A great concept that has far too many bugs at launch.
Take on the Canadian wilderness as you fight to survive.
Released Nov. 13 by Incuvo (Green Hell VR, Bulletstorm VR) TRACKED: Shoot to Survive puts you in the shoes of Alex, a young man who must use lessons from his past to outlast the dangers of the wilds.
You and your sister Sam are on your way to your father’s cabin, prepared to spend time and scatter his ashes. As you approach land – your cabin homebase on the horizon– your plane is violently shot out of the air. After crash landing, you awaken with Sam nowhere in sight and start your journey to make it safely to the cabin. This journey serves as your tutorial for the game, as you’ll learn the mechanics of the game as you sneak, heal and fight your first round of enemies.
Once you make it to the cabin, you’ll learn things like crafting items, upgrading your workbenches and cooking – all necessary skills if you plan on making it through the game.
For those who have played the virtual reality (VR) version of Green Hell, you’ll find yourself experiencing a lot of déjà vu. The game plays very similarly in terms of mechanics – whether it’s the notebook on your chest, the backpack storage system, or even the crafting system – you’ll perform a lot of the same actions between the two games.
Since we’ve already started talking about it, let’s jump right into the mechanics of the game, because there’s a lot to discuss.
The game tries hard to have in-game actions feel as natural as possible; and to an extent they do. You’ll grab, shoot, and perform most actions as if you were doing them in real life. There is, however, quite a bit of jank in the game at launch.
From small things like a gun appearing on the wrong holster – if you drop it on your right it moves over to the left – to watching your arms flail about when you try and put them together – if you try putting your knife back in the sheath you may encounter this – there’s a lot going on to detract from the overall experience.
As mentioned earlier, you have a notebook to help guide you through the game. This contains your map, objectives, notes you encounter, a list of all the lessons you learn, and crafting guide. This is one of the most important things you’ll have at your disposal throughout the game. It’s unfortunate then, that it is very difficult to use and has already become unusable in some sections.
Once the book is open – via grabbing it from your chest – you’ll be able to navigate the sections by tapping the tabs on the side. Simple system, yes; working well, unfortunately no. You’ll probably encounter instances where you’ll try tapping on one tab and instead get another – because it’s so easy to accidentally touch others. Once you’re inside a section this is where it becomes more difficult, as there are arrows you need to tap to “scroll through the page.”
Tapping on these arrows does not always work; one might even find that they stop working altogether and you’re no longer able to scroll through certain sections. This means you’ll forever be stuck with the big red notification symbol telling you that you have new entries.
While this only happened to one section, it was annoying to encounter such a bug.
When the arrows do work though, you may be unhappy with having to constantly tap to move through the list. Once it get’s big enough you could lose a day just trying to get to one entry.
Another thing which needs to be fixed is the backpack system.
On a basic level it works well; drop items behind your shoulder to add it to the bag, reach over the left to take the bag off, reach over the right and grab your weapon – though if you’re using the bow, it adds an extra step having to switch it over to your dominant hand for shooting.
The issue does not lay within the parameters of basic use, instead falling squarely on removing items and storing them in the cabin.
It’s not that the system is broken, but more the tedium as you’ll need to remove items one by one and toss them into the storage chest in the crafting area. This, again, is something that can see you lose an entire day – or night if you prefer to stay there and avoid the wolves – as it takes forever to empty out a full bag.
Perhaps just adding the ability to select the number of items you’re taking out would help, because in its current state it’s a slog.
Now before we jump over to graphics, let’s talk about some of the finer details of gameplay.
Your health, hunger, and thirst are all available to view on your watch. Depending on your difficulty settings, you’ll need to pay attention to this and care for yourself, lest you have to restart to a save point because you’re too thirsty.
As you progress through the game, you’ll encounter more and more animals which you’ll need to hunt to survive. Once you’ve taken down your prey the game employs an odd “pull it apart” mechanic, rather than having more realistic skinning used in other games.
Speaking of taking down your prey, you’ll get access to a bow early into the game. You’ll find arrows scattered throughout the area, but you can always carve a stick into a makeshift one if necessary. Using the bow, however, doesn’t feel great.
Some games do archery very well, with the whole process feeling as smooth as it would if you had a real one in your hands. Here it just feels off – though that may have to do with the game just feeling not ready.
Aiming doesn’t work as well as it should – whether you’re trying to shoot in a realistic fashion and accounting for the arc of the arrow or shooting by pointing at your target – and you’ll miss a lot of shots. Even when you get the compound bow later in the game, it doesn’t seem to mitigate the lacklustre feeling of archery here.
Oh, it should also be pointed out that you really need to pay attention to the time. You’ll see five minutes tick by on your watch for every five seconds in real life; this means you have about 10 minutes of daylight to work with. Considering there are a ton of dangers at night, and early on you won’t have any means of light to help guide you, you’ll want to properly manage a lot of things wisely.
Finally, let’s talk about graphics before calling it a day.
For those who played the other most recent releases by Invuvo – Green Hell VR or Bulletstorm VR – at launch, you’ll have a good idea of what it looks like in headset. Hint, it’s not stellar.
There are moments when things have a nice sheen to them – roaming through the woods does have its charm here – but mostly the game looks like it was made for early VR headsets.
Certainly, there’s no optimization for the Quest 3 and there should never be any comparisons between this and a looker like Ghost Town.
Many times, you’ll notice that items will pop in once you get closer – even textures on a log will appear as you’re about a foot away from the spot. At one point during the night, one might have a mild heart attack as it looks like a giant creature is appearing over the top of some trees; however, it’ll probably just be a mountain that only appears when you look from the right angle.
It makes sense now why the game isn’t launching across multiple platforms – after the last two debacles it took months of work before either game looked or played well on the PlayStation VR 2 (PSVR2).
Overall, TRACKED: Shoot to Survive, is a game that has a good core premise, but was severely underbaked at the time of launch. It’s unfortunate that the game launched in this state, as a March 2025 report from publisher People Can Fly points to their intent to stop producing VR games. It also notes that a game formerly codenamed Bison, now known as TRACKED would be the last from Incuvo in the VR space.
This news also seemingly points to no ports coming to other headsets and may also denote why the game was launched in this state.
Hopefully the team behind it will patch out all the issues before they stop with the VR market as this game can be enjoyable when it actually works.
