My Nerf armory begins and ends with the entire DinoSquad blaster line-up. In this review, I'm going to share some objective facts about the Raptor-Slash along with my opinion on how it performs and operates with adults and my 2 young children (ages 3 and 5), then compare it to the other DinoSquad blasters in the line-up. The Raptor-Slash is a revolver-style blaster with a 6-dart drum that's fixed to the blaster (non-removable) and is primed by pulling back on the blue slide just above the grip. Darts are fed from the front of the drum, which has to be manually rotated at least once to reload since the molded plastic supports block 1-2 of the chambers, which makes reloading a bit slow/tedious compared to other blasters. This blaster can also be slam fired (e.g. hold the trigger while pulling back on the blue slide repeatedly). It's also priced in the middle of the DinoSquad pack. Positives first. We love the aesthetics of this blaster and to my adult hand, the ergonomics generally make sense. The plastic feels durable and the rubberized spikes on the Raptor's head is a nice touch. Slam-firing this blaster feels akin to "fanning the hammer" on western-style revolvers and is fun in a novel and stylistic way. That's about all the positives I have to share about this blaster. Negatives? Well, the slide was difficult to prime by my 3 and 5 year old kiddos, so they never use this blaster. This could be solved if there was more texture or contoured plastic that small hands could grip. Of course, everyone's different so your mileage may vary. The adults also pass on the Raptor-Slash blaster because of its poor performance. I do not own a chronograph, but in a side-by-side comparison, this blaster visibly lob darts rather weakly in the ~50 fps range when compared to my other blasters which all appear to be in the 70 fps par range for Nerf Elite blasters. Its poor velocity is confirmed in my EXCLUSIVE pain-o-meter testing (i.e. when I'm shot by this blaster). When shot by this blaster with Nerf Elite and Accustrike darts, I'd register the pain at a 2 on a scale of 10. Most critical among my complaints, there's always 1 dart that just limply falls out the barrel, like there's not enough pressure or there's a poor seal. I hope it's a defect with my blaster and not characteristic of all Raptor-Slash blasters. There's also no place for storing extra darts on this blaster, so you only get 6-shots. Lastly, apparently this blaster was such an afterthought to Nerf that they didn't even include it in their "DinoSquad" commercial that you can watch on their official DinoSquad website. In the commercial, Nerf specifically only calls out the Rex-Rampage, Stego-Smash, and Tricera-Blast as the "3 DinoSquad blasters to choose from." No love for the Raptor-Slash at Hasbro. A bad omen? Overall, this blaster was a disappointment, but a slam-firing adult can have some fun with this just spraying a general area with 5-ish darts (because 1 dart always fails to launch in our blaster). If you're between this blaster and another of the DinoSquad blaster as a sidearm, then I'd 100% recommend the Stego-Smash over this. Even though you're giving up capacity and rate of fire, my two Stego-Smash blasters hit harder and more accurately than the Raptor-Slash. For a young child, the Stego-Smash was also easier to prime for my 3 and 5 year olds. If you're not specifically looking for a sidearm sized Dino blaster, then I'd recommend the Tricera-Blast. It's more accurate and overall more fun to reload and operate than the Raptor-Slash. Rex-Rampage is in another league, in my opinion, so if you're just looking for ONE Dino-themed Nerf branded blaster regardless of size and mechanism, then I'd highly recommend the Rex-Rampage over them all. (Edit) Upon further inspection, I found an over extruded piece of plastic attached to the stem inside of the faulty chamber, which was the cause of the malfunction I mentioned earlier (e.g. 1 out of 6 darts lobbing weakly out of the barrel). This is 100% a manufacturing defect and likely a rare quality control escapee. I spent about 15 minutes with a headlamp and a thin chopstick working the extruded plastic tumor back and forth until it finally snapped free of the stem. Now that we have all 6 chambers firing as expected, I still have to stick this with my 3-star review. The blaster is still shooting rather weakly and likely below the 70 fps par.
