastic tabs are no longer back here they're using glue and the actual ties themselves are
made of essentially cardboard paper rather than plastic and lots of plastic packaging all around
nothing too interesting on the box other than the velocity claims interestingly enough the
fps claims on this are actually a little bit below the normal rival claims I'm going to
expect that those are probably correct but I find it very fascinating that they chose to
represent this more accurately than they do the ridiculous ultra line
with the absurd range claims that are literally impossible to achieve as far as I can tell even
under a controlled environment with your best shot possible let's set ultra aside for a minute
because that's not what this video is about these blasters as I said are built very well the grips
especially feel very good in an adult sized hands like my own again I don't have extra large hands
but they are very reasonable I would say the side swipe is a little bit less comfortable but that's
probably going to be a given with the plunger tube in the grip that said it's a very comfortable
blaster overall and very reminiscent of its counterpart the knockout so getting into
the details with the side swipe they've made some pretty big improvements over the knockout
the first being that we get some nice extra ammo storage kind of cool styling
but it is considerably larger so if you look at the two of these you can tell they're clearly
built on approximately the same platform I have not opened this blaster up yet but I expect
we're going to see relatively similar internals and then of course we get the addition of the
rotating hop-up we'll talk a little bit more about some really interesting innovation on the rotating
hop-up as well one key difference in operation is the prime itself when you prime the blaster
it automatically opens the breach you can load and then you close the breach and then you fire
this is a little different than say the knockout where oh yeah this one has a ridiculous spring I
forgot the knockout needs to be primed then returned then the breech needs to be opened
manually push a black ball in and close it so right off the bat they've removed a whole step in
in cycle times which you can tell that one's got a pretty heavy spring in it which overall makes this
a lot easier to actually prime and use in rapid succession compared to the knockout here which
I'm doing a terrible job because this literally has the chunkiest spring you could possibly have
but that extra step of having to remember to open the breech is a nice feature and a nice
improvement here one downside to that however with not having to open the breech and not having to
return the prime is that unlike the knockout where the prime can sit flush at the bottom
with the side swipe it is permanently open no matter the position because it's a fixed plunger
tube it does not have that ability to collapse I don't think that's really a deal breaker but if
you were to try holster this um I don't think it's holsterable to begin with unless you're
gonna throw a holster plate or something similar a magnetic plate that is um I could definitely see
people however chopping this right off chopping this off and just having this sort of like
space blaster kind of looking thing here might be kind of neat I might have to take a hack at one of
these and see how how well I can clean that up but in reality I think for its intended purpose sort
of like arena style play or or friendly play with other people you're going to have a really good
time moving on to the side swipe this is where things start to get progressively more interesting
we've got the same rotating muzzle here that is indexed it's got nice positive reinforcement where
it tells you I'm locked into the right position you can also put it into a down position we'll
talk more on that in a little bit as well but this has got a nice very simple load
mechanism it's one of the better versions of this that I've seen the rival finisher has this
same sort of functionality where you load from the side but really this is quite an easy loading
point and then you release your follower prime fire need the safety off
pretty basic functionality I'm not quite sure why this wasn't a top slide though it does let you
get in here and really aim to get your curve which I think if you're down here looking at
the straight sights that's part of the design they want you to get right here so you can see
the curve really happening because the curve is is less and less pronounced visually to yourself when
you hold it down say waist level or something like that it doesn't seem as good as when you
see it veer off from your sight line in my tests casually here given we haven't had games in it
you can definitely see a noticeable curve in any direction you do you can drop them down faster and
overall the the effect works quite well it's not as pronounced however as some of the
other mods that I've attempted and one of the ways you can do this is by switching up the ammo type
so obviously this works with genuine rival ammo but if you choose lighter weight ammo
like I discovered about five years ago such as cornucopia cornucopia gen 1 was a really like
almost not rock solid but really really firm ammo it didn't compress very much and it also happened
to weigh about 50 percent as much because it was a completely different material so if you use one of
those lighter weight ammo types and I don't know if any of these are even available because they
were very very poorly reviewed and if you bring them to normal games people are probably going
to be a little ticked off in a 3s rival blaster for an example like a zeus you can shoot a full
90 degrees with that ammo and I'm excited to put that ammo in here as like the most ridiculous
curveball ever because it takes the it takes a difference between like a 30 degree turn from
from start access to end to like a complete 90 and the difference is just hilarious it's almost
it's almost unusable as a normal blaster when you use that ammo and it makes it quite fun.
