Buzz Bee Mayhem Outrage Review

The largest blaster in the Mayhem line (in the United States, at least) is the Outrage. At $20, it fills the traditional place of past Buzz Bee entries like the Sidewinder and Barbarian, with a manual plunger and a removable dart drum. And with regional holiday sales, 30 dart capacity blasters can be quite appealing. However, given some of the firing issues with this blaster, it’s probably not the best choice to go under the tree.

MAYHEM, LIKE ME!

The Outrage is a simple blaster in setup. It operates purely on slam fire – pulling back directly moves the plunger to fire the dart, and pushing the priming handle forward rotates the drum.  The drum is held in place by a special plastic insert; press down the buttons on either side to move it forward and remove the drum. Once you’ve loaded the drum and put it in place, move that plastic insert back. It will go inside the middle of the drum, forcing other pieces to move and make a solid axis of rotation.

The trigger piece is there just for show, to be clear. It gives a place for the index finger to sit and grip the blaster.

The blaster itself looks great, matching the rest of the product line with the “industrial honeycomb” motif molded into the blue plastic, and translucent orange plastic bits showing darts (there’s no spring to show off here, so the darts/dart path are the most interesting thing to see).

The drum itself has two staggered arcs of barrels, which line up with foam-sealed air outlets at the back of the blaster. As you fire, you rotate the drum a little bit to the next barrel on the *other* arc, and so on. Doing so fits 30 darts in a relatively small space. Spring-loaded tabs at the front of the drum area mesh with the gear faces at the front of the drum, rotating it. It’s a simple system…but it’s not quite good enough.

In practice, depending on how fast you move the priming handle forward, you can skip barrels. Admittedly, it’s possible that this blaster is tuned for “average kid strength”, so for some people this might not be an issue. However…

Performance and Gameplay

The Outrage has another problem, both when using its darts and other darts: it holds darts too tightly. Darts these days tend to have firmer foam than older darts (the yellow suction cup Buzz Bee darts of old, for example). The drum, in addition to the somewhat tight outer diameter, has a spigot at the base that compresses dart foam from the inside. This not only makes the drum harder to load (you end up either twisting or bending the dart with force trying to set the dart in completely), but it also holds the dart so tight that it can’t fire (or moves just far enough to jam drum movement). Even after letting a fully-loaded Outrage sit for TWO MONTHS after a Humans v Zombies game, many of the darts still didn’t fire. Which means it was easier for air to leak out the foam/drum interface at the back than it was to physically fire the darts. And since a decently beefy spring pushes that foam seal against the back of the drum, that’s saying a lot.

When I could get darts to fire, they were in the 70s in terms of fps. But when the question is “Will they fire?”, the speed becomes irrelevant. I was lucky I had a backup blaster for the above-filmed mission of Humans v Zombies, to be able to help at all.

Internals

The blaster setup is simple, and while a long tube connecting the plunger to the barrel isn’t ideal, the large volume helps to compensate for it. But again…if you’re moving a large amount of air at a low pressure, you can’t be holding onto the darts too tightly. Perhaps Buzz Bee can tweak the drum in future releases?

Last Thoughts

There’s always a place for inexpensive accuracy by volume in the blaster world. Spamming darts is fun regardless of age. But the Outrage doesn’t fill that role nearly as well as other blasters. Hopefully future revisions will rectify that mistake.