By Dave Goodin

Out of the box, the Armotech Zeus G2+ paintball pistol looks very intimidating. This is no peashooter, but a real handful of paintball pistol goodness. It has a good heft to it, and it feels like you’re holding a decent piece of equipment. In addition to the marker and magazine, the Zeus G2+ pistol also includes a 1-inch barrel extension, as well as another 8-inch barrel. Also included, is a small bag of spare parts that includes an extra spring, O-rings, cup seal, allen wrenches, and an extra CO2 chamber cap. The manual consisted of two small pages with a diagram of the gun, but it was pretty hard to read. I’d suggest going to the Armotech U.S. forum and downloading a manual, available in Adobe Acrobat (.pdf), and printing it. This makes the images and text much easier to read and understand.

The very first thing you should do is read the manual! The manual will tell you everything you need to know about the Zeus pistol. DO NOT pull it out of the box, gas it up, and start firing rounds through it! Follow the directions in the manual. Disassemble the gun, and make sure there are no small metal shavings left over from the manufacturing process. Clean and oil the gun, and then reassemble it.

Make sure you cock the pistol before you install a 12 gram CO2 cartridge and pressurize the gun. If you don’t, the cartridge will leak out of the barrel. Cocking the pistol first eliminates this from happening. Now, you can load some paint into the magazine, and go to a safe place to shoot the pistol.

The magazine for the pistol holds 10 rounds, and is a snap to take off and put back on the gun. If you’re into realism, buy several of them and change them out when you run one dry. I prefer to use the 10 round tubes and carry 10 of them in a separate belt pouch designed especially for pistol or pump players. A Quick Cap can be added to the magazine as well as an upgrade, which replaces the stock plug for the end of the mag, and allows for quicker reloads if you carry the 10 round tubes.

Right out of the box, the Zeus was shooting hot. I was chronoing steadily at 342 without adjusting the velocity from the factory setting, and I couldn’t get the velocity down below 320 fps with the stock spring in it.

Tip: Instead of trimming coils off of the spring as suggested on some Web forums, replace it with the main drive spring from a Tippmann A-5. This will give you all the adjustment tolerance you’ll need to keep the pistol field legal, and still shoot hard enough to be effective.

I average about 20 to 25 shots per 12-gram cartridge, which is plenty of shots if you’re using the gun as a backup.

I’ve had people ask if I carry the Zeus pistol just for looks, or for the intimidation factor it has on people new to the sport. The answer is neither. This not-so-little gem has saved my bacon on a few different occasions when my main paintball gun has gone down, run out of air, or when I belly crawl through the mud and underbrush with my main gun slung on my back.

The Zeus G2+ is very accurate for a pistol, out to about 50 or 60 feet. After that, performance really starts to fall off. But let’s be realistic, with a barrel length of 6-inches, it won’t be all that accurate at distances longer than 60 feet. If I’m in that range but you don’t see me, and I can get a bead on you, you’re taking the long walk back to the reinsertion point.

The Weaver rails that come standard on this model are excellent for mounting small optics, tac lights, or laser sights, but you’ll have a hard time finding a holster to fit the pistol with those accessories on it, unless you buy a custom holster from SpecOps or some other holster manufacturer.