Received one for Christmas and took it out chukar hunting 12/26. Overall, I like it. It is everthing you would expect from Badlands as far as quality and craftsmanship. It really is a solid, well built good looking piece of equipment with some neat features. It carries excellent with the load firmly on your hips, which is so much better than the traditional vest I have been using for the last 20 years. I carry quite a bit of weight with water, shells, food, first aid kit etc and hopefully a bunch of birds, so the way it carried made a huge a difference. The only thing I dont like is a few of the pockets are small and hard to get my hand in, which is a pet peeve when it comes to packs. I would rather have fewer large pocktets than a bunch of little ones, but that is just me. The bird carrying area is a little shallow as well, so if you manage to kill a pile of birds it could be an issue and you could lose one overboard....maybe I will do a follow up when I get my next limit...
My partner has a quillomene which is a great vest too, but he liked this one a lot which says something. Kind of spendy though at 169.00, but Badlands has an iron clad warranty and will take care of anything that happens to it.
If you cover a lot of ground and hunt big country this is a great vest and what it lacks in extra space is a good trade off for how it carries. If you dont hunt far, or long and don't carry a lot of weight, then a traditional vest, or one of the less expensive strap vests would probably be sufficient.
I havent ran out of shells yet and probalby won't, but as long as I am solving world hunger what the heck !!