I've put it in HIRicanes and Zeuses and and Nemesis' that are modded just as a gag and
you put it in and the standard up makes the balls shoot straight straight up into the air
and you couldn't hit something that's like 15 feet in front of you which is a a pretty fun fun little
gag and if everybody was playing with that kind of type of ammo I think we could see that being
really fun continuing with the ergonomics on this blaster this stock is just weird I don't get what
they're trying to do I guess this can hook on to something or maybe it's just cheap to make
but like there's no kid that this is a stock um it's just not it's not a stock maybe maybe I'm
not supposed to call it a stock I like the styling of the blaster overall I think it's a little more
adventurous on Hasbro's part and it looks kind of sci-fi I think that could be really fun to
paint up I mean it's definitely reminiscent of like tracer and I mean overall it's really cool I
don't know about the the actual color scheme I know they had to choose something different
and I'm I would rather see orange than something that could be mistaken for
a firearm though this looks nothing like any sort of firearm of course but
I think this might be a really fun shell to give a sleek paint job and I think I'm gonna hack this
off and try to figure out an actual stock whether that's an n strike stock would just look goofy so
it might have to be something custom that like screws on to this existing stuff but
I need that stock to be like a full six inches further back so finally I want to talk about the
whole purpose of this line and that's this you know shooting around corners I think in a normal
game against other rival blasters especially high-powered ones or things that are shooting
you know hundreds of balls it's probably not super competitive but if you were to play in an arena
or in your house or at a game where most of the people were playing with this or even better if
everybody was playing with this I think it could be a really fun mechanic and a really fun game
one curious little side note and innovation that only seems to exist on the flex and not
on the side swipe is this hop-up um both of the hop-ups rotate but this one does so in such a way
that the aggressiveness of the hop-up actually changes as you go to the right and to the left
being that it is actually more pronounced on the left right or down position than it is on the
front position now this makes a lot of sense it means that when you fire this straight it
functions just like a normal normal rival blaster in that it it will fire nice and straight plenty
accurate especially given the the lower fps but then when you do want to curve a shot it actually
is more pronounced than the hop up on the back so if I take the same blaster and were to fire
up instead by leveling it out the blaster I would actually get
a larger rise and I can visually see that when I fire the shot for some reason
the sideswipe doesn't have it as far as I can tell this hop up is the same at every angle and I don't
I don't really understand why they wouldn't do the same thing in both blasters
if anybody has a theory or has has discovered something I haven't or if someone else has
discovered something I haven't here I'd love to hear that because to me it just doesn't
make any sense why I mean this is the smaller hop up and they've implemented that option and on the
larger one they heaven seems like an odd choice to me perhaps this was done much earlier than
this one or vice versa or there's a cost thing it's sometimes hard to tell with Hasbro I think
these blasters are actually really phenomenal offerings even just as normal rival blasters
the gimmick aside whether you like that or not I think they're usable but ultimately I would love
to play a game where it's like 10 on 10 and we all have these same blasters and we're trying to
utilize the goofy mechanics because I've had some real fun with the hurricane that can shoot upside
down where you can drop balls down on people so you can actually hit people behind bunkers that
you normally would not be able to hit I think I saw Drac mention like "why would anybody want
to shoot down." That's why. You literally can can drop these down faster. You've got gravity working
for you, and then you add that front spin instead of a backspin and you're actually arcing those
those balls down on top of people. It's a pretty sweet little gimmick and it could be a lot of fun
I don't expect these to be super game practical in large games but they are a genuinely good
innovative effort on Hasbro's part and I'm really excited to see them return to form
at least in some sort this year it's just been a bad year of nerf products. Between ultra the Ultra
line being 'meh' and Elite 2.0 being completely disappointing, this just seems like a win so I'm
hopeful that Hasbro has more coming there is a big brother to this blaster that's going to be
on Target I will certainly do a video as soon as I can get a hold of that but it's a higher capacity
a little bit larger version as well and it has a hopper so I think that'll be an interesting
offering as well. I'd love to hear what you think in the comments whether shooting around corners is
interesting to you. Is that enough to get you to purchase a blaster,
or is it a a side an an afterthought ultimately? Let me know in the comments, and do hit that like
and subscribe button. We always say it all the time, but it's the only way that YouTube tells
anybody to watch our videos. Thank you so much for watching. Until next time, I'm out of darts.
It's like being a rebel being shot by a stormtrooper!