Gel Zone Pro Kratos Review

Blaster companies don’t always undersell their blasters. Range claims, after all, tend to be the maximum you see, not the typical. In that sense, the Gel Zone Pro Kratos is far better than you’d expect from the price and advertised performance. 200fps? Try 252fps average!

With a $70 price tag, high performance, and the small bonus of glow in the dart rounds, it’s hard to beat the Kratos when it comes to off the shelf gel blasting.

Pulsar, Remixed

Prime Time Toys (the company behind Dart Zone, Gel Zone, and many of the Walmart-branded blasters) already had a solid gel ball blaster entry in the Pulsar Pro. At the time, it was basically as good a blaster as you were going to find (I rated it 10/10), outside of some holiday sales on the various brands. The next iteration, the Kratos that I’m now reviewing, took that platform and made it even better.

The package comes with a blaster, adjustable stock, 500 round magazine, rail attachments, safety glasses, battery, charger, and 10,000 gel rounds (half regular, half glow-in-the-dark). There’s also a hydration pouch in the package – I opted for the option called “fill a giant bucket with ammo and water, hydrate, separate the ammo and water as best as possible, then load your magazine”. After all, I had lots of test firing to do, as well as letting a bunch of friends try out the glowing gel ball blasters at a Halloween party.

The Kratos is quite comfortable to hold and operate; the trigger movement is satisfying, the mag release is easy to reach, and the firing selector switch is easily manipulated by thumb. The stock (using an Nstrike-compatible attachment point) is comfortable and sturdy – I can press it into my shoulder without it collapsing. Meanwhile, the Picatinny-compatible rail attachments are nice. They may be toy-quality sights, but they’re more than adequate, especially considering the fact that gel ball blasting is usually a matter of “accuracy by volume”.

The included magazine holds 500 rounds. It also has LEDs wired inside it; they turn on to “charge” the outgoing flow of gel balls whenever you pull the trigger. Leaving the blaster on full auto for any significant amount of time actually leaves a large section of the magazine glowing. Not necessarily the best result if you’re trying to hide at night, but the effect looks great! Honestly, there’s something to be said for any blaster that has glow-in-the-dark effects. Even if it doesn’t impact gameplay, the visuals of a stream of balls flying towards the target makes your experience that much better.

Performance

Prime Time Toys doesn’t usually overestimate when it comes to advertised ranges or velocities. That trend continues here. The box might say 200fps, but experience (and chronograph measurements) says 252fps on average! That’s insanely high compared to advertised ranges, as well as being far above most (if not all) gel ball blasters on store shelves here in the US. I’ll have to dig out my Pulsar Pro to compare the internals sometime, to see if there’s a noticeable difference in spring strength, barrel length, or some other factor.

The advertised rate of fire is 8 balls per second, but I tended to be closer to 9, especially on a fully charged battery (1800mAh 2S Li-Ion battery pack).

In terms of accuracy, the Kratos was surprisingly accurate. Sure, the rounds don’t go as far due to the lack of hop-up, but they were extremely consistent, so hitting a target is easy.

Internals and Modification

The Kratos, on the inside, has the gearbox system you’d expect from a “primary” type of gel ball blaster. The rest of the internals, from the switch that chooses firing mode to the wiring scheme, are fairly standard. One nice touch, however, is the spring rest. You actually don’t have to take the blaster completely apart to swap out the main spring; you just need to remove the cap on the back of the stock attachment point, then rotate the spring rest until it pops out.

That means you can potentially do a lot more with the Kratos, and do it easily. Indeed, some people already have. And mods that have been done to the Pulsar Pro (adding hop-up, for example) can likely be done here. So you could have a serious contender compared to your friends (or enemies).

Last Thoughts

Using the Kratos is easy, fun, and fulfilling. Hitting opponents consistently at range, at night, with glow-in-the-dark rounds is hard to beat. It looks like a toy, but at the same time it shoots like a pro blaster. That is my personal ideal, and I’m perfectly fine rating this a 10/10.