For my son's sixth birthday last year I gave in and purchased him a Nerf gun which he had been nagging about for months and I had always said no. I had a quick look on amazon before purchasing the gun and the product which I chose was the Nerf N-Strike Barricade RV-10 gun which from memory cost me around £10.00. Now I have to say from the off set that I chose a gun which wasn't going to cost me the earth which it seems many of the Nerf guns do and I felt that around ten pounds was a reasonable price to pay for a product such as this for my son.

==What is it?==

Nerf guns are made by Hasbro and are basically a gun in which you can fire foam darts with. The Nerf N-Strike Barricade RV-10 gun is recommended for children aged six years and over.

The Nerf N-Strike Barricade RV-10 gun is one of the smaller Nerf guns as far as I am aware which was something that I liked as I wanted something that was quite compact and would store easily in my son's toy box at home. This is not to say that the product is really small because it isn't and I would probably compare it to a similar size of one of those power water guns you can get for outside. After a while the gun does get quite heavy to hold and my son would often have to hold it with two hands to make it steady enough to get a good aim. The gun is a tough feeling plastic and yellow, orange and black in colour.

The gun features a ten dart revolving barrel and with the gun you also receive ten whistler darts which are used for putting in the gun for a battle. I would advise purchasing an extra set of darts for use in case any get lost personally and these can be purchased for just a couple of pounds usually.

==Our experience==

My son was delighted last May when he opened this Nerf N-Strike Barricade RV-10 gun and wanted to have a play with it straight away. The gun does require three AA batteries which are not provided so this is something to be mindful of so your child can enjoy the toy immediately.

My son found it quite easy to load the darts in to the barrel by himself but it took us a little while to work out that if you pull the trigger the barrel will move around in to position which made inserting darts easier as we would insert one then pull the trigger to move the barrel round and insert the next. I think it is a good thing that a child can work the gun on their own really because I think the idea of these guns is that you go head to head in a way and shoot each other should you have a friend with a Nerf gun too.

When my son switched on the gun I have to say I was pretty amazed at how noisy it was and there was no way at all that you could sneak up on someone and shoot at them with it because they would most definitely hear you coming! For us this wasn't an issue as my son doesn't have any friends who have a Nerf gun and so he was simply using it for firing at things around the house but for those who would perhaps take things a bit more serious I would advise that if you want to sneak up on people you are better off looking for a different gun.

As my son's Dad came round later on that evening to see him my son took the opportunity to fire the darts at someone and launched an attack on his Dad. As they battled away the delight on my son's face was obvious and he was really having a great time playing with the gun. He did fire a couple of the darts at me and I have to say I was quite surprised with the force in which it hit me and it wasn't painless like I expected it to be! I did tell my son that obviously you mustn't aim the darts at peoples faces and such like and to be honest he did listen to me and aim more for the torso really.

Now of course I am always going to have a go with a product such as this and I was quite surprised with how easy it was to aim the gun and how far the darts did actually travel. My son and I lost a few darts along the way as we rapidly fired the darts from the barrel and so I would say that it is really beneficial to have another set of darts especially if you are going to be using the product outside. We used to set up a little firing range with cardboard tubes and see who could knock the most off using their ten darts which was a nice little game to play and something which is obviously less violent than firing the darts at people!

My son played with this gun on and off for a couple of months and whilst we had a few issues with the darts occasionally getting jammed in the barrel for the most part the gun worked well. However, one day my son got the gun out to play with and it was completely jammed and would not do anything at all. I wondered if the batteries were dead and so I replaced those with brand new ones but it was still jammed and nothing that we did would make the gun work again. My son was pretty gutted to be honest that the toy he had had a lot of fun with had broken so soon after his birthday but in the end he accepted that we would have to throw it away as it wasn't going to work again. Whilst I appreciate that I only paid around ten pounds for the Nerf N-Strike Barricade RV-10 I would fully expect it to last more than a couple of months and so to be honest this has put me off other Nerf products which is a shame because like I said it was clear to see the fun my son had whilst firing the darts at things using this gun.

You can pick up this Nerf gun on amazon for just short of the ten pounds mark at the moment but I can't say that I give it a recommendation purely because ours broke so quickly and hadn't been excessively played with at this point either.

Thank you for reading my review!