Big boys Christmas toys.

June end of financial year sales are happening here. Unlike Christmas sales, these sales are legit. Huge discounts can be had. I've nabbed Garrick's "big Christmas present" early.

I bug Garrick pretty regularly about what toys he likes. He's pointed out the LaserX laser tag game that's in all the toy departments lately. I haven't been overly impressed. It's a nicely packaged laser gun kit, but nothing fancy, nothing new, and certainly not "new tech" or even a new idea with old tech.

However while looking around I did bump into the RECOIL branded laser game which is radically different. It's been available at retail in the U.S for the last year or so, but hasn't existed over here 'till now.

Here's some of the cool-itude
- The gun bluetooth pairs to your smartPhone.
- The phone wifi connects to a base station.
- The base station can host a game of up to 16 players.
- Game modes include a Free-for-all skirmish, Team skirmish, and Capture the flag.
- Players without a gun accessory can still play as medics and deploy utility weapons.
- The game uses your phone GPS to locate you in the battlefield. Supply crates are deployed in the virtual field which you can collect.
- Supply crates include things like armor, armor piercing rounds, landmines, more ammo, and airstrike deployments!
- The audio is great. A commando instructional voice makes the game feel great to both set-up, and play.
- The guns have a mechanical recoil motor.
- Due to the systems used, "near misses" are heard, as well as nearby gunfire on your own weapon's phone system (use headphones for premium play)

The starter kit includes a base wifi station, and x2 pistols. Additional weapons can be bought separately. These include rifles, and grenades.

The inner packaging is a bit-budget...however...

...the product feels GREAT in your hand. Good weight, feels solid. The big orange button on the hilt is the reload button.

The sights are colored plastic cylinders with a really high refractive index (maybe acrylic), so when looking down the sight they LOOK illuminated like an optical cable. The big orange button at the back is an audio-chat button. I completely forgot to test it.

The guns already have a great weight to them, but yet to be added are four AA batteries, and the users smart phone! Real guns are DECEPTIVELY heavy, so I guess all this extra weight really isn't a negative.

The phone holder is mounted with a solid m5 machine screw with a nice amount of thread engagement into a tnut embedded in the plastic. The molding of the holder and gun finger-lock into each other so the phone mount doesn't rotate about. There is an additional nut shown in this photo further towards the muzzle of the gun which is a mystery so far...

The phone clamp has a really nice set of deep spongy rubber grabbers on both sides. It worked GREAT on the three different model phones I tested. You feel that your expensive phone is completely secure.

The system was an absolute no-brainer to set up. The phone application instructions were great. The only confusion was actually playing with the usual "what do these buttons and icons do?" experiments while in a live-game. Five minutes of playing would have you as an expert-user. This is normal for the first round of any game, it's fun regardless.

So anyway...Grandpa and I went outside and had a quick test. We really did play a "test" game, not a "run around and try to win" game...but man it was REALLY fun to try a few things. We weren't ultra thorough, but got enough of a feel for it to realise it was clearly fun. Wow I wish I coulda' played with these and a bunch of guys as a kid in the yard. It's REALLY immersive. Placing landmines is sOooO fun. Sorry Tari...

The price for two more individual pistol guns is almost the price of the starter kit, and the rifles are almost the same price as the kit each. Only having two guns is dull on a battlefield...so I bought two starter kits. This gives him four guns, and a spare base-station. A pretty good deal IMO!! Can't wait for Christmas now!

Additional notes:
- The guns go into "battery saver" mode with fresh rechargeable batteries (1.2v each) instead of the intended 1.5v alkalines. In this state, the gun works fine, but the motorised recoil is disabled. Expect to buy alkalines, or make your own 5 x 1.2v battery pack.
- It has to be presumed the wifi base station suffers similarly with rechargeables. We had no problems in a brief test, but signal-strength is something you want to be operating at peak efficiency.
- The base station went through a firmware update when the 1st phone connected for the first time. This was painless and took less than 2 minutes. The app instructs you to reboot the base station when everything is done. Everything was easy.
- Playing inside resulted in many false-positive hits. Signals bounce off of everything indoors. Play outside as intended.
- Playing in outdoor GPS mode has you respawning at random locations. Often this is near instantaneous on the spot you happened to die. If you play in Indoor-mode, then respawn is controlled via a countdown. I agree with some other players video comments that this is a better respawn system, but you do lack some of the outdoor GPS functionality when playing in the indoor mode while outside.
- I tested a CHEAP ~$49 ZTE Blade L5 android phone with the Recoil gun system and it failed to work correctly. It was not able to maintain a solid wifi, gps, and bluetooth connection simultaneously while running the app live. While I doubt the entire ecosystem is particularly demanding, this phone is a BUDGET phone and would not do all-the-things. It works fine for pokemon, navigation, streaming audio, streaming video, and geocaching...but none of those use ALL the systems simultaneously. A wild guess would put any modern ~$150+ phone in the capable range. An old iPhone-5 worked fine so in that context, maybe a modern ~$89 phone will be fine. I completely forgot to test the cheap phone as a "medic" and not bluetooth'd to a gun. This might have been OK, as bluetooth was the primary failure when everything was running at once.
- The map view while playing shows the direction you're facing, however anyone that's gone geocaching knows this is dubious depending on the systems used. 1) If the system uses your compass, then the direction is PROBABLY correct. Recoil doesn't use your phone compass to my knowledge 2) If the system only uses your GPS, then it merely infers the direction you're facing via calculating a line between your current position, and previous positions. This means you MUST be moving, and movement MUST be sustained or over distances greater than 3 meters for any kind of accuracy. Spinning around leaves you no chance of correct orientation on the virtual map. You can however perform logical navigation based on known locations such as the HUB which is shown on the map.