Project S.U.N.D.I.A.L. Preview — Hands-On With a Top-Down Extraction Shooter

Project S.U.N.D.I.A.L is a top-down extraction shooter that's currently available as a playtest. For now, you can only play solo. When asked about the release, the developer said that, at best, the game will come out in March 2027. My time with the current build started with the tutorial, continued with a rifle I accidentally dismantled, and ended with me never finding the exit from the city map. Here's the full story.

The first thing Project S.U.N.D.I.A.L does is send you to the tutorial. You're told that you're at some kind of base, but how exactly you got there is never really explained. The protagonist suffered some sort of head injury, and that's where the introduction ends. From there, you're left to figure things out on your own. Before you start, you can create a character. You choose a man or a woman and change the hairstyle and face. There are two more settings whose purpose I never figured out. I set them at random and moved on.

The tutorial can be skipped. The button is right there on the screen, so if you want, you don't have to go through this long run. I left it on, and some of the information came in handy. For example, I learned about crafting, the medic, dismantling items, and building at the base.

Building is where I ran into a problem. The game told me I could upgrade rooms but didn't explain how to actually do it. There was a fitness room that was probably supposed to affect stamina somehow. I pressed every key on the keyboard, but nothing happened. No menu appeared, no window opened, and the game didn't hint at the right action. Maybe this content was locked. Maybe I just didn't find the right button.

In general, Project S.U.N.D.I.A.L shows you quite a lot during the tutorial, but it doesn't always take the explanation far enough to be useful. You're told that a feature exists. After that, you're on your own.

There's a medic at the base. After raids, you can go to them for treatment. Depending on what happened to you in the city and how much time you spent there, you'll need to recover before heading out again.

There's also crafting. Items found in the open world can be turned into med kits and other useful things. Separately, you can cook food, which, as far as I understood, gives additional effects. I barely used food or medicine because my raids ended before I had a chance to properly figure out this whole system. Items can be dismantled into metal or other materials. The mechanic is simple, but once it nearly left me without a weapon. I accidentally dismantled my rifle: I just picked the wrong item — and that was it, the gun was gone. After that, I had to go to the weapons dealer and buy a new one.

Money is spent right away. By default, I had about $2,000 in my bag. If you die, you don't get the money back. The weapon you bought before that is lost too. On the next run, you have to piece yourself together all over again. There's a trader named Volkov at the base. He sells ammo, med kits, clothing, weapons, and backpacks. And if you enjoy the grim atmosphere of ruins, radiation, and survival on the edge, check out our selection of the best post-apocalyptic games.

After returning to the base, you have to go to the starter chest again. It holds a rifle, a pistol, a flashlight, clothes, shoes, gloves, pants, and a chest rig. You also get ammo, bandages, and healing items. This kit appears on every new run. The problem is that all the items have to be moved manually. I couldn't find a "take all" button. You grab an item with the mouse and drag it into your inventory. Then the next one. Then another one.

The first few times, it's bearable. You look around, get used to things, and gather your gear. But when you die on almost every raid, the process quickly turns into a chore. Open the chest again. Drag the weapon over again. The clothes again. The ammo and bandages again. After the third or fourth run, you just want the game to remember your loadout.

At one point, while moving items around yet again after dying, I noticed that my flashlight was missing. It simply vanished. I had to do one of the following runs without it.

Quests are handed out by NPCs in the open world and at the base. You walk up to a character, open the dialogue window, and read the text. There's no voice acting. Instead, you hear a typewriter sound that accompanies every letter as it appears.

The sound is very loud. I played with speakers and ended up turning the volume almost all the way down just so I wouldn't hear the clacking. I couldn't find a way to turn it off in the settings. When there's a lot of text, the typewriter becomes more irritating than the dialogue itself. Maybe the effect won't bother some people. It bothered me the whole time. The character hasn't said anything yet, and all you can think about is how to turn off that sound.

Right now, only one city is available in the game — Novigrad. I'm not sure whether the name is a reference to anything. In the city, you can enter buildings and search for items. Loot is scattered in various places, and you can also get it from enemies you kill.

