Another day, another tag system (Recoil: Part 1)

It's been a while since I've done a laser tag post! There's a new contender on the block, and it's time to run it through it's paces! This time, I've got the Recoil Multi-Player Starter Set in-hand.

The Recoil Multi-Player Starter Set box

The things inside the box

The right side of the RK-45 SPITFIRE Recoil Weapon

The left side of the RK-45 SPITFIRE Recoil Weapon

The front of the Wi-Fi Game Hub

The back of the Wi-Fi Game Hub

The front of the FRAG Grenade Recoil Weapon

The back of the FRAG Grenade Recoil Weapon

As I did with the Lightstrike gear, I want to do as in-depth of a look at this stuff as I can. I'm going to start with the basics(How it feels, whether it plays well), and then dive into the technical details. So let's get going!

Impressions (Before batteries)

The blasters have a good weight to them already, which has me a bit worried that they might be heavy once I actually put the batteries in. There's a whole four buttons, which is reasonable enough. A trigger, a reload, and two other buttons that I'm not actually sure what they are yet. The buttons themselves feel good, though there's no tactical feedback on when the trigger actuates. It's got several three-pin IR receivers poking through the case around the front end, so it should have a fairly decent field of vision. This blaster actually has a three glow-dot iron sight(Two red dots on the rear, one green dot on the front) on it, which is awesome. The iron sight is about as long as they could make it and still fit on the blaster, so if it's well-aligned with the optics in the blaster, it should actually be reasonably accurate.

The blaster's iron sights

The grenade is a pretty good size for throwing, and is pretty rubberized so it should survive the being thrown. It still probably wouldn't be pleasant to get hit with, though, so still be careful where you're throwing it. It's got a lot of LEDs on it, which bode well for either IR coverage or blinkiness.

The Wi-Fi Game Hub is a box with an antenna, a power button, and a battery compartment. There's also a MicroUSB B port on the side. Not a whole lot to say about it, though the built-in handle is a nice touch.

Impressions (After batteries)

As I feared, the blaster is a bit heavy now that I've put batteries in it. Specifically, it's front-heavy. You can use the... Well, it looks suspiciously like a GoPro mount, now that I look at it... You cna use the GoPro mount as a hand-rest for your opposite hand, and it still feels decent, but using it one-handed is probably going to be tiring on your wrist. The round button on the side is the power button, apparently, as it lights up green when I press it, and turns off if I hold it for a few seconds and let go. Even without pairing a phone in, the tagger appears to launch into an "active" mode, where you can pull the trigger to fire in a fully-automatic mode. There's a fairly nice recoil effect, too. Kinda noisy, but it's got a good feel to it. Turning on an IR receiver gadget, I can see that it does send an IR packet with every trigger pull. Somewhat... Questionable... Is that it also has a red LED on the front that blinks as a "muzzle flash" with every shot...

The frag grenade's button appears to have three "modes". Pressing it once turns the grenade on, and it starts blinking a 10-second countdown on the LED, and then sends a flood of IR packets out for 45 seconds. Holding the button blinks the LED off and on until you let go, and it sends IR packets for one second, then doesn't for one second, and repeats this two-second IR cycle until you let go of the button. Pressing the button to start the countdown, then pressing it again before it finishes seems to turn it off, and then it sends about three seconds worth of IR.

The Wi-Fi Game Hub seems to have a couple different button states, too. The first press turns it on, and the LED starts doing a pulsing fade-in-and-out thing. Pressing it again after that will make the LED blink on and off for a bit, then turn off. I assume this is a "safe shutdown" thing. Holding down the button while it's doing the pulsing will make it start to do a "half-pulse", where it goes between 50% and 100% brightness. The hub doesn't appear to have an IR capability.

Turning on various combinations of blasters and the grenade, none of them appear to respond to each other at all yet. So there doesn't appear to be any "simple" games that don't need an app. Though on closer inspection, I notice that there's no speaker on the blaster, so there's not really any way to give feedback for the game progress... Can't tell a person they've gotten hit when the only feedback method is the rumble/recoil motor, which is already used for firing.

Starting up the app

My phone's an LG G5, running LineageOS(Android 7.x). Starting up the app, it asks for location, SD card storage, camera, and microphone access. It asks for me to agree to an EULA, and for a nickname, then tells me to turn on the Wi-Fi Game Hub. Apparently I never waited long enough for it to finish booting up, because it says to wait 30-45 seconds for the LED to stop blinking before going on to the next step.

It then walks me through connecting to the hub, and warns me to disable cell data and that I might need to tweak other settings to get my phone to stay connected to the hub(This is a known problem with cell phones trying to connect to ad-hoc networks made by devices that don't have an internet connection, so nothing unexpected, just unfortunate).

It then asks me what kind of blaster I want to use, and then turns on Bluetooth and connects to it.

I wander through the menus for a bit, and there's options to change your nickname, and little help things for how to use the grenade(Which tells me that the "hold button" mode I found earlier is for claiming the grenade by a player during the game).

I hit the "Battle" option, which then starts a firmware update on the hub, and tells me to restart it by pushing the button, waiting for the blinking to stop, then push the button again to turn it back on and wait for the pulsing to stop. This goes well, and my phone automatically reconnects to the hub.

There's a few game types available currently, split into "Indoor" and "Outdoor", with the note that outdoor games require GPS. I'll get to the outdoor stuff later, for now I just want to see what Indoor does, so I pick the only Indoor option currently available, "Skirmish". It then asks me how long of a game I want, with a default of 2 minutes, and a score limit, which defaults to unlimited. It then drops me into a lobby, and I remember that the hub has no IR functionality, and there doesn't seem to be a way to use a blaster with no device paired to it... So I go start digging for another device to use with the other blaster...

And the work devices need to charge, so I'm gonna have to take a break here while that happens.

Current impressions

That there doesn't seem to be ANY no-device functionality, the build quality seems pretty good, and the hints I'm getting from what I've seen seem to imply that things were well thought through before implementation. Impressions of the app are minimal yet.