Zing Spiral Power Popper Review

One of the most interesting surprises to come this year at Toy Fair was Zing’s distribution of Hip Shot’s various dart and ball blasters (which themselves are mainly old Tack Pro blaster designs). Soon after, the Spiral Power Popper appeared on Walmart shelves, for $35. I’ve had mine for a while…but somehow I missed writing a review! I should get on that!

The Spiral Power Popper is a pleasant surprise to see, especially when ball blasters are mostly on their way out. Mine shoots way harder than expected, as well. And with a little bit of tweaking, you can improve the ranges and accuracy, as well. All this in a blaster meant for one hand? You should grab one.

Running the Rival Gauntlet

The Spiral Power Popper operates on a similar principle as the now-defunct D-Dart blasters; you hold a grip and manipulate the buttons while a ring of ammo spins around your wrist and feeds foam into a pair of flywheels. A spring-loaded pusher rides along a track on that ring, slamming into the ammo as the chamber lines up with the flywheels.

Loading the blaster from empty consists of turning a tab on the back to lift away the pusher. You can then push a ball into each of the 22 chambers, rotating the ring as needed. When you’re finished, turn that tab back.

The blaster features both a master ON/OFF switch and a trigger. That trigger operates the flywheel motors, the ring-turning motor, and an internal LED. Yes, all of them are on the same circuit! That means your first shot will range from being just okay to being really weak, depending on where the ring is aligned when you press the trigger. Doing everything at once is a tradeoff, but under sustained fire, the flywheel motors can still ramp up to full speed. So it works.

The Spiral Power Popper comes with a 2S Li-Ion pack, that uses an SM-4P connector. This is a bit different from the other connectors we see in the hobby, so don’t throw away the charging cable because you already have cables from Dart Zone or Xshot.

Performance and Gameplay

The Spiral Power Popper works well in gameplay, although in PvP cover is much appreciated. Depending on where the ring sits when you last stopped firing, that initial shot can be substantially weaker. But with the 2.5 ball per second firing rate, the flywheels quickly spin up to fire ~94fps shots. Not an amazing rate of fire for an automatic blaster, but not bad, either. Note that since the balls it comes with were lost at a Nerf war, that I measured the fps with genuine Nerf Rival ammo.

The open nature of the ball chambers also makes reloading easy. They retain the ammo (shaking the blaster won’t make them pop out), and you can pop in spare ammo as you go.

Internals and Modification

The internals are essentially the same as that Tack Pro gauntlet I reviewed in 2022. Even so, here are some pictures.

As you can see, all the systems are wired in parallel.

As before, this blaster doesn’t have any hop-up mechanism, and just spits balls out. At close range, this matters less, but it does mean the ammo will drift in various directions as distance increases.

To solve that issue, I went ahead and modeled a new orange tip that includes a hop-up tab. The Printables page includes two options, as your available ammo and the exact height of the flywheels above the motors can vary. The range only increases a little bit, from my initial backyard testing, but the overall placement of shots improves substantially.

Final Thoughts

Having easy access to a Rival gauntlet is finally a reality, and the Zing Spiral Power Popper doesn’t disappoint. It’s at Walmart here in the US, though I’ve seen it online at Costco in other countries (for example). And it’s lots of fun to use, especially in stock wars or Human v Zombies settings. At the very least, you should grab one for the collection.