More Archery Winners from Our 2025 Field Tested Awards

In addition to our flagship compound bow and crossbow tests, we also tested arrows, budget compound bows, and bow sights. Here are those winners.

Introducing The Real Grit, our retail partner for the 2025 Field Tested Awards. Buying through the links provided helps support Outdoor Life.

Easton finally built the ultimate arrow when they came out with the 5.0 late last year. Due to incredible demand, bowhunters are just starting to get them in their hands now.

The 5.0 is more than just an arrow – it’s an arrow system because you can build it the way you want. To start, it’s a 5mm arrow built using Easton’s Acu-Carbon process, which was made famous by the Axis series of arrows. Instead of rolling the carbon around a mandril to form the shaft, Easton weaves the carbon over the mandril in a continuous process.

This construction minimizes the effect of a “high spine,” which is a line of stiffer carbon running the length of the arrow commonly found when the carbon is rolled. Ideally, you want to identify that high spine and make sure it’s facing up when you load the arrow to shoot. Because of the 5.0’s construction, that orientation is less critical than it is with other shafts. Also, the continuous weave means the first arrow off the line will match the 387,000th arrow off the line, and every one in between. Buy a dozen this year, and the weights and straightness tolerances will match the dozen you buy three years from now.

Where Easton hit the 5.0 out of the park is in making the shaft super light. The 300-spine 5.0 weighs 8.4 grains per inch. That’s not the lightest arrow on the market, but it’s pretty light. So if you’re looking for a flat-shooting arrow, you can build the 5.0 to be super light. Put in the aluminum HIT inserts and some 2.5-inch fletchings, and you’ve got a real speed burner.

Easton has a series of components made for the 5.0 that allow you to add weight to the front to make the arrow hit like a sledgehammer while maintaining long-range accuracy. You can build a 5.0 arrow with 15 percent FOC that’s still a viable, long-range arrow, as opposed to one that weighs 700 grains.

Easton has a series of components that allow you to build the 5.0 arrow you want. There are inserts that weigh 16 grains, 25 grains, 50 grains, and 75 grains. You decide how much weight you want in the front of your arrow to get the performance you’re looking for.

Along with that, Easton offers the 5.0 in 200, 250, 300, 340, 400 and 500 spines. The varied spine offerings are critical for building high-FOC arrows that will still fly well. One of the common mistakes bowhunters make in building arrows with high FOC, is they don’t consider the effect that added weight has on the arrow spine. 

The more weight you add to the front of an arrow, the weaker the spine gets. So a hunter shooting a 70-pound draw weight with a 29-inch arrow would want that arrow to be 300 spine with a 100-grain point. If the hunter adds 50-100 grains to the front of that arrow, the correct spine for solid arrow performance is going to change to 250 or even 200. But bowhunters don’t realize that, so they end up sticking with the now-weakened 300, which likely won’t always fly well – especially as the shooting distance increases.

The Black Eagle Talon V2 Fletched .003 arrows represent the ultimate in convenience, simplicity, and affordability. This is a six pack of factory crested and pre-fletched arrows, so all the customer has to do upon buying a pack is to have the arrows cut to length and then glue in the included inserts. No arrow wraps are needed. No fletching required. And the pack sells for just $70. That’s a bargain.

Often times with these factory-fletched six packs, there is no cresting – a bright paint or sticker that serves the same purpose as a wrap – and the fletchings are kind of cheap. The Talon V2 Fletched .003 arrows include neon-yellow cresting and 2.5-inch Q2i shield cut fletchings. These are high-quality, durable fletchings that will work well for shooting field points or fixed-blade broadheads.

At the factory, Black Eagle “super sorts” these arrows to make sure that each arrow within a given pack weighs within 1 grain of all the others and that the spines and straightness tolerances are also equally precise. That’s the pinnacle of consistency, and it’s rare among lower-priced arrows. 

We picked the Talons with .003 straightness, which isn’t the tightest tolerance, but it’s pretty good. Most bowhunters aren’t likely to notice an issue where straightness variances affect performance. And the .003 six pack of this arrow is $20 cheaper than the .001 version.

Made of high-modulus carbon, the .244-diameter Talons are available in 300, 350, 400 and 500 spines. That will cover a broad spectrum of draw lengths and weights.

Buy at The Real Grit

Specs

• 
  Bare Bow Price:

  
  $550

• 
  Package Price:

  
  $650

• 
  + Package Price:

  
  $850

• 
  Draw Weight:

  
  45-60lbs or 55-70lbs

• 
  Color:

  
  Mossy Oak Bottomland or Throwback Green

• 
  Draw Length:

  
  27 to 32 inches

• 
  Axle to Axle:

  
  31 inches

• 
  Let-Off:

  
  80%

What if I told you you could have a compound bow that shoots over 320 fps, has several flagship features, shoots tight groups at 50 yards, and costs less than $600?

You’d say I’m crazy, right?

Meet the Bear Adapt 2 HP, which was launched in August 2025, just in time for the fall hunting seasons. This latest collaboration between the iconic Bear Archery and the popular, run-and-gun guys from The Hunting Public is a screaming fast, no-nonsense bow that outperforms its price tag by a mile.

