Customer Reviews

Nerf N-Strike Vulcan EBF-25 Blaster - Yellow

5 star:		(71)
4 star:		(44)
3 star:		(20)
2 star:		(23)
1 star:		(106)

 

 

The Nerf Vulcan, the latest release in Nerf's "N-Strike" line of toys, is a fully automatic belt-fed Nerf gun. It retails for $40.00 and don't let anyone tell you differently. It requires six D-cell batteries to run the gun on full-auto, but single-fire mode requires no batteries.

When firing, the Vulcan is no louder than an electric shaver, and probably quieter than many of those. On fresh batteries, it does fire ~2-3 darts per second, taking around 8 seconds to empty an entire 25-round belt of darts.

Its ranges vary pretty wildly, but 20-30 feet is about average. If you've used the Nerf Maverick, its ranges are comparable to the Vulcan's. These ranges make the Vulcan well-suited to indoor fun, but rather ineffective outdoors when targets tend to be further away.

I find the gun bulky and unwieldy, and I'm speaking as a 5' 9" adult. For children, (ages 6 and up according to the box) they will have to rely on the handy detachable, folding tripod to use the Vulcan effectively. Running around with the gun is very difficult, made more so by the detachable ammunition box's tendency to fall off when jostled.

The valuepack edition of the Vulcan (identifiable by the green stripe on the right end of the box) includes an extra ammunition belt, 25 extra darts to fill the belt with, and a shoulder strap in addition to the Vulcan and its normal accessories. The valuepack is the same price as the regular Vulcan, so buying anything but the valuepack is silly. The shoulder strap is a good quality item, and widely adjustable to fit any person.

A word on the tripod: It's quite stiff, necessarily so because of the Vulcan's weight. When you move it by hand, it sounds as if you're breaking it; this isn't the case, relax.

The Vulcan uses sonic micro darts which are supposed to whistle as they fly through the air. My darts have thus far never whistled. They lack suction cups, so there won't be any neat forest-of-darts sticking to walls, televisions, etc.

The Vulcan features three N-strike accessory mounting rails. These will allow you to attach the Longshot's scope, the Recon's flip-up sight and red-dot sight, the green tactical light, or the N-Strike Unity system's scout blaster. NONE of these are included with the Vulcan, just to be clear. I also recommend *not* attaching the Longshot's scope to the top of the gun, because it's very difficult to remove due to how it wedges into place.

Refill packages including Vulcan ammo belts and darts will be available soon, if they aren't in stores already.

Here are the pros and cons for an at-a-glance evaluation.

Pros:
Rate-of-fire
Ammunition-capacity
Reload Time (Loading a fresh belt, not filling a belt with darts)
Handy tripod

Cons:
Weight
Unwieldy size
Reload time (filling a belt with darts)
Battery cost (Roughly $8.00 worth of batteries)
Ammo-box connection fails when jostled

I purchased this for my sons birthday. He is the youngest of 4 boys and they all like to play nerf dart wars. We were hoping that the machine gun would be a lot of fun, and he was hoping for 'flare and more of a fighting chance'. The gun worked fabulously for the first afternoon and evening. If I completed the review within the first 24 hours it would have been five stars. All of the boys loved it. Early the second day the gearing mechanism started failing to advance the belt and load the next "round". In addition, I noticed the cylinder that releases the compressed air and provides the energy to launch the nerf bullet was jammed and didn't return to recessed position. The cylinder must recess to allow advancing of ammo belt. I suspect it was the jamming of the compression chamber cylinder that caused belt advancement gear failure. I tried disassembling the gun to examine what was causing the jam. I learned there was no disassembling and the only choice was to completely break several plastic welds to learn what caused the issue.

Summary, a great gun for about 500 shots after that the manufacturing materials and quality of assembly failed at it is now in the dumpster for recycling.

The Vulcan EBF-25 looks like it would be a blast for kids to play with, but unfortunately the toy is "JUNK" Quality.

I bought it for my son for his 8th birthday. He literally played with it for 2 hours. He went through about 6 reloads (it was a bit time consuming finding all the dispensed rounds and reloading the belt).

One of the first problems that he had with it was that the belt would not always advance after firing. I tried it and found that if I "gently" pulled on the belt, it would help it to advance to the next round. He tried it, pulled just a little too hard (nothing dramatic - just a bit harder than "gentle"), and that was it, it's broke!!!

Something internal broke or stripped. Now the gun just makes a horrible noise when trying to fire and it won't advance the belt at all. It won't even manually fire single shot rounds now.

I gave it to him at about 5:30, and between 7:00 - 7:30, it was done!

Conceptionally, it's a fun toy. But man, if it's made for young boys to play with, it needs to be tough enough for a scrawny kid to play with! For $35+, it needs to last a bit longer than a couple of hours.

Lots of people have complained that this gun jams too much. When I first got this gun I thought the same. It took me a bit to figure out but I found all you have too do is remove the ammunition box and it works fine. Also be warned, this gun takes forever to reload.That is the only reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5. Otherwise works just fine.

Agree on the reliability problems with this toy -- I would NOT buy it again. However, it is possible to open it up and repair the jam. Just remove ALL the screws along the left side of the gun (except for the ones on the barrel section, which can stay). The shell can then be carefully opened, revealing the mechanism.

Look along the top of the mechanism, you will see the firing piston (long white cylinder that protrudes out into the chamber area). On the forward right side of the cylinder is a white stub that engages an orange "bolt stop" stub mounted to the frame. The "permanent" jam is caused by this bolt-stop not resetting after a shot. Just push the orange pin back in, and the gun can be reset.

