 Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and today we're going to review the Rothko Special Ops soft shell jacket. So I have purchased two of these jackets and I've had them for about eight months, give or take, had a little bit of wear and tear and use out of them. So I thought it was time to kind of check in and do a review. On Amazon, I think I paid around $100, $120 somewhere in there. I originally got the woodland one and then I ended up going with the green one because at the time I was going down to one shepherd and I needed one of each in order to fit with the uniform requirements there in order to, you know, if I needed to be warmer, I needed to have one of each. So that's how I ended up with both of these. Overall, very glad I did. I'm pretty sure that this is their take on a Helicon Tex jacket that looks exceedingly similar that they've kind of just made a cheaper version of. I would say overall, the jacket's gonna keep you warm down to about 30-dish degrees if you're layering. If you have like some thermal under layers under there. If you just have a T-shirt like I do right now under this, you're probably good to around maybe 45, 40 degrees comfortably before you're gonna have to start doing something else. It is not an exceedingly thick jacket. It's pretty thin. It's just a, like I said, a good over jacket. It does have some water resistance during rain and stuff like that. So that is super helpful. As far as features of the actual jacket, you end up having two kind of pockets right here. They do have these tie down points that are there for dummy cording gear. Now as you can tell, they have not held up very well. This one is holding on by the barest of threads and I continue to wait for it to finally die but it has not yet. So these inner pocket kind of dummy cord lash points really don't hold up that well. They do, they did have some kind of elastic strapping but that's just been shredded just from having my hands in my pockets. So that's not the greatest. Other than that, it also has a pass through port here for your headphones if you're into that cause you wanna run your headphones through it for whatever reason. It also has kind of an inner pocket here for a pen or something like that. Other than that, they're just pretty simple. They'll zip up, zip down pockets. Originally I didn't like them cause I thought they were too high but to be honest with you, I've grown to like them. It does have dual zippers on the jacket. I do like that because then I zip the jacket all the way up and I unzip the bottom a little bit because I carry appendix and it's a lot easier to have that extra space around your waist. On the inside of the jacket, you end up having two pockets, one on each side that has a little zip pocket here. Honestly, I don't think I've ever used these. I have a Kleenex in there now because you never know when you might need that. The jacket does come with these little bungee things around the bottom of the hem of the jacket. Usually I'm not a big fan of that cause they get in the way of my draw and my whole string but these ones haven't been a problem so far. On the back of the jacket, on the bottom, it does have these little pockets that you can zip open to help get more air flow through here and that just allows air to pass through better. I haven't really used them that much but they are there. Same thing on the armpit of the jacket. You have a little pit sleeve that you can unzip in order to try to get some more air flow and cool the jacket down. Again, haven't used that feature very much but it's there. One of the things I do like about this jacket is that on these shoulders, it does have a Velcro for mounting patches which is kind of cool but also, I was able to, again, meet the one shepherd requirements that I needed to meet with this jacket so I can have my flag, I can have my patch, I can have that stuff. It also does have the nice handy arm pockets. These are nice, I've used these a little bit. They do have, again, that headphone jack pass through if you wanna use that. Getting to the hood, the hood is one of the weaker points of the jacket. It has this kind of weird bungee system in order to make the hood smaller if that's what you want to do. The problem is you end up with kind of all this extra bunched up here so I kind of just cut it somewhere in the middle and I've just been leaving it there. It's still awkward to have the extra bungee here but you gotta do what you gotta do. The hood itself does have this interesting Velcro thing here so if your hood is deployed and you want it out of the way, you can kind of Velcro it up just like that and you can wear the jacket like that. Again, going back to the inside of the jacket, they do have these little pockets here which end up being right and high up here. Never use those but they exist. After eight months of wear on and off, these jackets have held up pretty well so I am happy with them. I do think they're overall worth the $100. Again, the weakest points on the jacket are gonna be these dummy tie down points on the inside of the pockets. These get shredded in a hurry and then the hood's kind of wimpy but as far as insulating you and generally keeping the rain off, I think they work pretty well. I'm gonna continue to wear them. I'm gonna continue to use them. It also works for a good kind of soft shell jacket thermal layer if you wanted to roll that up and put it in your pack. They're not gonna roll up the smallest but they will roll up decently well to be able to fit inside a good three day pack or something like that so that you can have an extra thermal layer and the nice part is if you're going to be layered like you should be in cold weather with long underwear and then maybe a shirt and then maybe a fleece layer and then you put this jacket over it, you're gonna be able to be pretty comfortable getting down to decently colder temperatures which is nice because these do again, a pretty good job of keeping the water off you or snow or anything like that. The hood is also very nice. It kind of fits over a helmet. That's a little bit tougher but you can kind of get it over your helmet. In general, if you're on the fence but you're just looking for kind of a more affordable soft shell jacket, I'd recommend these. Like I said, I paid full price for them on Amazon and I've enjoyed them so far. It's nice to be able to find a decent thermal layer jacket thing that's not $600 because it's super cry precisiony, whatever. So hope that's helpful. Enjoy the poor man's cool jacket. Do brave deeds and endure.