For my review, I borrowed a 55-70-pound Bear Adapt 2 HP with the RTH Plus package from Lancaster Archery Supply. After building the bow with the Trophy Ridge accessories, I headed to the range. Two shots through paper showed a slight nock-right tear, so I went to the bow press, put half a twist in the right yoke, and took a half twist out of the left. The next shot through paper was a perfect bullet hole. The tuning process took all of about 5 minutes.

Next, I went to the Garmin Xero C1 chronograph. The bow was set to a 30-inch draw length, and a handheld scale showed the weight was 70.6 pounds. The test arrow was an Easton Sonic 6.0 that weighed exactly 350 grains. The parameters Bear would have used for deriving the bow’s 330 fps speed rating would have been 70-pound draw weight, 30-inch draw length, shooting a 350-grain arrow. So we nearly matched those specifications.

My speed test produced a reading through the Garmin chronograph of 325 fps. So we were just 5 fps off the rating. In my book, that’s a good result. With last year’s Bear Adapt 2, I got 294.8 fps, matched to Bear’s rating of 320 fps. That’s why I said this year’s bow gained 30 fps over last year’s. That’s a huge gain in performance. And 325 fps for a bow that costs under $600 is insane.

But how does it shoot?

The draw cycle on the Adapt 2 HP is noticeably stiffer than that of the Adapt 2. That’s 100 percent expected, given that Bear switched from a single-cam system to a hybrid cam. But while the new bow’s draw is stiffer, that doesn’t mean it’s harsh. It’s not. It just takes a little more effort to get the cams moving.

The cam rollover into the valley is noticeable, though not abrupt. And the valley is deep, which is critical for bowhunters — like the Hunting Public guys — who might have to hold at full draw for a bit before a clear shot is offered. The back wall is a bit soft compared to flagship bows, but as long as you keep pulling into it, you can hold steady at full draw.

At the shot, you can feel a slight thump in your hand. It’s subtle, but it’s there. After five or six shots, I didn’t really notice it again.

There is some noise from the bow at the shot, but I would say it’s a quiet bow before I’d say it’s a loud bow. Are there quieter bows on the market? Yes. But again, the noise isn’t problematic.

Whenever bowhunters today complain about the noise produced by current compound bows, I think back to the Browning, High Country, and Golden Eagle bows I started hunting with in the 1990s. I killed a lot of whitetails with those bows and they were infinitely louder than anything on the market today.

For me, the true test of a bow’s performance is seeing how well I can shoot it at 50 yards. That distance is longer than any shot I’d expect to take at a whitetail, and longer than most shots I’d expect to take at any other big game. Does it hold on my aiming spot well? Do my arrows hit behind the pin? How tight are my arrow groups? If the results of all those tests are positive, then the bow does everything I need it to do in the field.

The Adapt 2 HP performed well on the range. It was a bit windy the day I shot it, but it aimed well at the elk target I was shooting at. My arrows hit consistently behind my sight pin, and the groups were one-hand tight at 50 yards. That is, I could get one hand around all of my arrows in the target. And again, this was with a completely rigged bow that sells for $849.

The Axcel Driver is the sight that feels like Axcel saw everything that was coming out on the market, so their engineers rolled up their sleeves, told everyone to stand back, and said, “Hold my beer.” The Landslyde Axcel introduced just a few years ago was a huge hit among bowhunters, and the Driver is basically an improved Landslyde.

The Driver is a slider that comes in just about any configuration you can imagine – dovetail, Bridge-Lock, Picatinny mounting options, single or double vertical pins, three or five horizontal pins, and three different scope options. You name it, they’ve got it.

The wheel is bigger than it was on the Landslyde and it has a rubber “tire” on the outside that’s great for traction in your hand. The locking bar, which locks the scope in place, is conveniently located on top of the sight, right about where your index finger would be when you go to adjust the sight. And it is an absolute lock. When you lock it down, the scope does not move.

Axcel took out a lot of the guts from the Landslyde to lighten the Driver, without sacrificing features or stability. The Bridge-Lock version with a 3-pin Accustat scope weighed just 8.5 ounces. One of the features that was removed, but is offered back in another way, is the typical second axis adjustment was eliminated. The second axis adjustment typically is a set of two screws that hold a bar in place. Loosening the screws allows you to pivot the scope up and down to make sure that it’s level. 

With the Driver, Axcel machined the scope receiver so that the scope is perfectly perpendicular to the vertical, elevation bar. By doing that, now the user can level both the first and second axes simply by adjusting the first axis. The first axis adjustment is a set of two screws connecting the vertical elevation bar to the sight’s mounting system – pic rail, dovetail, Bridge-Lock bar. That’s the most important one on a slider, because you need to know the elevation bar is moving straight up and down, or else you’ll have left-right issues as you adjust the sight for different yardages.

Each sight includes 1-3 sight scale indicators that can easily be adjusted to meet the calibration of your sight. And you’ll get some metal sight tapes and dozens of stick-on paper sight tapes with every sight.

Axcel employs some of the brightest fibers on the market for its pins. There is the option to mount a light on any of the scopes, but I’ve found that, except when I’m hunting from a blind, I’ve never needed a light to see the pins on an Axcel hunting sight. They gather light in ever the lowest-light situation. A blind is different because you’re sitting in the dark shooting into the light, which makes unlighted pins all look black.