Adventure Force Aeon Pro X Review

The Adventure Force Nexus Pro X isn’t the only new powerhouse on shelves this spring. A successor to the Aeon Pro also arrived on shelves, keeping the same relative form factor while featuring more quality of life improvements and modding potential. Aiming for 150fps may seem quaint at this point, but for fans of the top-prime setup, the Aeon Pro X makes for both a great new addition to the collection and a nice loaner for new players.

Keeping the same $25 price point? That’s icing on the cake.

Improving the Original

The Aeon Pro X features lots of improvements over the original. For starters, the blaster is short dart only, so there’s no need for the slop in priming that accommodated long darts in the original. The entire priming distance can be dedicated to compressing the spring, which in turn makes for a slightly easier, smoother prime. In the back, there’s an NStrike stock attachment point; I’ve seen many Aeons modified to have stocks, so the fact that Dart Zone included that option this time around is a welcome development.

The blaster, of course, maintains the dual-catch system to maintain magazine compatibility, although the included magazine is a newer design, updated to a Talon-style shape and catch slot. It’s better overall (and looks cool with the translucent purple plastic), but in case you still have plenty of the older DZ mags, they’ll still work here. You can also drop the mag with either your firing hand (via middle finger) or your offhand (via thumb when grabbing the magazine).

The internals are largely identical in layout to the Nexus Pro X, with a large plunger tube, an offset connection to the barrel, and a dart pusher that’s thin enough to allow magazine removal without priming the blaster. Being a “secondary” blaster, there’s no buffer tube for containing a really long spring…but the one DZ used here is still decently large. It also allows the user to remove the cap on the stock attachment point in order to swap out the spring. There are already some low-power and high-power springs available for purchase, along with spacers, but we’ll cover those in a separate post.

In any case, you couldn’t do this with the original Aeon Pro!

The Aeon Pro X comes with a small detachable iron sight, which works well enough. Being a smaller, slide primed blaster, you’re not going to be throwing large aiming attachments up top anyway. If you have other attachments, there are plenty of Picatinny rails to choose from.

Performance

The Aeon Pro X hits around 154fps on average, in my testing. The included injection-molded SCAR barrel doesn’t hurt the velocity, but the slight spin on the darts does improve accuracy considerably. The real shock was using the bearing attachment from the Nexus Pro X; fps increased to 162fps average, along with an increase in accuracy. Clearly, the Aeon Pro X has sufficient power, but not enough barrel. Luckily, there are hobby solutions to that problem.

Slamfire is also an option here, letting you fire as fast as you can move the priming handle (around three darts per second).

Internals

The Aeon Pro X, as mentioned above, has a similar system to the Nexus Pro X, but with less space overall. As such, the spring is shorter in length, as is the barrel. There’s plenty of power available for dart blasting shenanigans. and modders will have a field day making this blaster even more practical, be it for high performance games or lower performance formats.X

Like the Nexus Pro X, the Aeon Pro X can easily be spring swapped. Really, if the Aeon Pro X has a weakness, it’s a need to be a $25 pistol.

For lots of people, though, that’s not a weakness.

Final Thoughts

The Aeon Pro X isn’t as powerful as its older sibling. But it maintains excellent performance at a great price, updating the Adventure Force line fours years after its jump to “professional performance”. Whether it’s for higher fps games or (with modification) lower ones, the Aeon Pro X makes a great addition to both the personal collection and the loaner bin.