Buzz Bee Air Warriors Bug Slayer 2.0 Salt Blaster Review

Buzz Bee Toys has been branching out into many other things in the past few years, including small fighting toys (Battle Ballz) and salt guns. The Bug Hunter came out back in 2022, and the original Bug Slayer appeared soon after, aimed at adults in the outdoor section of Walmart and other stores. Interestingly, now there’s a Bug Slayer 2.0, even if it uses the same Walmart link. It not only claims to have more power, but also puts the various branding logos on the back of the package to look more serious.

I don’t have the original on me for comparison, but the new version works pretty well against flies. It also has me wondering if Buzz Bee will ever try its hand at making harder-hitting dart blasters for older customers.

Big Force, Tiny Ammo

The Bug Slayer 2.0 takes a surprising amount of force in order to move the priming handle. Thankfully, the priming handle has enough ridges and greebles to make gripping it easy. However, all that force isn’t going towards a dart. It’s instead firing a small pinch of salt from the forward reservoir.

The blaster comes with a safety built in; the ambidextrous orange lever at the back can be flipped with an adult thumb, and it returns to the safe position on every trigger pull.

The salt reservoir is a clear container with a flip-open cap, although the cap weakly latches in place. This is perhaps the blaster’s greatest weakness, as the lid can be dislodged to spill salt all over. A piece of tape solves the problem, but ideally Buzz Bee needs to tweak the mold to solve the issue. Even so, when that’s the only real issue with a $13 novelty blaster, that’s very minor in the grand scheme of things.

Against flies and soft-bodied insects (the preferred target), it’s fairly effective. The “cloud” of salt generated is wide enough to make aiming easy, although I found being within 1-2′ gave the best results.

Internals

Looking inside the Bug Slayer 2.0, we find a pretty stiff spring, but a relatively small plunger tube compared to dart blasters. This blaster has enough draw length, however, that I wish the blaster had used a larger, moving plunger tube instead. That way, you could throw in a short dart magazine breech!

Even so, I’ll likely convert this into a dart blaster just to experiment. Perhaps a single shot blaster for plinking.

Final Thoughts

I do enjoy going off the beaten path with blasters. And for $13, this is a far more accessible “Adult toy” than similar products like the Bug-A-Salt. But it does make me wonder if Buzz Bee will ever decide to make a pro dart blaster. Reusing this layout with a larger plunger and short darts would make for a fun Adventure Force version of the SPAMF. Just a suggestion.