Bristol Court House

[warlord]

As a group of five friends we travel around playing various airsoft sites around the country. Main CQB style as we mostly prefer indoor in the dark with some stealth and back stabbing.

The site is close to public parking (NCP), but be aware that the £4 Sunday parking becomes £12 if you arrive before 11am. Be prepared to part with a bit more than is stated on the web site.

I wasn't expecting a hot meal to be laid on for lunch, so was pleasantly surprised to find a slice of Margarita pizza, a box of fries and a bottle of water included in the price.

There are two floors of play, upstairs court rooms and downstairs - the holding cells. There are a few nice touches that make it a difficult place to play and equally some very frustrating areas that make it impossible to advance and the bottle necks are horrible.

The team briefs, mission objectives and safety protocols were pretty laughable and really need some work. Yes we go to chrono to ensure we're all safe, and I know it's an honesty based game but it was very easy to avoid chronoing at all. No weapon marking in place. Add to that the chrono's in use were unreliable and if a hot gun was found it still got in the game.

The safe zones were far from safe. Test dry firing all over the place and no marshall intervention. Very bad for a non-eye pro area. Like most places, the safe zone also opened directly into the game zone. But often the extra door was left open. There was very few times there any control over any player entering the safe zone with potentially loaded weapon.

The missions were very haphazard. I think if you were a regular at the site you'd understand them better, but given the amount of first time visitors more "clear" detail to some of the objectives and locations could have been better.

I tried to assist a guy with a hire weapon as he'd emptied his mag and needed a refill. This was impossible to achieve as we were unable to find a marshall or staff to resolve this during the game. I felt so bad for the guy I offered some of my own.

If this had been my first experience of airsoft I'd have come away a disappointed. We can tick it off the list of played sites, but I doubt we'll return.

We have a wide are range 21-50 all walk ons, and no youngsters in our group. On the day the site had a number of young teenagers playing that were a credit to the game.

 

[springs]

being one of the above to attend, my main points are:

Getting there:

As it's in the middle of the town centre there aren't any signs saying where it is. I got there earlier than our main group and ended up walking the whole way around the building trying to find a sign or some sort of visible entrance. in the end where we had originally looked it was the right place, but again no signs to advise this in any way. the signs that were there all pointed to a gallery which was the opposite door

On-site shop:

probably the better part of the site. guns, ammo and other bits available. tuck shop with cold drinks and some sweets mainly. prices aren't out of this world but certainly not the cheapest.

Marshals:

no visible marshals for pretty much the whole day. No one in high vis jackets advising people of generally being there for people to ask questions. Every marshal they had was playing the whole day and never really made themselves stand out.

Chrono:

as mentioned above. it was a bit of a joke. their chrono's were all over the place. I had checked both rifles the day before and they were well within the limits set by the site. when going through their chrono, you used your own ammo / mags. It isn't a major problem but some players using different weighted ammo meant they kept having to change the settings on the chrono. Another site i've used asked the weight, you shot and they said yes / no as they could tell if its safe or not.

one of the younger players were using black coloured BB's. for some reason that was not explained the person doing the chrono said that no coloured BB's are to be used and can only use white. have no idea why this was said and i assume the kid managed to get some standard coloured ammo as he was playing during the day.

Their listed site FPS is 340, but when going through the chrono, it was mentioned on more than one occasion that there was going to be lots of "ouchies" because there seemed to be lots of players with weapons close to their limit. at the end of the day it's a very close CQB site so short range hits are to be expected and as long as the weapon is withing field limits there shouldn't be any problems. It sort of gave the impression that normally they have lots of lower powered weapons on site.

as well, none of the guns were tagged in any way to say they had passed which meant you could of brought out a untested weapon and started using it with no issues.

Safe Zone:

the "safe zone" if you can call it that was 2 rooms that branched off from one of the main rooms. Both rooms were just protected with a door each. i would of expected some netting for the time where players are coming in and out during game plays and could get caught in cross fire. The main shop / toilets, although are down their own corridor they aren't really covered by any protection, if you happened to take a wrong turn you could of ended up in the shop with a loaded weapon.

lots of dry firing as well throughout the day with no player marshals advising not to do it.

Parking:

it states on their website that there is no onsite parking and that you'd have to use one of the 2 local NCP car parks instead. they mention that is apparently £4 for the day between the hours of 11am and 5pm but as you have to get there before hand it ended up costing us £12 to park for the day. It would be nice if they could get a deal with NCP to either get fixed rate tickets or some form of discount so it's not so bad.