Maxx Action Zombie Crossbow Blaster Review

I don’t always buy popper-type blasters, but when I do, they’re always fun to use. Useful in foam combat? Not usually (unless all the participants are very young). But when you see a cool new variation, you have to pick it up!

Such is the case with the Maxx Action Zombie Crossbow. It doesn’t do anything new, but it does look amazing!

Play Ball!

No animals were actually fired upon.

The Zombie Crossbow may be a simple popper (akin to old things like the Nerf Reactor), but it went all-in on theming. The blaster is meant to look like a baseball bat, with molded “grip tape”, added handles, and a fake accessory rail (the dimensions aren’t anything standard). There’s even a removable faux red dot sight to complete the pretend play factor. The crossbow arms themselves are decorative, and the string is just a weak, stretchy cord. You’ll have to use your muscles here, sorry.

Operation is easy. Push the five “baseballs” into the mouth of the blaster, past the sealing gasket. Pull back the rear of the bat. Finally, push the two parts of the blaster together to build pressure and fire a ball.

It’s a simple setup. Easy to understand why it’s persisted so long in the blaster space.

Performance

Firing over my chronograph, I got an average of 45fps. A good shot can exceed 50fps, but doing so likely means putting all your attention on pumping the blaster, with none on aiming it accurately.

You can easily fire off balls at around 2.5 per second. Rate of fire is always a strong suit for poppers like this.

Internals

Is there any real reason to open this up? Just curiosity.

This blaster does have some dead space, but that is inevitable when you’re using the baseball bat aesthetic, and the ammo is wide enough to not fit in the handle. As a designer/engineer, you then just have to match the volume being pressurized to the space being filled by ammo – *all while* keeping in mind that a young child should be firing one ball with each pump, so the sealing gasket can’t be too narrow. In blasters like this, ease of use is a dominating concern, not performance. Just some food for thought.

Final Thoughts

I have yet to use this blaster in gameplay…but when I do, it will be thoroughly hilarious. For “older” gameplay types, running this successfully is an achievement in itself.

For the target audience (young kids), its’ a fun blaster for the collection. It works, the theme is well done, and they get to hunt zombies. What’s not to like?