Beretta M8045 Cougar Warrior - Western Arms

When people think of select fire Western Arms GBBs, they think of the Infinity Prokiller/Gigant range. However, there is an alternative, if the Infinity style is not quite your thing.

Based upon their excellent Beretta Cougar, the Cougar Blade is a heavily modified gun, with full auto option,a metal compensator, rail and select fire operation. The Limited Edition Cougar Warrior adds an extended, tight bore, non-hop up barrel, running through a metal suppressor. It also features a rail attachment, which allows a second magazine to be fitted as a forward handgrip.

In the Box

In the typical, but very long, Beretta logo'd, WA box was the gun, the second magazine, some literature (which included a Cougar AND 3.9" Prokiller manual), an Allen key (for adjusting the Hop-Up) and a few BBs in a bag.

First Impressions

My Warrior is unusual in that it has a silver slide. This was taken from a Cougar Blade and fitted to the Warrior by the retailer I bought the gun from. There was never a two tone Warrior produced, but I expect a few people have swapped slides around like this.

The basic Cougar shape is pretty much swamped by the add-ons, with the heavy metal rail and magazine-as-a-foregrip mount, metal compensator (fitted with a rail unit on the left side) and the silencer dominating the appearance. Only the grip is instantly recognisable as a Beretta Cougar.

The weight is enormous, but the gun feels very muzzle heavy, with that hefty rail pulling the front of the gun down.

Overall, the Warrior, full equipped, looks gimmicky and fussy (a bit like the Gigant, although it is a lot more manageable as a pistol than the SVI special). No doubt, the intended market was the CQB skirmish market, where the rail and foregrip make the gun more like a small SMG.

Closer Look

The WA Beretta M8045 Cougar Warrior is certainly a nicely detailed gun.

The frame is made of the heavyweight material seen on a number of WA guns and on KSC slides, it is plastic, but with elements of metal mixed in to give a 'metallic' feel. It looks less metallic than the KSC Mk23's slide, but certainly feels good, in both terms of weight and touch.

However, the slide is lightweight plastic to reduce moving weight on full auto. The suppliers of my gun took advantage of this by switching the ABS black slide with a silver Inox finish slide, from an Inox Cougar Blade, to produce a near unique gun.

The grips are, as expected of WA Berettas, excellent, being exact facsimiles of the real thing, if they are not.

Trademarks, as already observed, as strong and well defined on the 8045, whilst the WA ones (whilst clearly present) are less intrusive on the bigger Cougar than they are on the M84 Cheetah.

On the left of the slide is "PIETRO BERETTA GARDONE V.T. - ITALY", followed by the PB in a circle logo. On the frame, below the barrel, is "040599MC CAT.10170" On the right hand side of the slide is "MOD. 8045 F - PATENTED" with "MADE IN JAPAN BY WESTERN ARMS. ASGK." in a slightly smaller font. On the frame, there are numerous proof marks above the trigger and "This product is made in Japan by WESTERN ARMS CO., LTD.","and Beretta trade marks are affixed under exclusive","license of FABBRICIA D'ARMI PIETRO BERETTA S.PA." in three lines on the rail unit.

The breech is marked ".45 AUTO" (this is a 8045, not a 9mm 8000) and "040599MR".

The gun replicates the Beretta's complex Rotating Barrel is accurately replicated. The idea of this is that "by channeling part of the recoil energy into barrel rotation, and by partially absorbing the barrel and slide recoil shock through the central block before it is transferred to the frame, the Cougar can achieve unusually low felt recoil. When the Cougar is in battery (ready to shoot with the slide closed), the positive lock-up of barrel to slide assures perfect alignment of barrel and sights. Upon firing, the barrel travels and rotates with axial movement. The result is superior accuracy and quicker recovery for second shots." - Whether this is true of the GBB version is uncertain, but the gun certainly seems very accurate.

Underneath the Cougar shell, though, the mechanism is pure Infinity Prokiller. The Cougar, of course, is double action, but the Cougar Warrior is not. For the first shot, you need to cock the hammer or rack the slide and the ambidextrous 'safety' works as a selector (up for semi-auto, down for full auto). Of course, there is also no decocker device.

The silencer is the standard all metal WA unit, as seen on numerous Prokillers and the Beretta M84 Spypack. This conceals an extended, non-hop, tightbore inner barrel, much like the Para Ordnance Prokiller.

The major differences are up front, with the big, heavy, metal unit which allows the, included, spare magazine to mounted as a forward handgrip (promising more stable full auto operation). There is also a short metal barrel extension, with compensator style slots, between the slide and the silencer and a standard sized rail (for mounting a laser or torch) is fitted to the left side of this.

Shooting Impressions

Being a select fire gun, I ran my normal two phase test.

Click on image for bigger version in separate window.

Carrying out my standard 5m/6 round, off hand test with Winter gas and .25g BBs I first ran a set of semi auto shots.

The 6 rounds fell in two groups. 5 were in a tight grouping below the aim point, just 1.75 inches (4 CM) across, with a left to right spread of just 1 inch. The sixth shot went high of the aim point, but still well within the centre of the target. I suspect this was my fault, rather than the gun's.

Switching to full auto, I fired off 7 rounds (all I had left in the magazine). Five of these fell in the centre area, very near the aim point (the centre of the target), but the remaining two straggled off towards the left. Even so, the accuracy was good on full auto, as well as semi. The 5 shots together fell within just 1.25 inches (3 CM) of each other.

Performance is stonking, with the gun averaging 368 fps over 10 shots with .2g BBs and Cybergun Winter gas at around 16C.

I was able to carry out a trigger pull weight test on this gun and it produce a figure of 640g (22.6 ounces), a light-medium pull for a GBB, and a fraction less than the standard Cougar.

Take Down

Take down on a Cougar Warrior is like a standard Cougar, once a few preliminaries are got out of the way.

The initial steps of removing the magazine, is followed by removing the front barrel block, which entails removing three screws to remove the underbarrel mag mount and then using an Allen key to remove the block.

At this point you can rotate the disassembly lever (on the right of the frame, over the trigger) downwards. The barrel and recoil rod may pop forward at this point. The barrel, slide and recoil rod will all push off the frame at this point.

At this point things become more complex than with other Berettas. The recoil rod and central block come away and the barrel/ breech assembly can be pushed forward and down and back to remove them, but this requires a little manipulation to achieve, compared with all the other Berettas I've encountered.

When reassembling, give the barrel a little push backwards, into the frame, when turning the disassembly lever - This has caught me out a number of times on WA Berettas, as you don't need to do it on KSCs.

Conclusions

Although I am a big fan of WA's Beretta Cougar in its standard form, the Warrior left me a little non-plussed.

What we have here is a full auto Prokiller in a sexy Italian frock and it ends up looking a little tarty, with little of the original's style shining through (and I prefer the M92 looks over the Cougar's, anyway!).
Shorn of some of the rail addenda, the Warrior would look a little better, but, as so often is the case, the full auto option is no great advantage in a gun with a 25 round capacity.

This is an interesting alternative to SVI Prokillers or even the KSC Glock 18C and the similar models, but is less useful (with a small magazine) than the Tanio Koba H&K VP70 or the better (and cheaper) KSC Beretta M93R, both of which feature 3 round burst settings to control the expenditure of BBs.

Weight : 1,640g

Realism : ***
Quality : ****
Power : *****
Accuracy : ****

Real Steel link at World Guns