Buzz Bee Air Warriors Lightning Strike Review

This blaster was a bit of a surprise! We saw it for the first time on a Reddit post, but now it looks like it’s hitting shelves in the US at Dollar General.

The Lightning Strike isn’t anything special in terms of being a blaster. In fact, I think it’s oriented towards the gimmick more than the dart blasting. But that’s what makes a blaster like this a cute impulse buy, after all.

It’s Cooler When it Spins!

Interestingly, Buzz Bee didn’t have to get any new trademarks filed for the blaster; turns out they already had a Lightning Strike line back in 2003/2004. So Buzz Bee isn’t new to making blasters that light up.

This Lightning Strike features a spinning light within the blaster, hiding under a translucent green plastic cover. When you pull the trigger, the light activates and spins around. The trigger actually has a long pull distance, and you can let go of the trigger and repeat the motion to keep the light spinning. Once it slows down, though, the light turns off.

The Lightning Strike is basic in format. There’s a priming handle to pull back, with relative ease. The blaster holds two darts in the barrel, and fires based off of Buzz Bee’s rotating plunger tube method of switching barrels. It’ll cycle through the barrels instead of “firing the next dart”, like Nerf’s smart AR does. Everything fires with the same power, but it also means that if an empty barrel is lined up…you fire nothing.

The handle is long, with room for all the fingers of a kid or teenager. Adults with much larger hands might have a pinky hanging off, though. If you don’t care about the light, the trigger pull will annoy you, because you HAVE to pull it all the way back in order to release the catch mechanism.

Performance

The Lightning Strike averaged 72fps in my testing. Rate of fire was around 1.5 darts per second – the time required to pull the trigger becomes very noticeable when you’re trying to fire both shots in rapid succession.

Internals

The Lightning Strike takes quite a bit of work to open up, as it turns out. The green grip panel can be easily unclipped with a flathead screwdriver. The top green panel, however, is a bit more interesting. It’s clearly assembled at the factory before the priming handle, due to the metal pin on the plunger. If you want to try it, you could punch out that pin. Otherwise, you have to unclip the front, slide the piece back a little, and clip the green plastic under the plunger. There’s also an extra screw port hiding underneath.

The front iron sight is solvent welded in place, so it may take some effort to pop loose.

The blaster internals are standard for Buzz Bee. The light function is neat, though. There’s a self-contained battery, LED, and switch on the spinning disk. The switch consists of a weak coil spring extending through a loop. When the disk spins, the coil bends to one side, making contact with the loop and completing the circuit.

It’s shockingly bright (I’ve had all the lights off before and used it to navigate through the house to find something, simply by continually pulling the trigger). I want to try using this up at Z13 in the laser tag area just to see what it looks like.

Final Thoughts

The Lightning Strike isn’t special as a blaster; in fact, the trigger mechanism is built around spinning a light. But I do have a soft spot for a gimmick blaster. At the very least, it’s a fun blaster to pick up for the kids.