The hop up is entirely new, but it did not become better. It can be serviced without a tool. There are no screws, everything is held together by the barrel breech and the fitment of the parts. The breech became plastic, so the bolt carrier does not bounce around that much, unlike previous versions. The hop up uses a VSR-compatible bucking without the side notch and the inner barrel is now having a huge window. Unfortunately, the OEM bucking is not that good, the adjustment nub is large but the lever moves around too much. The whole chamber rocks forward and backward, so I had solve the issue by mounting it into place with an O-ring. With this solution, the hop up effect became stable and constant – without it, the system failed to hop the BB every now and then. At the same time, now the hop up can only be adjusted with a screwdriver. With only three clicks away from the lowest hop up setting, it already overhops 0.36 gramm BBs. 

As for the trigger group, the shell around the firing pin has been modified. The aim of this was to reduce the number of issues when the firing pin go stuck. Another interesting thing is that the bolt catch block was noticeably wobbling, since the screw inside was not screwed in all the way. Everything is still made of steel inside the trigger group, so it is not going to wear down or malfunction anytime soon.

The upper receiver got one significant update. The flap in front of the rear pin has been reinforced. Finally, this was a needed modification!

The buffer is completely new. It now contains a steel pin and has a spring behind it. It absorbs energy very well and at the same time, increases the cyclic rate. The buffer spring that comes with it, gives excellent rate of fire and strong recoil (considering the weight of the buffer itself and the weight of the whole replica).

The magazine, on the other hand, was a disappointment. The current version, which is mocked by the GBB community as the ‘MagicMag’, is just an external/visual upgrade, while being more of a step back in other areas. The polymer body is looking good, but the fitment is horrible. Filling it up with BBs is a pain, I even broke a BB loader while trying.

When the first MagicMag reached the market in 2016 and I received some of them with a Umarex HK416 (a replica which was leading VFC sales by a large margin at the time) I was really hoping for VFC to break the hegemony of GHK. Instead, GHK now struggles with their own bad quality control and VFC is still going their own way (which is not necessarily a positive thing in case of M4 models) while Marui is slowly closing the gap.

Currently, the VFC/Cybergun M4 is like a beautiful collector’s item in my opinion. It is not a bad replica, but there are better alternatives on the GBBR market.

Photos:Batmause

Text: Batmause

Translation: Yssomru