It’s Nerf darts or nothing for these slick new blasters

When I was a kid, “It’s Nerf or nothing” meant you couldn’t find a better dart blaster. Starting today, it means you’ll have to buy Hasbro’s own overpriced darts if you buy Hasbro blasters for your kids.

The company is revealing its new Nerf N-Series lineup today, and a new “N1” dart it’s calling “the future” of the Nerf brand — a future where Hasbro blasters for 8- to 14-year-olds only fire Hasbro darts that cost three to five times the competition. Lose a dart? That’ll be 25 cents, because only official darts have the patented nub that pushes a safety mechanism out of the way.

The blasters themselves are cool, but is it Nerf’s derided Ultra all over again? Not quite, for three important reasons.

First, while today’s new blasters for kids won’t support any existing dart or magazine, the company says the Nerf Pro brand — which does — will live on. “We are expanding on the [age] 14+ blaster line we launched with the Stryfe X,” Nerf product design manager John Falkowski confirms when I ask. “I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with what you see when those items are announced.”

Second — see gallery above — the new N-Series blasters are big, bold, mostly satisfying designs that shoot darts notably further than Hasbro’s previous kid-friendly options! By making the new N1 dart shorter, wider, and squishier, Nerf can now fire them out at 90 feet per second, compared to 70fps for the Elite darts they’re replacing, without increasing the dart’s weight (still 1 gram) or their impact on a kid.

I measured four of the new blasters with my chronograph, and they’re all averaging 90fps — except the secondary barrel of the two-shot Ward pistol, which hit 83-84fps. The darts do still fly off target with the slightest crosswind, I immediately find, but many fly quite straight without it.

Safety is the reason Nerf is breaking compatibility with a decade-plus of Elite darts, explains Falkowski. The new dart’s wider and shorter so it can be softer and safer, and the proprietary nub is there to “maintain the integrity of the Nerf brand” by guaranteeing a certain amount of safety at that speed. As a result, Hasbro won’t ship safety glasses with these blasters.

“There’s always pros and cons to a closed system,” admits Nerf global marketing director Patrick Schneider, hinting I should look out for new blasters this fall that appeal to an older age group.

The third reason this isn’t a repeat of Ultra is the prices — they aren’t outrageous for these new blasters. While it does feel a tad ridiculous to ship a two-shot blaster with just two darts (you need to buy more if you lose even one!), $40 for the flagship Infinite, which comes with 80 darts, is more kid firepower than Nerf has offered at that price for quite a while. The derided Ultra line shipped with a far less interesting blaster for $50.

None of this means Hasbro’s pulling ahead of the competition: rival companies have proven you don’t need to break compatibility with over a decade of Elite-sized darts in order to increase range and accuracy while satisfying requirements for safety. While Hasbro says these darts are better than its own Elite in every way, that’s an incredibly low bar, and the team dodged my question about how they stack up to rival darts that cost far less.

But I can’t deny these blasters look and feel pretty great — aside from the occasional jam on my Infinite review unit, not sure what’s going on there — and that I would have enjoyed them back when I was a kid.

In the US, Target will additionally get two exclusive blasters: the pump-action shotgun-like $25 Strikeback, with a six-dart internal clip and side panels that spring forward to provide a sense of recoil when fired; and the $30 Shadow Storm, a top-priming pistol with an eight-dart internal clip that comes with attachable barrel, stock, and sight.

Walmart will get the $30 Sprinter, the only motorized blaster in the line, which takes six AA batteries and has a 16-dart detachable magazine and semi-auto firing.

The first N-Series blasters will arrive in June and July.

Photography by Sean Hollister / The Verge