Gamo Swarm Magnum 10X Gen3

The Gamo Swarm Magnum is a powerful, break-action air rifle for hunting, pest control and plinking. Unlike most break-barrel guns, it has a 10-shot magazine and a mechanism that automatically feeds a pellet into the breech when you cock the action. It’s a system that greatly speeds up your shooting.

Given that break-actions are the most popular and affordable air guns, it’s a real benefit being able to get one that’s also a repeater, not a single-shot. You can get 10 shots away noticeably quicker when you only have to manipulate the barrel without having to also find a pellet and carefully feed it into the chamber.

The unique stock just adds to the value!

When the magazine is empty, it takes a minute or so to refill it but you can always buy spares if you think you’ll still need that bit of extra speed after 10 rounds.

The 10X Gen3i system is the third version of something Gamo has been doing for some years now, and it is by far the most refined and well-designed of them, featuring a cassette-style magazine holding 10 pellets. When you break the barrel all the way, the magazine is carried to meet the chamber and a rod swings into position to push the pellet in. Simple, strong and ingenious.

And with this iteration, it prevents you from accidentally double-feeding the rifle because it relies on the recoil of a shot to bring the next pellet into position. It’s a rotary system, with each pellet in its own little cavity, waiting to be spun into alignment with the barrel. But the pellet holder does not rotate until it is tripped by the inertia generated by recoil; when you shoot, the next pellet is lined up to load. If you don’t shoot, there’s no pellet to be fed so you cannot double-load.

It works perfectly, with never a problem during several hundred shots in testing. However, the magazine is a bit fussy about the pellets you fill it with. Some slip in easily with the push of a stubby finger but others don’t want to go in without coercion. At first I used a small punch to push in the recalcitrant ones but quickly realised I was better off not using them at all, and afterwards I only used cooperative ammo. There seemed no obvious pattern to this — brand, style and material weren’t a predictor of what worked and what didn’t.

The little cassette-type magazine holds 10 rounds in its rotating inner drum, which turns when the rifle is fired – the #2 is the shot indicator

The magazine includes a shot indicator that tells you how many pellets are left to shoot, a very handy thing that prevents you from cocking and firing a non-existent 11th round. Removing and inserting magazines is simple. Oh, and you can single-feed the rifle by inserting a pellet into the open hole in the top of the magazine before you break the barrel.

The Gamo Swarm Magnum is no one-trick pony, and has more than a magazine to boast about. It’s an adult-sized firearm with plenty of grunt from its 33mm gas-piston design, in which cocking it compresses gas, not a steel spring. It has a fair bit of wallop, optimistically claiming up to 500m/s (1650fps) muzzle velocity using the slickest alloy .177-calibre pellets, although the closest I came was just over 300m/s (986fps) with some aggressive little 9.6-grain H&M Hornet pellets. That’s quite quick enough to provide a decent trajectory out to 50m or more while still carrying the energy you want for small pests.

The stock is suitably serious, not just in scale with its full-size dimensions, but in design. The thumbhole style includes a vertical pistol grip measuring 12cm circumference at the top but swelling to fill your hand lower down. Up front, the fore-end is 5cm wide and gently curved underneath in a way that helps you support the weight well in your palm. The length of pull is a comfortable 35cm and the raised comb lines you up perfectly with the scope; the comb gives the impression of being adjustable but isn’t. There’s a soft recoil pad on the rear. Stippling like medium-grit sandpaper provides good purchase.

The front blade is the safety, and while this setup may look awkward it actually works well

The effect is a stock to shoot accurately with, primarily when lying down or behind a rest. It’s a naturally good fit for your body and encourages equally natural target alignment.

The stock includes modern sweeps, curves and angles in what’s a very striking look. The red trim on the butt, by the way, indicates the .177 calibre; green is used on the .22.

It takes a little muscle to cock the Gamo. You need just over 18kg of force to pull the barrel down, but that’s what it takes to get the higher velocities. You feel like you’ve done a bit of a workout after a decent session of plinking, and this is not the best first gun for a child unless they’ve already grown large and strong.

