Shooting your friends with LASERS! RECOIL Multiplayer Starter Set

It’s not every day that you get to spend your afternoons playing laser tag with your coworkers, terrorizing the office as you unload a virtual clip at your workspace besties… unless you’re lucky enough to have the RECOIL Multiplayer Starter Set in your workplace. We spent the last month giving this wifi laser tag system by Skyrocket a thorough playtest.

The starter set comes with two guns, a wireless hub, AR markers, gun mounts, and sensors. The wireless hub is easy to setup, and provides a 500 foot play area. The guns have a good weight to them (heavy enough that you feel like you’re using a weapon, not a cheap plastic toy, and provide a very satisfying and tactile feedback when fired. Sensors, which register damage from your opponents’ guns, are plugged into the bottom of the gun via a thin wire, and each player places their sensor in their back pocket. RECOIL supports up to sixteen players, and the starter set can be expanded by purchasing additional RK-45 Spitfire guns, Frag Grenades and even the SR-12 Rogue, a high fire-rate, magazine capacity shotgun.

Playing requires that each participant have a smartphone running the RECOIL app, which is free to download and takes up roughly half a gigabyte of space on iOS. Phones are mounted to the guns via an adjustable phone mount, and by plugging earphones into the phone, the app provides directional cues for enemy gunfire, as well as status updates, match information, and sound effects when targeting the AR markers. The app allows you to select the length of the match, pick your teams, and provides spawn and respawn locations. The app keeps track of hits, kills, reaspawn cooldown timers, and announces a winner at the end of each match–though we did often find that both players were deemed winners. The provided AR markers should be distributed across the playing area, and provide boots and ammunition when targeted.

While it’s very easy to setup the wifi hub, connecting all the phones to the wifi network requires coordination and sometimes a bit of luck, meaning that younger players will likely need some parental assistance during setup. The wifi hub and two guns require 12 AA batteries, and we found that it doesn’t play especially well with the rechargeable kind. While we did have a great deal of fun with it in the office, we do think it would be even more fun in an outdoor or wooded setting. Check out the video above to see our unboxing, some footage of the RECOIL Multiplayer Starter Set in action, as well as our final thoughts. The RECOIL Multiplayer Starter Set is intended for ages 12 and up, and is available for $129.99.

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