Last week I received a Halo Covenant Plasma Pistol pack in the mail. The laser pursuit gaming set comes with two Covenant pistols and two targets.

I spent a bit of the weekend playing around with them and came away fairly impressed, though their are some things that make using them for honest to goodness gameplay a challenge.

The developers of the toys seem to have spent quite a bit of time incorporating a Halo 3 flavor into not just the way the devices look, but how they operate.

Each post has a trigger and a reload button. The guns, according to the instruction manual, can fire off 50 regular shots before having to be reloaded, which produces the reload sound from the game. You can also do super shots by holding in the trigger to overheat the gun. Firing off one of these shots takes up a tenth of your ammo and causes the gun to remain overheated for five seconds, meaning you can't fire for a bit.

The side of the guns have a little red light which blinks when you're out of ammo and the front of the gun glows green when it is powered on. The green light flashes brighter when you fire.

The target is a square cube that you latch to your pants or what have you. The front of the target is a big red circle that flashes red when a hit is scored. Underneath the red circle is a green light bar made up of what appears to be six LEDs. Each time you take a hit one of the LEDs blink out. If you get hit with an overcharged shot you lose half of your LEDs. This shield indicator will actually start to recharge if you're not hit for 20 seconds.

When your shield totally depleted the target says "game over" in the voice from Halo 3 and then five seconds later, it reactivates and says "Slayer". Both add a really neat touch of virtual realism to the game.

While I like the design of the weapons and how accurately the targets both track score and represent death, there are some issues.

First off having a single target makes it hard to play a true game of Halo 3. You can't shoot someone from behind, or the side and it's easy to have the target accidentally or purposefully covered. I know this is more of an issue that laser tag games face, but it would have been nice if the Halo 3 set included two targets, one for the front and one for the back.

Another issue is that the gun isn't in anyway linked to the target, which means you can keep shooting even after you are killed which results in a lot of hard-to-call, down-to-the-line battles.

Finally, I wish they had incorporated vibration in the pistols. It's a minor thing, but an overcharging Covenant pistol isn't an overcharging Covenant pistol unless it's about to shake right out of my hand. The Plasma pistol sold on it's own not only vibrates, it has a vent that pops open after a overcharge shot is fired. It also has an digital display of ammo left.

One thing I suppose people could do is play dual-wielding Halo 3 laser tag and buy one of these two-player packs for each person. That way they'd get two pistols and two targets, one to wear on the front and one to wear on the back. Personally, I think the targets should be worn on some sort of harness or something that allows it to be located at chest and back level, but that's totally doable to.

Final verdict? The guns are a ton of fun to play with, sure the ones sold individually have more bells and whistles, but if you're looking for something fun to play around with in a darkened office or outside at night, these are probably worth the $40. Now if only Jasman sold the target cube's seperately.