Nerf maker Hasbro has heard you loud and clear, Adam Savages of the world: you want to be able to shoot foam projectiles for days, without carrying around a belt full of magazines or constantly stooping down to reload.

Today, the company’s announcing Nerf Hyper, a new line of blasters that not only shoots harder (up to 110 feet per second) than any stock blaster but also features the company’s fastest reloads yet, thanks to a smaller foam projectile that takes up so little space, you can fit 40 of them inside a pistol-sized blaster. That’s unheard of in Nerf. You can clip on (or carry around) 50 or 100 round canisters to quickly top them up, much like a paintball gun.

Image by Hasbro

Hasbro doesn’t have a firm release date for Hyper yet beyond “2021,” but we’re getting three blasters to start:

• The $30 Nerf Hyper Rush-40 is the 40-round pistol I mentioned; it’s a single-shot, spring-action where you pull back the entire slide (including its integrated hopper), then fire once.
• The $40 Hyper Siege-50 holds 50 rounds in a pump-action shotgun design that features slam fire too; hold down the trigger and it’ll fire as fast as you pump. See it atop our gallery below.
• But the flagship is clearly the $70 Hyper Mach-100, a fully automatic SMG design that takes D batteries and spits out foam balls from its 100-round hopper. See it at the top of this post.

Note that none of the new blasters actually breaks records for how many shots you get before reloading — the $100 Nerf Rival Nemesis, $100 Perses, and $200 Prometheus already featured hoppers capable of fitting 100 or more of Hasbro’s larger Rival balls. Rival was already capable of 100 feet per second, so 110fps also isn’t a huge jump.

No, it’s the capacity-to-size ratio of these blasters that’s truly impressive. “In the volume where you could previously house 25 Rival rounds, you can now fit 100 Hyper rounds,” Hasbro SVP and Nerf brand manager Tom Warner tells The Verge.

Where the fan-favorite Perses just barely fit 100 into a big, beefy SMG unless you invested in an aftermarket hopper, it might be easier now. The next time Nerf makes a big underslung cannon like the Prometheus, you might theoretically be able to fire 800 rounds without reloading once. And it wasn’t too long ago a six-shot revolver was considered the state of the art in stock Nerf sidearms.

Hasbro

And while you might wind up spending on new ammo, you could pay a lot less per shot if you buy in bulk. While the 50- and 100-round refill canisters will retail for $12 and $20 respectively, you’ll be able to pick up a pack of 200 rounds for under $30. That works out to 15 cents per projectile — far less than the 27 cents Nerf charges per Elite dart, not to mention the 36 cents per Rival, 40 cents per Ultra, or 50 cents for each Mega dart.

Hasbro tells us that while it needed to find a new material for Hyper balls, they should actually fly further now, while still being able to bounce. No word on whether they’ll curve.

It’s been over five years since the Nerf community showed that Rival was perfect for high-capacity, rapid-fire blasters, and the Nemesis and Perses were an excellent start, but Hasbro also recently got trounced when it comes to long-range blasters while still trying to sell us on its proprietary Ultra dart. But Hyper looks like it could do a lot of the things Nerfers want all at once.

I’m very eager to see where Hyper will fit in the new foam blaster meta once the pandemic recedes, and whether the community will embrace it or not.