Swampfox Optics has a goal of making solid, reliable optics at a price that folks can afford. Their first generation Liberty red dot pistol sight met that goal and has been a solid performer on the market. Swampfox is a company that listens to customer feedback, though, and makes changes and improvements based on that. The new Liberty II optic is the result of that process and improves upon an already solid sight.
The Liberty II
The Swampfox Liberty II uses the popular RMR mounting footprint, so it’s going to fit on almost anything you want to mount it on. The new sight has a large 24mm window for an increased field of view and a more streamlined body design. It’s available in three versions: a 3 MOA red dot, a 3 MOA green dot, and a red Multi-Reticle version.
All three versions have 10 illumination settings that let you adjust for whatever light conditions you’re shooting in. It runs on a single CR1632 battery and has a 50,000-hour battery life. Further enhancing that is Swampfox’s Shake N’ Wake auto on and off function.
The sight shuts down after 225 seconds of inactivity. When it senses any motion it turns on, back to the reticle setting that it was on when it shut down. The battery is top-loading, so when you do finally need to replace the battery it’s easy to do so without having to dismount the sight.
A Solid Construction
The Liberty II’s body is machined from 7075-T6 aluminum, and it has a black, hard anodized finish. It has rear anti-glare hood serrations, IPX7 waterproof rating, and 1,500 G force shock rating. The lens is fully multi-coated to resist scratches, fog, and water. The red dots have ruby-coated lenses, and the green dot uses a silver-coated lens.
The optic body and hood have been enhanced over the first-generation sights to better protect the upgraded internals and larger, recessed sight window. If you want enhanced durability you can also add Swampfox’s optional ironsides shield to give an extra layer of protection.
While the features on the Liberty II are impressive, I think the price is even more impressive. It has an MSRP of $249.00, which is extremely competitive for an optic with these features.
Hands-On
I picked up a Liberty II with the red Multi-Reticle for testing. It’s a solid sight but much trimmer than my previous Swampfox pistol red dots—the Kinglsayers. Those are good sights, but I ended up using them on my Mossberg 930 SPX shotgun and my .45 ACP PCC build. The Liberty II’s size feels better suited to a duty or EDC pistol.
I mounted mine on my “Glock 34” build. I put that in quotes because nothing on it is actually Glock. It’s built on an SCT Manufacturing frame and uses a Steel City Arsenal 34-length slide. I had one of my Kinglslayers on it before but found the smaller profile of the Liberty II a much better fit.
The field of view on the Liberty II is excellent. I found it is quick to get on target with and didn’t find that the sight hood occluded much of my down-range view. The serrated back face on the hood and lens coating worked well for reducing glare, even on bright sunny days.
The Multi-Reticle Red Dot
The multi reticle is simple to select. All you have to do is hold the Up arrow for 3 seconds to cycle through reticles, and pick which one you prefer. The multi reticle sight gives you the option of a 3 MOA dot, an open circle, a complete circle with center dot, and a crosshair. I went with the circle dot, but I do like the crosshair option as well. The nice thing about how easy it is to switch reticles is that you can easily switch out at the range and find out what works best for you.
The Shake N’ Wake feature works well on the Liberty II. Any time I picked my gun up the sight was on when I brought it to eye level. In fact I had to sit the pistol where I could see the sight without touching the gun to confirm that it turned off. No worries, it actually does.
More importantly to me, is that it does indeed turn on when you pick it up. If you’re using a Liberty II on a duty or defense gun you want to know that it’s ready to go, and I never had an issue with mine over a few months of use so far.
Running the Liberty II
The sight picture is crisp and there are plenty of illumination levels available to tweak the brightness of the sight to your range conditions. Most of the time I could leave it right in the middle and it was fine. On a particularly sunny day I did kick it up a couple levels to account for the washout. I still had a couple levels to go though, even after getting to a usable setting, so I never maxed out my options.
I didn’t do any sort of torture test on the optic, but have used it for a few months so far with normal jostling around and range use. My older Kingslayers are about 4 years old now though and have been run on handguns, 12 gauge shotguns and 10mm and .45 ACP carbines with no issues.
Being that the Liberty II is an improved design I’m pretty confident that it’ll be fine. Swampfox has an excellent warranty on their optics if you do run into an issue, but I haven’t had to use it with my other 5 or 6 Swampfox optics I run, so I have yet to test it out.
Wrap Up
You can probably tell by me mentioning my pile of Swampfox optics that I’m a fan of the brand. I was introduced to them about 5 years ago by one of the guys on my old agency’s SWAT team. He’d been impressed with them, and recommended I check them out. They offer solid performance at a good price, and that was important to me.
I do a lot of builds that can use optics. While you can’t argue with the quality of the big optics brands, the price can be a barrier to folks. Especially if you’re trying to put optics on multiple guns. Swampfox knows that, and positions itself to provide a quality optic and an affordable price.
The Kingslayers I’ve been running have been good optics, but the Liberty II is a big jump ahead of those. It has solid construction, and a wide field of view 24mm sight window. The impressive 50,000 hour battery life is complimented by the Shake N’ Wake feature.
Feature wise, they compete with just about anyone else’s sight on the market. The RMR footprint makes it readily mountable to most handguns, carbines, shotguns and rifles as well. With the $249.00 MSRP it makes it an easy sell for me.
Still not sure? Swampfox even offers a 30 day money back guarantee when you buy one of their optics through their shop. If you don’t like it for any reason you can return it and get all of your money back. There’s zero risk in trying one out if you aren’t sure if you’ll be happy with it. But with a guarantee like that, the folks at Swampfox are pretty sure you will.
For more information on the Liberty II or Swampfox’s other products, check out their website at Swampfox.com.
