Tracked: Shoot to Survive mixes grounded survival mechanics with pulpy action, offering flashes of brilliance buried under layers of jank
When Tracked: Shoot to Survive opens, it wastes no time getting straight into chaos. You play as Alex Hart, a guy whose flight with his sister Sam to spread their late father's ashes over the Canadian wilderness gets violently interrupted when their plane is shot down by a drug-smuggling cartel. You crash somewhere deep in British Columbia, and when you come to, your sister is gone. What follows is a mix of survival, crafting, and firefights that tries to balance a grounded survival experience with pulpy, action-movie energy.
The premise is simple but effective. Alex isn't a soldier, yet he ends up cutting through armed smugglers, wolves, and bears like a one-man army. At one point, the enemies even talk about you like you're Rambo, and the comparison fits. The game gives you just enough story to keep you moving forward, with notes and recordings that slowly reveal more about your family's past and the criminal operation that has taken over the island. It's not groundbreaking, but it's good enough to keep you curious.
The first-person immersion on Quest 3 is solid. You've got a full body, visible arms, and a physical backpack that you interact with just like in The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners. The cabin that once belonged to your father serves as your home base. Here, you can craft and upgrade weapons, patch yourself up, cook food, and improve your gear. The crafting bench and upgrade system feel almost identical to Saints & Sinners — which isn't a bad thing. It's tactile, intuitive, and still one of the best ways to do VR crafting.
You can repair the broken guns you find scattered across the island, upgrade them with scopes or extended magazines, and improve your armor, shoes, or backpack capacity. The weapon roster covers the basics — a knife for stealth kills, a revolver, a shotgun, an old rifle, and later, a semi-auto rifle and two types of bows. Once you upgrade your backpack, you can carry two main weapons alongside your revolver, which feels like the right balance between immersion and convenience.
Gunplay is satisfying when it works. Reloading each weapon is physical — you pop open the revolver's chamber, slot the bullets in, or pump the shotgun manually. It feels good to handle, though some weapons feel a bit off. The shotgun reloads weirdly and doesn't always give the satisfying clack you'd expect. Still, putting down wolves or enemies with a well-placed blast never gets old.
Combat itself is fairly easy. On medium difficulty, I breezed through most encounters, only dying in the last big firefight where armored enemies swarmed me. The AI isn't particularly clever, and while they will duck behind cover, their heads will be out waiting for you to shoot them. Animal encounters can be quite scary, especially at night, but again one shot through the head is all it takes.
Outside of combat, the game leans into its survival mechanics. You have hunger, thirst, and stamina meters, though you can disable or simplify these if you prefer a more straightforward experience. On easy survival settings, you can completely disregard the thirst and hunger meters, which honestly makes the game more enjoyable for people who aren't into the constant micro-management that usually kills pacing in survival games.
When it's working right, Tracked really captures that sense of isolation and danger. The forests, caves, and abandoned sawmills all look decent for a standalone Quest title. If I were to compare the game graphically, the closest game on standalone Quest 3 is probably Ghosts of Tabor. The lighting at night is especially intense — when the sun goes down, it's pitch black. Walking around with only your hand-made headlamp while hearing wolves howl in the distance is genuinely unnerving. It's not photorealistic, nowhere near it, but it nails the atmosphere.
Exploration feels decent too. The island is split into zones, forests, caves, gang hideouts, a lumber mill, each with its own dangers and loot. You can climb rock faces with pickaxes, ride ziplines, and scavenge everything not nailed down. Materials like sticks, ore, animal hide, and cloth are essential for crafting upgrades and healing items. The game also encourages hunting animals like pigeons, beavers, or moose. You can carve them up for meat, bones, and leather, which then feed into crafting recipes back at the cabin. Also since Alex is a unit of a man you can tear small animals like rabbits or beavers only by using your bare hands and that's quite satisfying. It's all very tactile, and the physical interactions make even simple tasks feel grounded, when they work.
Unfortunately, Tracked is a mess technically. The potential is there, but the current build feels like it's still in early access. Mission objectives sometimes don't trigger. If you drop off the zipline before you reach the end, the climbing axe bugs out and it can't be used anymore, only a reloading the last save fixes it. I had my rifle disappear from my inventory entirely so I was kinda forced to roleplay as Rick from The Walking Dead using only the revolver until I got the shotgun. The enemy AI often freezes in place. Your legs will be placed in some pretty weird positions when trying to climb down ladders. Plus some weird small oversights like after you craft the headlamp and place it on your head,you can turn it on by pressing the trigger. However, everytime you basically ADS with a large gun, as you shoot the lamp will turn off and on again with each press of the trigger.
There's also no way to sleep or pass the time, which makes the day-night cycle more annoying than immersive. You can fast travel, but it costs food, and if you do it at night, you'll just arrive somewhere in pitch darkness with no way to rest until morning. The headlamp eventually helps, but not enough to make wandering around at night feel practical.
Cooking food is another confusing step. You have to collect ingredients, put them in the pot, and then add a lid before the fire starts cooking. The tutorial never explains this, so I spent a good five minutes wondering why my food wasn't heating up. Small things like that add up and break immersion.
Health management is also weirdly punishing. Bandages only stop bleeding but don't restore health. The few healing bottle pills you can craft or find are somewhat rare, and if you run out, you're basically stuck at low health indefinitely.
Despite all of that, there's something likeable about Tracked. It has this scrappy charm, a sense that it's trying to do a lot of things bigger studios usually shy away from on standalone VR hardware. The world design is ambitious, the mechanics are varied, and when everything clicks — when you're hunting, crafting, sneaking through a camp, and then pulling off a perfect ambush — it feels really good.
It also runs fairly well on Quest 3. The graphics aren't groundbreaking and I wouldn't call this a pretty game, but the dense forests, mountain ridges, and cave interiors look decent enough. The lighting and sound design help a lot. You can hear the crunch of snow and the unsettling quiet of the wilderness when nothing's moving. It's immersive enough that you forget the low-poly edges and just enjoy being there.
Still, the issues pile up fast. Objective triggers fail, certain missions can't progress, and the UI sometimes stops responding entirely. You'll find yourself reloading saves or backtracking just to get things working again. It's clear that the game needs a few more months of bug fixing and polish before it truly shines.
Yet, I can't say I didn't enjoy my time with it. I finished the story in about five hours, even though the devs say it can last up to fifteen. I skipped some side content, sure, but the pacing felt good. It's the kind of game that's better when you don't take it too seriously — when you let yourself enjoy the survival fantasy of being alone in the wilderness, crafting bullets and hunting down a cartel with whatever tools you can make.
Tracked: Shoot to Survive has all the right ingredients: a cool premise, solid survival mechanics, tactile crafting, and a surprisingly competent sense of atmosphere. But right now, it feels unfinished. It's held back by bugs, missing tutorials, clunky interactions, and inconsistent difficulty balancing.
If the team at Incuvo can patch up the major issues, smooth out the AI, and tighten the survival systems, this could easily become one of the better standalone VR adventures on Quest 3. As it stands, it's a very rough but enjoyable experience that shows promise beneath the jank. Thanks for reading!
The game was reviewed on a Quest 3 via a promo copy provided by the developer. Tracked: Shoot to Survive is available on Meta Quest.
