Review
The Nerf N-Strike Vulcan EBF-25 gives you the auto-blasting advantage when you’re at foam-filled war with your friends and enemies. Children and adults ages 6 and up will love the EBF-25, the largest full auto blaster that Nerf makes. It lets you shoot 25 sonic micro darts at up to 3 darts per second for an offensive assault. .caption { font-family: Verdana, Helvetica neue, Arial, serif; font-size: 10px; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; } ul.indent { list-style: i…
Buy Nerf N-Strike Vulcan EBF-25 Blaster – Yellow at Amazon
The Nerf Vulcan, the latest release in Nerf’s “N-Strike” line of toys, is a fully automatic belt-fed Nerf gun. It retails for $40.00 and don’t let anyone tell you differently. It requires six D-cell batteries to run the gun on full-auto, but single-fire mode requires no batteries.
When firing, the Vulcan is no louder than an electric shaver, and probably quieter than many of those. On fresh batteries, it does fire ~2-3 darts per second, taking around 8 seconds to empty an entire 25-round belt of darts.
Its ranges vary pretty wildly, but 20-30 feet is about average. If you’ve used the Nerf Maverick, its ranges are comparable to the Vulcan’s. These ranges make the Vulcan well-suited to indoor fun, but rather ineffective outdoors when targets tend to be further away.
I find the gun bulky and unwieldy, and I’m speaking as a 5′ 9″ adult. For children, (ages 6 and up according to the box) they will have to rely on the handy detachable, folding tripod to use the Vulcan effectively. Running around with the gun is very difficult, made more so by the detachable ammunition box’s tendency to fall off when jostled.
The valuepack edition of the Vulcan (identifiable by the green stripe on the right end of the box) includes an extra ammunition belt, 25 extra darts to fill the belt with, and a shoulder strap in addition to the Vulcan and its normal accessories. The valuepack is the same price as the regular Vulcan, so buying anything but the valuepack is silly. The shoulder strap is a good quality item, and widely adjustable to fit any person.
A word on the tripod: It’s quite stiff, necessarily so because of the Vulcan’s weight. When you move it by hand, it sounds as if you’re breaking it; this isn’t the case, relax.
The Vulcan uses sonic micro darts which are supposed to whistle as they fly through the air. My darts have thus far never whistled. They lack suction cups, so there won’t be any neat forest-of-darts sticking to walls, televisions, etc.
The Vulcan features three N-strike accessory mounting rails. These will allow you to attach the Longshot’s scope, the Recon’s flip-up sight and red-dot sight, the green tactical light, or the N-Strike Unity system’s scout blaster. NONE of these are included with the Vulcan, just to be clear. I also recommend *not* attaching the Longshot’s scope to the top of the gun, because it’s very difficult to remove due to how it wedges into place.
Refill packages including Vulcan ammo belts and darts will be available soon, if they aren’t in stores already.
Here are the pros and cons for an at-a-glance evaluation.
Pros:
Rate-of-fire
Ammunition-capacity
Reload Time (Loading a fresh belt, not filling a belt with darts)
Handy tripod
Cons:
Weight
Unwieldy size
Reload time (filling a belt with darts)
Battery cost (Roughly $8.00 worth of batteries)
Ammo-box connection fails when jostled
I purchased this for my sons birthday. He is the youngest of 4 boys and they all like to play nerf dart wars. We were hoping that the machine gun would be a lot of fun, and he was hoping for ‘flare and more of a fighting chance’. The gun worked fabulously for the first afternoon and evening. If I completed the review within the first 24 hours it would have been five stars. All of the boys loved it. Early the second day the gearing mechanism started failing to advance the belt and load the next “round”. In addition, I noticed the cylinder that releases the compressed air and provides the energy to launch the nerf bullet was jammed and didn’t return to recessed position. The cylinder must recess to allow advancing of ammo belt. I suspect it was the jamming of the compression chamber cylinder that caused belt advancement gear failure. I tried disassembling the gun to examine what was causing the jam. I learned there was no disassembling and the only choice was to completely break several plastic welds to learn what caused the issue.
Summary, a great gun for about 500 shots after that the manufacturing materials and quality of assembly failed at it is now in the dumpster for recycling.
The Vulcan EBF-25 looks like it would be a blast for kids to play with, but unfortunately the toy is “JUNK” Quality.
I bought it for my son for his 8th birthday. He literally played with it for 2 hours. He went through about 6 reloads (it was a bit time consuming finding all the dispensed rounds and reloading the belt).
One of the first problems that he had with it was that the belt would not always advance after firing. I tried it and found that if I “gently” pulled on the belt, it would help it to advance to the next round. He tried it, pulled just a little too hard (nothing dramatic – just a bit harder than “gentle”), and that was it, it’s broke!!!
Something internal broke or stripped. Now the gun just makes a horrible noise when trying to fire and it won’t advance the belt at all. It won’t even manually fire single shot rounds now.
I gave it to him at about 5:30, and between 7:00 – 7:30, it was done!
Conceptionally, it’s a fun toy. But man, if it’s made for young boys to play with, it needs to be tough enough for a scrawny kid to play with! For $35+, it needs to last a bit longer than a couple of hours.