Tag: the site list

Like Airsoft Plantation? One of the best-established sites in Essex, Airsoft Plantation has recently taken over Tower Airsoft, a former Delta Force Paintball Site that shares a boundary with Airsoft Plantation itself.

As a result, what you have here is a new site that’s taking advantage of the extensive experience team AP has, but with a site and game modes that push players towards direct competition.

At a glance

• Website: https://towerairsoft.co.uk/
• Address: Tower Airsoft, Heath Road, Billericay, Essex, CM11 1HL
• Price: £25 for a walk on, £55 for a rental
• Rental gear: AK74’s or Combat Machine M4’s, a bottle of BBs and face protection
• Lunch: Catering van that does a selection of food for breakfast and lunch, cold drinks, ice poles, even hot doughnuts in the afternoon.
• Frequency: First three Saturdays of the month. Special events may change this.
• How to book: Text one of the owners. Numbers on https://towerairsoft.co.uk/
• Toilets: Full toilets in a proper block. Fancy, huh?
• Car Park: Grass covered, lots of free space. Small walk to the safe zone.
• Safe zone: Big safe zone with partial covering.
• Shop: Limited store with basic tactical gear, BBs and Pyro.
• Card accepted: No, PayPal accepted in an emergency.

What to Expect

Constant attack and defence missions that see one team with unlimited respawns and a series of objectives to attack, and one team with a handful of respawns trying to defend them.

As a site, Tower Airsoft runs from end to end with 5 points of interest along the way: the Bridge, the Tanks, the Village, the Castle and the Church and you’ll often attack through that collection of points in one direction or the next. The ground here is hard and uneven, littered with debris that’ll put you on your butt.

Because you’re always fighting against the clock on the attack, there’s always pressure to keep moving forwards. However, because the respawn is from two marshalls who are trawling behind the fight at the pace of the slowest player. The hard part is this sometimes means snipers are holding back the flow of the respawn, but that then becomes a social problem rather than a mechanical one.

Breaks are fairly well-spaced, with 10-15 minute breaks between each 60-90 minute game. These breaks are kept fairly tight, so there’s space to bomb up and take on some water before you’re stepping off back to your next game.

Marshalling is good — but I must confess bias as I’m in a team with the head marshalls at the site, something which happened after I met them playing here — and it’s clear that everyone at Tower knows how to put on a good game.

I say this, because if i’m honest Tower Airsoft still has a little way to go, in terms of the site and how to get the best out of it, and I want to ensure people continue to play there and give it a chance as it shakes out.

At the moment brambles stretch six feet up in places, making movement through them difficult. The floors of several huts in the Village area seem ready to collapse, and there’s a big lack of workable cover. More seriously, The Village feels like an unviable point, easy to collapse with a 360-degree attack. In the short term, the best thing they can do would be to bring in a gardener and open up a couple of paths.

I’ll keep playing at Tower, but it’s still clear that the site was abandoned for a year — and then left during another lockdown — and it’s going to need a bit of time until we get games there that aren’t “push forwards and sometimes carry things”.

Have faith though, Tower has some memorable areas: attacking the Castle and Church are both phenomenal, with some verticality that’s rare in airsoft. As you can see from the push on the Castle from a recent game day at Tower, it offers something that’s a little rarer in Essex, at least. It’s just a bit of gardening and a few strategically placed barrels away from nailing it, at which point I’ll probably wriggle back in here and give you an update.

What to bring

Grab some boots. This is good advice at any airsoft site but it’s rare that I play somewhere where everything seems desperate to kill me, with trip hazards as common as RIFs for most games.

Pyro is a hard no at Tower Airsoft, at least for the moment. Smoke grenades are good to go, and yellow smoke is gas. If you’re not wearing a gas mask with a proper filter that’ll kill you as sure as a BB.

Pyro is a hard no at Tower Airsoft, at least for the moment. Smoke grenades are good to go

Tower currently has a lot of open spaces and some powerful bolt holes to shoot from. A support weapon or DMR will do a lot of work in skilled hands.

Otherwise, the engagement distances tend to be around 30m and up, so anything with decent accuracy will pay dividends.

New sites are opening constantly around the UK, and while you may not have heard of Imperium Airsoft yet, the Faversham-based site has something many well-established sites don’t: the ability to dick around in vehicles. 

That, or get chased by angry airsofters firing from the back of them as they move towards you. 

All images used courtesy of Imperium Airsoft. Photographs used were taken by Darwin of Atdarzairsoft.

At a glance

• Website: https://imperiumairsoft.com/
• Address: IMPERIUM AIRSOFT SITE ‘Battlegrounds’ Uplees Road Oare, Kent ME13 0QR
• Price: £35 for a walk on. Milsim and battlesim events vary. 
• Rental gear: AEG Rifle M4 / AK, 2 x High Capacity Mags, 5000 BBs for £75
• Lunch: Domino’s Pizza is available for £5. Biltong is on sale and recommended.  
• Frequency: Sunday every two weeks, running in tandem with Invicta Airsoft. 
• How to book: https://imperiumairsoft.com/packages/
• Toilets: Full toilets located in big blue block. Urinals too. 
• Car Park: Grass covered, lots of free space
• Safe zone: From cars.
• Shop: Platoon Stores runs the on-site store, click and collect possible.
• Card accepted: Yes

What to Expect

What to expect from Imperium Airsoft is wildly different depending on the day you attend. 

Regardless of whether you’re playing a full milsim or a more casual skirmish day, you should expect vehicles to be in play. This adds something fairly unique, and they’re used either as a way to break a stalemate and push forwards, for defence or even just for getting you to and from the safezone when you’re feeling a bit tired at the end of a match. The vehicles are the biggest “addition” to Imperium Airsoft compared to many sites, but the biggest plus point for the site is that they just do the basics really well. 

This means that Chronoing is really efficient, the crowd is solid, the games are well-run and well marshalled, and the site has a lot of interesting areas to fight over. 

Also, while we’re bigging them up, head marshall Ginge (who sold me a King Arms P90 ten years ago at a cracking price, so I’m already biased towards) delivers the best safety brief in the business. A welcome change to the butt-numbers you get at many sites. It’s important, because we need to not lose an eye, but that doesn’t mean safety can’t be fun.

Crucial thing: Imperium reserves the right to stop you filming on the site or from using their photos without credit. This is reasonable because their content is top notch (and their on-site photography gets great snaps and effortlessly manages to stay out the way of moving players, so he’s worth his weight in gold.) and their argument is that it’s them that should be making money from content shot during their game days.

What to bring

Let’s start with some big stuff: Box mags are banned at Imperium on non-support weapons, and the FPS limits are a bit weird, so take a look.

Got a DMR? You’ll want it here. While areas like the sand FOB (pictured above, behind my muddy self) and the surrounding hills can facilitate close-quarters play, a regular AEG feels short-ranged on some of the longer approaches.

A full bolt-action wouldn’t be out of the question, if you’re good with it. Several of Imperium’s regulars are roaming the grounds with ghillie suits and rifles, so there’s plenty of potential rivals just waiting for you to meet them.

DMR FPS limit is 420 FPS on a .2 at Imperium

If you’re going to run an AEG, smoke grenades aren’t a bad shout (show them to the site to make sure their insurance covers them, as you would anywhere.) 

The ground is hard work, so consider clothes that don’t snag, a decent pair of boots and maybe some waterproof socks in case you have to ford some of the shallow water on the site wouldn’t go amiss. The longer games require you to manage your own food.