In terms of appearance, if you like a bow with a long riser and short limbs, you’ll love it. It can be removed for shooters who prefer a skinnier grip.įit and finish is the kind of high quality you’d expect from a PSE flagship bow.
I found it comfortable, and it will certainly be warmer in cold weather. It’s much wider, with a flatter back, and is a rubber-like synthetic. Finally, the grip is new and different for PSE. The cable guard is straight, as opposed to the flexible cable guards of recent years, but can be moved in or out to adjust for torque, and rollers on the guard itself act to reduce cable friction to an absolute minimum. Parallel limbs, along with the longer stabilizer, decrease noise and hand vibration. A rear stabilizer mount allows even further tweaking of balance. A second stabilizer mount, near the bottom of the riser, provides increased stability, especially for those who shoot with quivers mounted to the bow. The riser is proportionately long and lacks the cage from previous models, making the bow more stable and less top heavy. The Wedge-Lock limb pockets are retained as well, but there are numerous new design features on this bow.
PSE’s popular Evolve cam system is at the heart of this bow, offering an adjustable letoff from 80 to 90 percent, as well as a wide draw range of 26½-32 inches. Where does the PSE Evo NXT 33 fit in? With a published speed of 314 fps, this offering is clearly designed to appeal to the growing number of bowhunters who place a premium on pleasant-to-shoot over super-fast, flat-shooting bows. With a 2020 line-up that includes 19 compound hunting bows (in addition to numerous target bows, recurves and longbows) PSE has this advantage over its competitors: Rather than seeking a common denominator with a handful (or less) of bows, it can create niche bows - that is, a variety of bows each designed to appeal to a different set of preferences. Another hunter’s sweet spot is a 220 fps bow that may not have the flattest trajectory, but that will still effectively harvest any North American big game animal, and is as smooth-drawing, quiet and generally pleasant-shooting as a hunting bow can be. Of course, one bowhunter’s sweet spot is a 250 fps barnburner that is more shootable than just about any compound manufactured 10 years ago. A bow that’s reasonably fast and exceptionally pleasant to shoot, with a smooth draw cycle, high letoff, low noise and little, if any, vibration.
Manufacturers who not that long ago seemed to be competing to produce the world’s fastest compound bow now seem to be competing to produce, if not the world’s smoothest-shooting bow, at least a bow that hits the elusive sweet spot. Going forward, it’s going to be all about what I call ice cream bows - compounds that are super-smooth shooting.” PSE’s Pete Shepley said that to me more than 10 years ago, and his words have proved prophetic. “I think we have squeezed about all the efficiency we’re going to get out of the bow machine.