These Are The 10 Best Water Guns For Grown-Ups (2024)

With seasonal heat in full swing and people gathering together en masse, summer is truly, finally here. If you’re lucky enough to be near friends and family as the world continues to reopen, you might be looking for ways to kill some time in an enjoyable fashion. And there are few ways to do that better than having a good old-fashioned water gun fight.

If you’re going to embark on a hydro battle campaign, however, you’ll want to be properly outfitted. As such, those little pocketable plastic squirt guns just aren’t going to cut it — not, at least, if you want to come out the other side victorious. Instead, you should pick from our list of the best water guns for adults, and then you can revel in your aquatic dominance all summer long.

Built for backyard water warfare, pretty much all water guns serve the same basic purpose and function — whether made for children or adults. First developed in the early 1980s by an Air Force and NASA engineer, toy water guns have massively evolved over the years from simple pump-pressured super soakers to modern “smart” water guns. With so many different styles and models now on the market, it can be difficult to know what to look for when shopping. So, in addition to highlighting what we consider to be the latest and greatest options that money can currently buy, we’ve also taken some time out to shine a light on the five most pivotal factors to consider when buying a new water gun.

Water Gun Type/Style: Modern water guns come in an enormous variety of shapes and sizes, ranging from old-school Super Soaker-style blasters to small sidearm-style items to backpack-fed guns to full-size water-shooting rifles. In recent years, we’ve also seen a growing number of weapons from popular video game franchises recreated as water guns.

Power: Typically measured in distance or PSI, a water gun’s power will play an enormous role in its overall performance and user experience. Not only is this area responsible for how far a water gun can shoot, but it will also play a massive role in determining a given model’s accuracy — especially from a distance.

“Ammo” Capacity: Though it limits portability, the volume or reservoir of a water gun will directly determine how much “ammo” it can store — a metric that will directly determine how long of a firefight one can enjoy before having to refill their weapon.

Size: As previously mentioned, modern water guns come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes, with the larger options on the market almost always boasting more power and range — albeit at the cost of portability and child-friendliness.

Child Friendliness: While this list focuses on water guns for adults, the vast majority of them can also be used to children. Some modern water guns are markedly more kid-friendly than others, making this an important factor to take into consideration, especially if you happen to have children.

Bunch O Balloons ZURU Slingshot

Best Water Balloon Launcher: Technically speaking, the Bunch O Balloons ZURU isn’t strictly a water gun — but we’re giving it a pass because it fits into the same family. Rather than shooting a stream of water, this slingshot was designed to launch water balloons at distances of up to 100ft, which is great for raining down liquid grenades on your faux-enemies across the field of battle. Better still, it comes prepackaged with 100 water balloons with their own self-sealing technology, making them super simple to fill up for your subsequent bombardments.

NERF Super Soaker FreezeFire 2.0

Best Budget Pick: Having a water gun battle in the heat of summer can be a great way to cool down, but if you want to gain an extra edge and send your foes shivering off into the distance, you’ll be interested in the NERF Super Soaker FreezeFire 2.0 you see before you. You see, along with offering simple operation and a constant stream of pressurized water — courtesy of its simple pump operation — this squirt gun has a refill port that’s large enough for and designed to accept ice cubes, helping to chill the liquid in its reservoir for a freezing surprise.

NERF Fortnite HC-E Super Soaker

Best Sidearm/Hand Water Gun Pick: If you find that your list of favorite movie characters includes the likes of Dirty Harry, Travis Bickle, and/or Paul Kersey, you might find yourself drawn to the squirt gun equivalent of a hand cannon, e.g. the NERF Fortnite HC-E Super Soaker. It’s small enough to tuck into a waistband but big enough to haul and fire up to 7.4oz of water. Of course, this pistol is on the smaller end of the spectrum, so you might want to utilize it as a sidearm alongside a larger rifle or double-up for twice the firepower.