Humans drop more useful stuff: weapons, gear, and medicine. Most of them wear armor, though, so they're harder to take down. Monsters and rats are less protected and die faster. They more often drop metal for crafting and some items they apparently found or ate while wandering around. There are also dogs. They run around the city but aren't dangerous on their own. If you'd rather run into the walking dead in a city instead of rats, check out our selection of the best zombie games.

The main problem for me was the lack of a map. I didn't understand where to go or where the exit was. You can spend a long time wandering through buildings, collecting items, and running into enemies, and then simply get lost. I never managed to properly finish a single raid with an extraction. On top of that, mobs sometimes spawn behind your back. You enter a room — nobody's there. You go further, come back, and suddenly there's an enemy right next to you. I could start looting, get distracted by the contents of a crate, and then take a hit from behind. Sometimes I couldn't even tell where the attacker had come from.

At night, the city turns into an almost completely black screen. The flashlight helps a little, but only within its own beam. If an enemy is outside the lit area, you can't see them. When the beam reaches an enemy, they become visible. Until then, you can walk right past them if you're lucky. The game specifically points out that you can attach the flashlight to your weapon and walk around with both the light and the rifle at the same time.

Items are switched with the number keys 1 to 5 or through a radial menu. It seems simple enough, but in the dark, any extra movement already puts you on edge. Especially when you know an enemy might show up nearby, and you're holding a flashlight instead of a rifle. Once, during rain, white drops or snowflakes appeared in the air. I never figured out what exactly it was. As far as I noticed, it didn't affect anything around me. It just got even darker and harder to see.

There are radioactive rains. They build up a separate negative effect that can kill you. At the same time, you have to keep an eye on food, water, and sleep. If sleep drops to zero, the character dies right in the middle of a raid and returns to the base. Then it's the chest, the clothes, and trying to figure out where to go all over again. If survival systems like these are your thing, you'll find plenty of them in our selection of the best survival games on PC.

There are characters at the base and in the city who give out tasks. Some ask you to kill a certain number of mobs. Others send you to find items and bring them back. You might get a task to kill ten of one enemy type or five of another. The tasks themselves look clear. The problem is that I never managed to properly reach the extraction point. Because of that, I couldn't return with the items I found and hand them over to the people waiting at the base.

The game also has warnings before you head out. If you haven't healed enough or forgot to prepare, the system reminds you. It's useful, because after several deaths you start acting on autopilot: grab a weapon, drag the ammo over, head out. And only then do you remember that you have almost no health.

I died a lot. Sometimes I understood why: an enemy was close by, I didn't have enough firepower, I didn't notice the radiation, or I spent too long in the city. Sometimes I just didn't understand what had happened. There was no map, it was hard to get my bearings, enemies could appear where there had been nobody a second ago, and the darkness made it hard to see what was going on.

For someone who's already familiar with the genre, this might be part of the fun. Here, you need to memorize routes, keep track of supplies, understand what can be picked up, dismantled, or sold, and make a risky decision every time.

Right now, only solo mode is available, even though Project S.U.N.D.I.A.L is described as a PvPvE shooter with online play. There were no other players in my runs. There were human enemies, monsters, rats, dogs, radioactive rain, and a growing certainty that the exit was somewhere in another city.

Project S.U.N.D.I.A.L already offers a solid set of mechanics for an extraction shooter: a base with a medic and a trader, crafting and item dismantling, a survival system with food, sleep, and radioactive rain, NPC quests, and an atmospheric nighttime city where every raid keeps you on edge. Of course, this is a playtest, and rough edges are to be expected. The tutorial lacks detail, raid prep could be simplified with a "take all" button, and a map would make getting around Novigrad much easier. But all of these are entirely solvable issues. For those who love hardcore games, memorizing routes and taking risks with every run, the foundation already looks promising. With the release expected no earlier than March 2027, the developer has time to polish the interface and launch the promised PvPvE mode. If that works out, S.U.N.D.I.A.L has every chance of becoming an interesting entry in the genre, and one that's definitely worth keeping an eye on.