this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
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I thought these were pretty bad overall from an actual using it as a battle rifle perspective. Maybe this is the updated version that fixed a lot of the earlier bugs though. Got to say that trigger situation looks really weird.
Nah. The original was pretty rough, but the A3 is one of the better modern military rifles. If you’re into the bullpup thing.
That was more of the reputation among the A1 variant, produced from 1985 to 1994. The A2 and A3 (the current model) are quite decent bullpup rifles. They're kind of expensive is the only downside I know about.
I also know that the L85A3 is used by British infantry, but British special forces tend to use AR variants like the Colt C8.
From what I remember reading the l85 was/is a pos not sure if this version is modernized and fixes it's problems.
The original A1 was rife with issues, but that was more-so due to incompetent manufacturing than any fundamental flaws in the design itself, and most problems were addressed with the A2 upgrade program. The actual design is mostly just a bullpupped AR-18, so mechanically it's perfectly sound.
The only thing that I would say is an issue is weight - the rifle is nearly 5 kilos, part of that is the scope, of course, but even that's only about 420 grams, so this still leaves you with over 4.5kg for a 5.56 rifle with a ≈20″ barrel - for comparison, the M16A2 is 3.4kg, the SG-550 is 4.1kg (both having barrels of similar length), the FNC is 3.84kg (with an ≈18″ barrel), and the FAMAS and Steyr AUG - both also bullpups - are 3.6kg. I assume this mostly comes about from the really big receiver - if you look at most other bullpups, they tend to try to make the actual metal receiver bit as minimal as possible, and use polymer for the rest. For example, the QBZ-95 (the FAMAS is also pretty similar) - the carry handle, the upper and the pistol grip & handguard section are all polymer and pretty light.
Or the AUG, which has a rather atypical receiver that actually sits mostly ahead of the chamber - it's the section with the scope on it. The stock is all polymer.
Conversely, on the L85, basically everything behind the green handguard is metal (there's a few other polymer bits, like the pistol grip and the buttplate):