Nerf "gear up" Recon review

The brightly coloured "Gear Up" series of Nerf N-Strike blasters are *Finally* hitting Australian stores, so the other day I went and picked up a Recon and a Maverick, which were the only two available locally that I've heard of so far. I've been meaning to get this review done for a few days, but the main camera lens I use to take decent quality photos for this blog was stolen on friday afternoon, and I can't replace it for some time. In the meantime, I've cleaned up an old Pentax lens and used an adapter ring to fit it to my camera body, so I apologize if the quality isn't up to standard, but it's all I've got.

The first thing I can say about this gear up Recon, is that it is orange. And by orange, I mean the kind of orange that's so bright it'll burn the retinas of your enemies. I have seen photos of these before and just thought they were over-saturated, but no, it's REALLY orange. But, I think it looks pretty good. These photos just don't do it justice.

Of course, the Nerf Recon has been around since the very early times of the N-strike series and has stayed available the whole time, which it's worthy of. It's the blaster that can be customized in so many different combinations it's hard to decide what you want it to look like! Thanks to having both a barrel adapter AND a stock adapter, you can put and Nerf barrel or stock on, so it can be a sniper rifle, a sub machine gun, an assault rifle, even a pistol. And on top of all that, there's 2 rails on the barrel, one on the cocking slide to attach scopes, lights, sights and foregrips, even a Nerf strikefire blaster under the barrel, AND an extra clip can be stored in the stock. That's a serious amount of stuff you can do with it straight out of the box! Unfortunately, not much will suit the bright orange colours, so if you don't like painting then you're probably better off with a standard Recon. If you do, most Nerf gear has some orange or black on it already, so it's just a case of painting everything else black (longstrike barrels work well).

Alright, so what about performance? Well, out of the box you can expect 30 foot ranges, nothing spectacular, and until recently modding was mostly cosmetic as there isn't much you could do with a reverse plunger style mechanism inside. But, Orange Mod Works has come to the rescue and started developing mod kits to get great performance out of the Recon, once again giving it more appeal. Cosmetic mods are also something that this blaster is a great platform for, I've seen the Recon turned in to an M4A1, a pulse rifle, small pistol and integrated in to other blasters, so you might say the word "versatile" is an understatement.

Honestly, I love the Nerf Recon. It's clip fed, can be anything you want it to be, can now be modded easily with a simple drop in mod kit by Orang Mod Works, and usually pops up at the price of $23AU quite often. There is so little I can fault about the Nerf Recon, about the only thing that stops it from being a perfect 10, is the fact that it's a little awkward cocking this blaster, but that can be solved with a mod to add a bolt handle. So, this blaster gets a 9.5/10 flying potatoes.