Nerf Rival Khaos MXVI-4000 Blaster (Red)

What more can be said of the best Blaster of 2016 by the top Nerfer Guru's in America? Drac has named the Khaos as the 2016 blaster of the year and Coop has named it the best 2016 gift of the year (it made the top 5 best list by Bobololo too). At over $70 it is a fairly steep price tag, but what you get is a whole lot of fun. This blaster uses Rival rounds, which look like little foam golfballs. The official Nerf Rival Rounds are yellow in color but you can purchase very good aftermarket Rival balls in a variety of colors from Cornucopia (provided it is the most recent upgraded formula as their first releases were much too soft and brittle). The Nerf Rival Khaos is capable of shooting these rounds at over 100 feet per second (FPS) and has a confirmed average velocity reading of 100 FPS according to my ProChrono Digital Chronograph. This is the first official fully-automatic Rival blaster on the market, and to fire the balls by simply holding down the trigger, there is a conveyor belt (similar to that of the Nerf Hyperfire) that leads the balls into the flywheels, ejecting them with considerable speed and force upon contact (kind of like a baseball pitching machine). There is a convenient jam-access door that allows the user to look and poke around the flywheels if he (or she) so chooses. The internal electrical locks immediately stop any internal movement the moment the door is opened. The balls per second (BPS; not to be confused with Basis Point or Bits/Bytes Per Second) or rounds per second (RPS; not to be confused with Rotations Per Second) is 3.64 (yes, better than Pi), or the entire clunker of a 40 round magazine in 11 seconds. This mag is huge; thick like a text book, and it exceeds the length of my iPad (you might as well use it as a shield once you are out of ammo). There is a tiny switch (that looks like it could break if the mag is ever dropped the wrong way) on the tip of the top part of the mag. This switch opens the flip-top door that swings open on top of the magazine so you can reload it. There are 4 plastic levers with arrows embossed on them to direct you to push the springs down to make reloading possible. These levers and springs pop back up by either pushing a switch on the right of the magazine face, or simply fully inserting the magazine into the blaster (or manually unhinging the 4 plastic levers but that is not recommended). Inserting the mag is another potential issue in itself, and needs to be inserted at a specific diagonal angle to go into the magazine well. The user will have to become accustomed to the orientation and may need to practice with it beforehand to reload quickly, which is actually kind of a bummer, like... a lot since this magazine is *not sold separately and is *not cross-compatible with other Nerf blasters. But I digress, after-all, it does have the largest ball capacity of any Nerf magazine ever released. The battery tray was confusing for me when I first tried to load it with batteries (not included), and you apparently need to unscrew the Phillips screw on the top rear part of the blaster, slide the rear iron-sight panel (it has 2 plastic flip-up iron sights and one of them is on the panel) backwards, then pull the top panel off and slide out the battery tray. For such a pricy blaster, you would expect it to have batteries included, but unfortunately it does not come with the required 6 1.5V D-sized batteries to operate, and that is another con that adds to the following con that I must point out... the weight of this rather large blaster is considerably heavier than the other Rival blasters. Being designed for an older target market of kids over the age of 14, this consideration is pretty much negated due to the increased size and strength of the typical older user, but the smaller/ weaker users will definitely have a harder time moving around with this blaster. As far as ergonomics goes, I have no qualms. The pistol grip is okay and the main trigger, safety locking switch, acceleration (rev) trigger, and mag release are all placed well and are easy to reach for me. I think the front is in desperate need of a more comfortable grip, and perhaps the shoulder stock could have been a little longer, but that is just me being nit-picky. Luckily, there are Rival-specific attachments that will be released soon: One is a red-dot sight, the other is a flashlight foregrip. The grip seems like it was designed specifically for the Khaos since it is *the only current blaster in the entire Rivals line with a Picatinny rail in the area of the fore-grip. The Khaos also has a straight top Picatinny rail that covers the first 3/5 from the front of the blaster. These rails are not designed for the use of Nerf tactical rail accessories, but many do still fit on them. This blaster definitely has modification potential, and the *new Nerf Rivals battery pack could give this Nerf blaster the first legitimate modification performance upgrade in the entire Nerf line. So in conclusion, the Khaos blaster is arguably the best Nerf blaster that Nerf has ever released in terms of performance. It has several cons weighing down it's greatness, but *it also brings with it a lot of firsts in the Nerf blaster universe. Of course, *it will be the best until the Rival Nemesis (100 round with hopper and agitator feeding mechanism) is released. *It is my hope that Hasbro and Nerf take cross-compatibility of it's magazines and ammo as seriously as it used to, and *I hope that their design team and engineers are also listening in on reviews (like this one) to understand what people (like Drac, Coop, and Bobololo) think of their products and to improve it with greater success in the future.*at the time of this review.