I added a touch of grease to this pin to try to prevent further jams, which seems to have helped. Also, I cut a square hole in the top of the external case above this spot, which makes it easy to reach in and fix if it happens again.

I know this is not the ideal fix, but for those who want to give it a try, it worked for me and redeemed a major Christmas disappointment for my 8-year old.

My 8 year old son was dying for this toy, so you can imagine how happy he was when Santa brought him one Christmas morning. After putting in the batteries and having the thing fire through about half a belt's worth of darts it simply quit working. The belt feeding mechanism won't rotate to push any more darts to the bolt and won't even fire manually. The heartbreak of listening to my son say "I can't believe Santa sent me a broken toy" and seeing the look on his face was hard to deal with. I normally love Nerf products but this one is a dud and would advise everyone to avoid it.

okay, lemmi just say how awesome this thing is
it is ridiculously awesome
okay, now then, to the meat of the matter
pluses
this gun is ridiculously awesome
it comes with two belts (and is in fact out now, my dad and i bought two from hasbro toys and they arrived July 29
I've yet to use them in our uber Nerf war campaign, but my recent Vulcan on Vulcan battle with my dad has yielded the following
rate of fire is staggering, this baby can lay down five more rounds than the rapid twenty, allowing for considerably longer bursts, given that it fires at roughly 3 darts per second
reload is on par with the Longshot for ease and speed of reload, you just pull up the chamber hatch and put in the new belt, you don't even need to remove the old one, it just falls out after firing the last round
despite this the rounds are very secure, one can easily pick the gun up and run around with little fear of jamming
the gun also comes with two belts, allowing fifty rounds of ammo, more than any other gun by far
this, added with it's sturdy yet maneuverable tripod as well as the option to go manual (fire each round as if it were in a Longshot) make this a formidable weapon, whether you've got batteries or not
now, the downsides
this thing is HUGE
i have a bit of trouble hefting it, and I'm 16 years old
you cannot tactically reload
this means you can't add new rounds to a magazine or belt after firing it, meaning if you accidentally fire, or your other belt is full, you're stuck till you empty this one (Although you can, provided you pump the manual lever just right, cycle the whole belt through the gun without cocking it...though it takes an hair-touch)
the gun is prone to jam(well, skip is more like it, since it cycles rounds with a system of pronged wheels) if you run around with the belt loose and don't have the box attached. in fact, without the box you're pretty much screwed trying to run with this thing (forget what you saw on the Great Office War people)
and lastly, the D batteries (6 of them!) are really what make this gun, and without them, your stuck with a big long shot
however, all these problems can easily be overcome (well, except for the weight issue, so don't expect your little six year old to be running around like Rambo)
and as such, this gun is beyond awesome, but definitely not worth $80, go to hasbro and buy it for 40, or if you can wait just wait till amazon "comes out" with it
Edit:
After two years (yes that's right two years) of near constant use with two of these, including running around, shooting, hitting things, stripping belts out, etc etc (in essence beating the hell out of them) I can safely say
Those people up there who talk about how it broke in five minutes I can almost personally garuntee got either the short end of the stick or were over exaggerating how it "broke" I've reloaded thousands (yes literally thousands, we have nerf wars on an almost weekly basis for hours) of rounds into these belts, swapped belts hundreds of times, and the only thing that is wrong with either of them is one now has a sticky lock clamp. (In essence, to reload you have to press the underside of the door hatch to release it, rather than just pull it up as usual) and that is a minor problem at worst. We also have yet to need a replacement on the batteries, nor do we need to fear loss of power. It's simply a matter of the following: little Timmy will love it, but it's a complex machine. Don't let little Timmy try to yank on the belt or take out his aggression on it, let him sit it on a table and shoot at everyone who walks by the front of your house.

Like many others on here, it's Christmas day, my son really was excited that he received this for Christmas. We enjoyed it for a total of about 20 minutes, then the little white cylinder in she shell chamber popped out and jammed in position, now the shells don't advance nor does the gun fire darts. The instructions say to cock it slightly to get the cylinder to go back in but, I had no success. I tried everything I could think of to no success. My only hope is that Amazon will honor the return of this hunk of junk along with the extra set of ammo I bought for it. Nerf has really blew it.

Hello, I am reviewing the Nerf Vulcan EBF-25 (By the way, I am not actually Karen, but her 16 year old son). I recieved this for Chistmas '09 and it is still running perfectly. Ignore the poor reviews as this is actually a good product. As long as you ensure that the beltis being fed properly, you shouldn't have any problems whatsoever. For that reason, I would only recomend this for older children as you do need to take care of it (making sure the belt is being fed correctly, etc) and that this is a rather large and heavy nerf gun. This is meant to be more stationary, firing from a secure position, not chasing people around with it (though I can chase people around as I am older and it is both satifying and VERY fun. All in all a great nerf product. IGNORE BAD REVIEWS, THIS IS A GOOD NERF GUN.

Great idea, but the gun is too complicated to work for very long. The first day the advancing mechanism failed. Before the mechanism failed, it never fired all 25 rounds. One would always get stuck in the barrel or stay in the drum. Many jams.

I think this toy is going to be a headache for many people. It's probably better for adults than kids. I can see children getting very frustrated with it due to jams and technical issues. My advice is to get a simple Nerf gun.