NERF Super Soaker XP100

Best Retro/Nostalgic Pick: For anyone with a sentimental soft spot in their hearts for nostalgia, there might not be a water gun that’s better than the NERF Super Soaker XP100, which looks like it was ripped right out of the ’90s and packaged to be sold today. In fact, this 44.44oz blaster actually features the original Super Soaker air-pressure water launching mechanism — the one that started it all — which can fire a constant stream of H2O, so long as you keep pumping the plunger. For those who love the classics, this is the ideal water gun.

Team Magnus Incog Water Gun

Best Compact Pick: The Team Magnus Incog Water Gun has two primary things going for it: an impressive and unexpected capacity of 40oz and, thanks to its rather odd format, the element of surprise. Of course, you might have the element of surprise anyway, since the Incog can fire up to a whopping 32 feet per squirt. Furthermore, its unique format makes for easier refills with less waste and fewer chances of a leak. It’s actually kind of surprising this water gun isn’t more popular and well-known, likely partially due to the fact that it isn’t made by NERF.

SNAEN Backpack Water Blaster

Best Backpack Water Gun: The biggest downside to most water guns is their capacity. It’s not that they don’t haul a good amount of water, but rather that the water doesn’t stretch quite as far as we’d like it to. In the interest of curbing that issue, we’ve got the SNAEN Backpack Water Blaster. The pistol portion of this kit can fire up to 30ft with its simple pump action. But the real star of the show is the second part, the backpack that can hold a whopping 2.5L of water — which is more than any of the other guns on this list. That capacity alone is enough to give this water gun an edge, as it means you’ll stay loaded for longer than your foes and you can track them down while they defenselessly try and fill back up.

Water Sports QF 2000 Stream Machine

Best Poolside Pick: If you had or knew someone with a pool in the 1990s, there’s a pretty good chance you already have a familiarity with the Water Sports QF 2000 Stream Machine. This water gun was nigh-ubiquitous back then (and in those fairly specific circ*mstances), but it still makes a formidable blaster today. With its simple piston action — which serves both to fill it up and fire it — this squirt gun can fire a thick stream of H2O up to 70 feet across any backyard or campground. Just remember, with this one, you’ll need to refill between each shot, leaving you a bit vulnerable between reloads — kind of like a musket in a machine gun fight.

NERF Super Soaker Soakzooka

Best High-Capacity Pick: If you want your backyard H2O fights to make you feel like Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura in ’80s action flick Predator, then the NERF Super Soaker Soakzooka is probably the water gun for you. Though not nearly as big as an actual Gatling gun, this hip-fire squirt gun is carried in a similar manner and operates via a simple pump control — meaning there’s no trigger. It also holds up to 1.6L (65 fl-oz) of water in its reservoir, is super easy to refill, and it looks a measure more interesting than most of the other options out there.

NERF Super Soaker Hydra

Best Full-Sized Pick: Finally, we’re getting into the big guns on this list, literally. The NERF Super Soaker Hydra you see here can hold a whopping 65 fl-oz and, with its simple pump control, can blast all of it at a distance of 25 feet or more — it kind of depends on the force with which you compress the pump. And it will keep firing, so long as you keep pumping it — right up until you’ve expelled the contents of the reservoir.

SpyraThree

Best All-Around Pick: Originally unveiled in 2015 before most recently debuting in the latest third-generation form in April of 2023, the SpyraThree is unequivocally the world’s most powerful and advanced water gun which fires “bullets” made of water. Constructed around a futuristic assault rifle-inspired design with a textured integrated handle, the SpyraThree features a trio of user modes — standard “Freestyle” mode, a three-shot Burst mode, and League mode — video game-style tactical digital “ammo” count and battery life display, constant and consistent pressure, a battery that can deliver several hundred rounds per charge, the ability to be reloaded in under 12 seconds, and a standard 33’ range, as well as the ability to load and power-up shots that can fire as far as 50’.