Review: Nerf Rival Pilot XXIII-100

The Nerf Rival line isn't available in Australia, presumably because it exceeds the kinetic energy limits on toys here. I recently had an overseas holiday to a country which had Rival stuff available (among many others - check my FB page), so decided to grab one of the single-shot blasters. I opted for the Pilot, and while I have no intention of investing any more into Rival, it is a lot of fun and definitely worth the purchase.

The Box

Pretty ordinary open-style box.

Pilot Blaster

The Pilot is a nicely stylised, break-open single shot blaster. Paint detail is limited to just the Rival logo on the right side, but additional colour and shape is provided by multiple different coloured plastic shell components. I think it works quite effectively, with an obvious bias towards the blue body, but an overall solid mix of colour.

Compared to Nerf's typical dart blasters, the Pilot is significantly bulkier. Part of this reflects accommodating the greater width of Rival rounds compared to darts, but also the older-intended audience.

Like many other Nerf blasters, the Pilot has a set of built-in iron sights.

Of note is the little tab near the end of the barrel - I've seen this called a "hop-up" tab. This tab imparts spin on exiting Rival rounds, causing them to generate a degree of lift for additional range, as well as improving horizontal accuracy. A "hop-up" tab can be found on most (perhaps all?) Rival blasters.

Unlike most Nerf blasters I have held, the Pilot has a large and rather wide handle. This is partly to house the hefty plunger tube, but also accommodates larger hands as expected for Rival's older target audience.

The Pilot features a trigger lock on the bottom of its trigger guard. Pushing the lock forward will prevent the trigger being pulled.

The Pilot uses a T-pull prime much like the Jolt and its many variants, with the T inline with the blaster rather than perpendicular. It is quite a hefty prime compared to typical Nerf blasters, hinting at its power.

As mentioned several times already, the Pilot has a break-open barrel for loading. This barrel automatically opens upon prime, springing forward and down. This exposes the chamber in which to load a Rival round, as well as the seal and air restrictor on the outlet of the plunger tube.

Loading of the Pilot is relatively simple and intuitive. Priming the blaster automatically pops open the barrel, after which you simply need to load a Rival round into the chamber, and close the barrel up. Note that the barrel needs to be angled back up first, before being pulled back to lock in firing position.

Curiously, there is no built-in trigger lock besides the safety. This means that it is possible to pull the trigger while the chamber is exposed, or hold the trigger down while priming to open the barrel without actually priming the blaster.

Given the open chamber design, it is entirely possible to load multiple Rival rounds into the Pilot at once. These will be fired out all at once, for a burst of rounds albeit with less range than if just one round was loaded.

Rival Accu Rounds

The Rival rounds that come with the Pilot are of the Accu variant. According to the Nerf wiki, Accu rounds have larger dimples than regular Rival rounds - I have no idea how true this is or if this difference significantly affects performance.

Despite having already seen Rival rounds in-person, I was again surprised with the size of Rival rounds - they are smaller than I expected, for some reason.

Much has been said about Rival rounds by others, given I'm almost a decade late to the line. For the sake of this review, I'll just mention the major reloading advantage they have over darts - specifically that they don't need to face any particular direction to be loaded and fired correctly.

Pilot Performance

Rival rounds don't pass cleanly through the chronograph that I have, so sadly I can't get good data myself. The best testing range I currently have (that doesn't have a high risk of losing rounds) is only about 10m long, and the Pilot clears that range with ease. The Box art claims up to 90FPS, which I can definitely believe.

Accuracy is quite good in the (short) test range I have. Thanks to hop-up giving the rounds vertical spin, the Pilot has very little horizontal variation in shots, making the built-in iron sights surprisingly effective. Vertical variance is larger, but is more manageable given typical human-sized targets are much taller than they are wide.

Rate of fire is, as expected, quite slow being a single-shot. However, the Pilot has a key advantage over dart-firing single shots. Where darts need to be carefully aligned and inserted into the barrel, Rival rounds can be simply dropped straight into the chamber. I find that this convenience shaves off up to a second of loading time with the Pilot - where I find comparable dart-firing single shots to take around 3 seconds between shots, I can get shots off with the Pilot roughly every 2 seconds.

Game Utility

The Pilot is a pretty typical single-shot. It can put out fairly accurate shots to reasonable range, though the range advantage is less significant nowadays with increasingly common high power retail blasters. It is small, so will not impede mobility, and can be easily carried as a backup blaster.

It isn't going to win outright firefights with most other blasters, particularly in close-quarters, simply by virtue of volume-of-fire (or lack thereof).

The Pilot probably shouldn't be your only blaster, but it can serve effectively as one part of a wider loadout.

Value and Summary

I purchased my Pilot for 70 Malaysian Ringgit - roughly 22AUD/15USD at the time. I believe the RRP is 12USD. The Knockout, an older Rival single-shot, is slightly cheaper at 10USD. Given the (slight) extra complexity of a break-open system, I think this is a reasonable, though not exceptional, price. There are a number of very solid non-single-shot blasters around the 15-20USD range within the Rival/competitor range. Looking wider into dart blasters drastically increases the competition as well.

Overall, I think the Rival Pilot is a solid and fun blaster. It packs a hefty punch (by my Aussie blaster standards at least), and makes good of several advantages that Rival rounds have over darts. Its break-open feature is both fun and practical, allowing relatively quick loading of rounds into ideal position in the chamber. It's not exactly cutting-edge, but at its price, it doesn't need to be.

Power: 7/7

Accuracy: 4/5

Rate of Fire: 1/5

Usability: 4.5/5

Value for Money: 4/5

Overall: 3.7/5

Personal Rating: 4/5 - a fun and effective Rival blaster, ideal as an entry level purchase or a compact backup blaster.

Internals and Mod Potential:

Image taken from Blasterhub: https://blasterhub.com/2023/03/nerf-rival-pilot-review/

The Pilot has a simple internal setup much like a Jolt with a fancy barrel. Its direct plunger in the handle is quite sizeable, and the seal from the plunger into the barrel seems quite good.

If you are inclined to rebarrel it for darts, that is a very easy prospect. The barrel can easily be retrofitted with a dart-firing barrel if desired. Additionally, the break-open seems to be angled just enough to load in even full-length darts without further alteration - a notable advantage over other long-barrelled single-shot blasters.