The Custom Action Trigger, as Gamo calls it, is adjustable for take-up and over-travel but not weight. It lets off at 2kg, after a long, dragging creep towards a nice release. Break-action air rifles are not renowned for crisp triggers and the Gamo doesn’t do anything to change the situation, with a trigger that’s a long way from the instant let-off of a good centrefire rifle, but the more you get used to its long travel the more you shoot reasonably well with it. It does take practice and focus to be consistent, though.

A very smart looking and modern rifle, the Swarm Magnum is a full-size adult’s firearm

The safety is a small trigger in front of the main trigger, and it must be pulled to engage it, which seems counter intuitive at first but quickly becomes second nature. It feels quite different from the main trigger and is much lighter, so it’s not likely you’ll pull the wrong one. To disengage it, simply push it forward with your index finger.

Dovetail grooves are cut for scope mounting. There are no open sights, mainly because the magazine doesn’t allow for them. Gamo fits the Swarm Magnum with its unique Recoil Reducing Rail (RRR), which it claims absorbs almost all the recoil stress inherent to spring- or gas-powered air rifles. The aluminium rail has a small rear part that is anchored to the rifle by a screw; it’s sort of like a recoil lug and does not move. The longer front part of the rail, onto which the scope mounts, is clamped onto the dovetails in the usual way.

Both parts are linked by two nylon dowels that act as dampers. When the rifle bumps forward under recoil (the major recoil force in a spring-fired air rifle is forward, not backward like a convention rifle), the main part of the rail can slide back a tiny bit along the dovetails, the nylon dampers slowing its movement; on fixed mounts, there’s no damping so the scope cops a solid hit.

Supplied with a scope and mount, the Swarm Magnum is a great air rifle for hunting small critters

This system can only work if there is a hint of movement of the rail’s front section; over-tightened the bolts would lock it up, although generally speaking the only thing that stops a dovetail mount moving on an air rifle like this is a pin. Whatever the case, I could not determine whether the RRR worked as described or not.

There is another benefit to the rail. It raises the scope about 1cm, a critical thing to suit the raised cheek piece. Most shooters will find their eye aligns nicely with the crosshairs.

The scope that comes as part of the package is a Gamo W1PM 3-9×40 air-rifle optic in a mount, ready to fit. It has decent optics, a sharp duplex reticle, and ¼ MOA adjustments under the turret caps; you don’t need tools to adjust the zero, either. It lacks parallax adjustment, and you’ll wish for it at less than about 20m range, but for any longer distances it’s a perfectly good scope for the money.

In more enlightened markets than ours, the Swarm Magnum is usually fitted with a twin-chamber sound suppressor. The Hollywood bad-guy fantasies of our country’s regulators mean we miss out, so the barrel has a small nylon fitting at the end which resembles a compensator but is probably too light to achieve very much.

Accuracy is respectable. I had 12 different types of pellet, which came down to eight once I’d weeded out the ones that didn’t want to fit in the magazine, and I finished up shooting groups of 10 shots with the ones in the table. Ironically, I couldn’t get any Gamo pellets, which I would have liked to try, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.

The main lesson is that the Gamo showed plenty of potential to use light, medium and heavy pellets, so could be relied on to tackle everything from mice and rats to crows and rabbits. Every group I shot, with the exception of two shots you’d call flyers, meant dead rabbits and toppled cans at 25m and more.

That was over bags, and I could shoot with very nearly the same accuracy from my elbows or even with a comfortable place to rest my fore-hand on while aiming. I’m sure that has a lot to do with the rifle’s good stock, its hefty 3.9kg field-ready mass and the fact that the weight is centred directly over your front hand, making it very neutral to hold.

Pricing varies enormously in gun shops, the bigger ones advertising the Swarm Magnum 10X Gen3i package for as little as $500 or so, and others up around $800 or more. You might want to shop around, but whatever you pay, you won’t regret buying the Gamo, which is nicely made and well equipped. The magazine is no gimmick, but a genuine convenience, and the rifle itself is powerful and full sized, making the scoped outfit an air rifle for those who want more than just a plinker.