This is not a game. The Matrix: Awakens is a tech demo developed to show to the world the power of Unreal Engine 5, the next big thing of the gaming industry.

I was amazed to see in this tech demo how the video games are developing. I know that The Matrix: Awakens was made for market reasons and I also know that we'll probably have wait for almost a decade to see a full game with this result but it's really cool see the future on your hands right now.

The tech demo looks like a attraction that we could see at Disney or Universal's park, especially if you have a good TV and a headphone. It's almost not a game but the action segments are really fun to play.

It's a short experience (30 minutes). The visuals are incredible and the gameplay is also pretty sick (but I have to say it has a encrypted action segments).

It's a free "game" so I think you should give it a try, especially if you want to see how the future of gaming will be.

Absolutely stunning.

Ever since my jaw dropped in 1996 when I first saw Super Mario 64, I have loved that first moment when new hardware really shows off what this console generation can do. The Matrix: Awakens was that moment for me, chronologically following SM64, Metroid Prime, Halo 3, and Uncharted 4.

It's very important to go into this knowing exactly what it is beforehand though: a tech demo. This is not a game, so don't expect any compelling gameplay of any kind. But when the latter half of the demo started, I was breathless. I could not believe what I was seeing and exploring.

Most of the time, I was thinking "My PS5 is rendering this???" though that was occasionally interrupted by bleak thoughts of how many high-res assets and textures are needed for any game on this scale, and that it will likely increase development time and be more grueling for employees. But it was hard to stay focused on that when there was such an immense, gorgeous cityscape to gawk at!!

I’m just a sucker for tech demos, I can’t do anything about it. And this is just one of the craziest things I’ve seen in a while. Whenever I imagined what rockstar would be able to do with the new console generations, having the new ssd speeds and data streaming rates that directly influence how detailed open worlds can get, I was thinking about this. Of course, this is on a small scale and without any gameplay, but we’re going to get there and that’s just absolutely insane. You don’t even have to be a matrix shill, like I am, to have to check this out. It’s crazy.

Came at it with very low expectations. Was very happy to discover that it went as far as giving you a big city space to walk around in, drive cars in, and crash cars in.

Now, there were plenty of visual issues. Flickering textures, objects popping in, framerate instability, and lighting acting strangely. I was not massively bothered by these things. I understood the whole thing to be more of a rough proof of concept rather than a polished and perfected piece.

The technology is exciting. It was incredible seeing the early on-rails segment of the game, seeing near-movie-like graphics rendering live. The free-roam segment is beautiful as well, though it isn't quite as stunningly new.

It was nice fun to throw a couple of hours of time at, taking the time to admire the visuals and test the settings, race through the city, torment npcs, and try to viciously ram into traffic to admire the destruction physics of the cars. It gave me a glimpse of what the coming generations of games are gonna look like, and I'm very excited.

It do be a UE5 tech demo. Will def admit things look incredibly photorealistic all throughout, and the setpieces in the car chase definitely looked expensive to make. I do wonder how many games going forward are actually going to look like this, or really if they should. The freeroam section did let me admire the whole city from various different angles and distances and the attention to detail is great. The city was also more spacious than I expected so driving around was fun too (though I won't give this game any awards in the driving physics or stable framerate department when doing so).

Despite the fancy expensive setpieces, the photorealistic graphics, and all the other fancy features that the game claims to have, I still have a hard time discerning this current generation with the previous one. As someone who hasn't seen the matrix and doesn't play much big-budget modern AAA games, you could probably have told me I was playing some watch dogs thing on PS4 or something and I would believe you. We've long since hit the point of diminishing returns on game visuals, and I hope games don't take more time and money to make as they chase for visual enhancements I won't really even notice.

Minha primeira impressão dessa Tech Demo foi por um vídeo no YouTube, e eu fiquei bem impressionado com tudo.

Jogando... não foi pra tanto. Mas ainda assim é algo bem incrível que mostra o potencial enorme dos jogos em estarem cada vez mais graficamente fiéis a realidade.

Ah, e usar o universo de Matrix pra isso foi uma boa cartada.

“Hello, I’m Keanu Reeves, and twenty years ago I was in the Matrix trilogy of films” being delivered by a temporal-spatial-facial rendering/animating/morphing/jargoning Neo-through-the-ages was genuinely stirring and did a surprisingly good job of selling me on Unreal Engine 5, despite the whole premise of this demo not being a million miles away from those Windows 95 CD-ROMs that Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry did way back when. As someone who was Right Age, Right Time for the original movie, I guess something like this is precision-engineered to get me emotional despite it being the Epic Games equivalent of Quake II RTX. I made a point of only watching the first trailer for Resurrections, but if this is a hint of what the movie is gonna be like… I’m excited!

The highway chase being an essential spiritual sequel to Path of Neo (“enough talking, we have to give the gamers some action”) was a delight, though I could hear my Series S sobbing quietly beneath the hood while trying to rustle up some of the particle and destruction effects. Very funny to think I’ve bought an only-one-year-old next-gen console that is already writhing in agony at a specialist tech demo made by the very architects of the engine that underpins most video games!!

The city sandbox at the end is a genuinely fascinating little petri dish of games tech, and did a far better job of explaining some of the new-age rendering technology than any diehard no-lifer “vegetation doesn’t respond in real-time to player movement???” tweet ever has. Complaints about car-handling and physics feel wholly redundant when you can literally pop a menu to fuck with…. idk…. the position of the sun in the sky or the diffusion of light across surfaces. Crazy. Now we just need someone to actually make a game that meaningfully integrates this stuff.

There was really no reason at all for this to be tied to The Matrix. In fairness, besides a few uncanny valley movements and scenes a lot of this does look really good.

The shooter section is HOTD without the aiming, adaptive triggers were not used so there’s nothing interesting but the visuals. After that there’s a scene that shows you the effects of the new engine which is neat I guess.

Then you’re placed in an open world city with roam to walk, drive or “fly” (1st person) around just to explore. It still looks great, being blinded by the sun while driving was pretty cool. Sadly the cars felt weightless despite their handling suggesting they were back-heavy. They do roll if you handbrake turn tho so maybe game devs can build from the engine and give us mechanics that don’t feel like GTA IV

Gameplay is rough but it's a pretty cool tech demo of Unreal engine 5 and one of the real first looks into next gen technology.

The city visuals once in the freeroam are amazing. The buildings and world object detail is pretty bonkers and the fact there is almost no pop in and an insane draw distance when flying around all with Ray tracing is extremely impressive. When switching to night it really looks fantastic with the lighting.

Some tips: Turn the Matrix filter off for better lighting quality and lessen the crowd and car density to improve the framerate in the options. That's my main critisicm is that it aims for 30fps, aims. Give me 60 fps with this level of fidelity and then we are really talking. Still very impressive though.

Wow! I thought most of the intro was live action on the first go, then the chase sequence starts and I was impressed, but thought it wasn't overly special for an on-rails sequence. Then my brain dissolved upon realizing it's all a real-time, fully open environment.

From the aerial cityscape that looks indistinguishable from drone footage to the insane level of detail on the signs, the crystal-clear tiny text on the posters, here's finally something that feels entirely next-gen. I didn't think I'd ever be this blown away by a technical demo again.

The car chase segment is really impressive, barely looked like a game at times (though ironically the frame drops broke that immersion a bit). It didn't wow me too much in terms of "this is what games could be like in the future" because of how much it didn't look like a game at all, on top of it just being a tech demo with very limited gameplay. As a visual showcase though, it's pretty neat. I think reading up on how everything in the demo works will give me a better picture of how all of the tech could be implemented into a full game some day.