Nerf's Laser Tag Guns Are Cool

Nerf's Laser Tag Guns Are Cool

Nerf blasters are two affairs at once. First, and most evidently, they're fake firearms for flinging foam at your friends and foes. But secondly, they're also ingenious works of technology, with ingenious mechanisms of springs and levers to store and launch dates, with varying capacities, accuracies, and firing rates owing to the nature of their innards and projectiles.
It's this clockwork nature that's given rise to a whole generation of tinkerers and engineers who take Nerf blasters far beyond their stock performance. But Nerf's new Laser Ops Pro blasters, the brand's first real foray into laser tag (available online as of Monday), see Nerf shooting from a different slant. Nerf guns made for laser tag are a pure and fascinating departure from classic nerd, opening up fresh possibilities for cooperative play—but losing something at the same time
Laser Tag Is Back In Style
Nerf's Laser Ops Pro blasters work basically like the laser tag guns that came before them. The blasters shoot beams of invisible infrared illumination. Sensors mounted on the barrel of each gun function as the targets for guns to score. Yes, this is vest-free laser tag.
This means Laser Ops Pro blasters are also "smart," meaning they recognize when they've been run into. This means you can work in two ways. For simple out-of-the-box play, just grab a few blasters and start shooting. Every time your blaster gets hit, your health gets down. Once it's used up, you can't shoot anymore until you've had some time to "heal."
A second, more complex mode requires your telephone. Using Nerf's app, you can pair your trusty blaster to a smartphone and unlock the more sophisticated side of this new laser tag frontier.
This mode tracks statistics and has Leaderboards to show just who shot whom and how many times over the course of a couple. It has power-ups that can increase the abilities of your blaster, which are gained by leveling up in multiplayer games or messing around in single player mode, where you can set up your phone as an AR sight and then blast digital drones out of the simulated sky as if you're going cyber skeet shooting.