While this is not a product review site, I am pleased to report (as one of the common folk fortunate enough to acquire Laugo Alien Signature Edition #443, and having just put it through its paces for the first time yesterday) that Larry Vickers’s review is accurate. The gun’s design is not magic. If you can’t shoot a pistol for beans, you won’t be able to shoot this one for beans either. What it does is reward good technique astonishingly, without the need for a compensator or barrel porting. As Vickers indicates, the recoil is sharp (thanks to the fixed barrel system) but modest, and its vector is very directly back into the web of the hand. With proper forearm strength and technique, and a bit of practice, a skilled shooter can hold a sight picture throughout recoil, which is, when you manage it, quite surreal on a pistol which does not vent gasses vertically. My rapid-fire group sizes were significantly smaller than (on the order of 50% the size of) my groups with my other pistols, for any given rate of fire. As fast as I could work the trigger with my amateur finger, I could not manage to land a round outside the head on a standard silhouette at 7 yards. The gun feels in the hand like a pistol, but the results in rapid fire feel more like a carbine–again, not because the pistol “makes it easy,” necessarily, not because it substitutes for good technique, but because it rewards you when you do your job, as a precision instrument should, in a way I personally have never experienced except with a carbine. Another shooter, experienced with rifles and shotguns but relatively novice with pistols, accompanied me on the test, and we observed that each improvement he made to his technique dramatically reduced his group size in rapid fire. In slow fire, the pistol rewarded me for eliminating a very slight angle in the vector of my trigger pressure, shifting point of impact at 7 yards from a quarter inch left of center to dead center. I don’t have the facilities to determine how accurate this pistol is. With simple reman FMJ and the red dot, I was able to discern no dispersal at all at 7 yards. As long as my technique was correct, the bullet landed exactly where the center of the dot had been at the moment of break, centered to less than a millimeter. It is rifle-accurate.

We experienced no malfunctions over more than 100 rounds of simple remanufactured FMJ in slow and rapid fire. The replaceable top rail works as advertised–which is to say, shockingly well. Installing the rail is a matter of positioning it on the frame, sliding it aft so that it “snaps” into place, and then pushing home the captive pin at the front. Initially, the “snap” was very tight. It took a sharp rap with the heel of the palm or a nylon mallet to get the rail to seat properly. That eased within 10 repetitions until it could be done with strong thumb pressure. The top rails held zero throughout multiple swaps. The adjustable iron sights are excellent, though as with all open sights, they reward best those who have learned the full volume of iron sights technique. (Do you know not just how to focus on the front sight, but also how to make the top of the post and the top of the notch align perfectly flush? Do you know how to watch the two spaces of light between the sides of the post and the inner edges of the notch, to make sure those spaces are perfectly equal? Do you know how to make sure not only that your bull’s eye is above the front sight dot, but that the distance between the corner of the front sight post and the edge of bull’s eye is exactly equal on both sides? If you do, these sights and this pistol are easily equal to the task of a bull’s-eye pistol competition.)

The trigger is very good, certainly one of the best pistol triggers, though not quite as clean as a race-tuned 1911. It has a couple of degrees of smooth slack, and then a bit of travel under friction (“creep”) as the sear is drawn off the hammer. The bearing surface between the hammer and sear seems to be about 0.025 inches, so that is how far you have to move the sear with the trigger before the hammer springs free. I suspect that competition shooters (who can accept extremely light trigger activation weights) will experiment with sears cut closer to the edge, but as it stands now, the 25 thousandths of an inch of sear bearing surface translates to about 35 thousandths of an inch of trigger creep at the tip of the trigger, which, while noticeable in slow fire, can be taken up carefully and does not affect one’s ability to achieve the kind of accuracy I described above. In rapid fire it is a non-factor.

Grip texturing is awesome on the front and back straps. Zero slippage during rapid fire. Never once did I have to readjust my grip. The slide serrations are also excellent. They could be used to saw through timber and will probably flay your hand before they let your grip on the slide slip. Fit and finish are also perfect, giving the impression of a hand-fitted match-grade pistol. The only thing I had to monitor was the installation screw for the detachable flared mag-well flange. The flange works as advertised, making reloads a breeze, but it can be removed by backing out a small set screw. We found that this screw backed out of its own accord during shooting, loosening the removable flange until it rattled a little and reminded us to re-tighten the screw. I will have to experiment with the correct torque to keep the screw from backing out over an extended shooting session.

All in all, I am floored. It is exactly what it was advertised to be, an out-of-the-box competitor to highly-modified open-class race guns.