Leaked Project U playtest video gives us a first look at Ubisoft’s co-op robot shooter

rockpapershotgun.com:

A video that appears to have been sent to playtesters of Ubisoft’s mysterious session-based co-op shooter Project U has been shared on Twitter. It mostly consists of clips of the game’s dev team talking about playtests, but there are a few sections of gameplay and other footage from the game itself interspersed between those. Creative director Damien Kieken appears in the video, saying that the U in Project U “stands for Unite”.

Kieken goes on to add that “if you want to prevail in this game, uniting with other players is a must”. He explains that the team at Ubisoft Annecy have been working on Project U for several years, and “aim to do something a little bit different in the co-op shooter genre”. The few snippets of actual gameplay show a character sprinting across grassland, and firing on an enemy in third-person. Also shown in the video are some of Project U’s environments, which seem huge and mix forests with giant structures. There’s quite a few colossal light beams firing into the sky for some reason, too.

Community developer Timo Wang appears in the video to tell playtesters that Project U is “in very early development”, and asks for their feedback to improve the shooter. Ubisoft only revealed the existence of Project U at the end of September. At the time, the company said they were going to hold closed playtests in Western Europe on October 14th and 15th. Judging from the content of the leaked video, it seems almost certain that it emerged from someone who signed up to take part in those tests. Cheeky.