Epic, this tech demo could have been a video. I would have believed you if you'd told me it was all in engine in unreal 5 and I wouldn't have had to download 27gb for a 10 minute car chase and perhaps the lamest open world experience conceivable.

Ok in fairness, the car chase portion is decently cool. It's very matrix reloaded, and despite one or two framerate hitches it's pretty visually impressive, as are the recreations of keanu and carrie ann moss, which you really need to squint at to see the uncanny valley-ness of it.

But there's so little here to talk about. The tech demo opens with a statement from keanu about tech and reality converging and shit but then completely drops it like a minute after and doesnt seem to actually have a point to make other than "damn, unreal 5 is pretty sick huh".

The open world section after the car chase is so pathetic I have no idea what it's purpose is. And it doesn't even look that amazing! It looks like Watch dogs! And all you can do is rob cars and run about!

Just watch the car chase on youtube.

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.

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.

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

“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.

It's a 10 minute tech-demo, not a legit game and that's the only reason I rate it so low, but I will say that as a graphical experience it the most realistic I've ever seen in the context of a 'video game experience' and what the Unreal Engine 5 is capable of is absolutely undeniably impressive.

When I think about how far our technology has come in such a short amount of time, it blows my mind. Pong, arguably the very first video game, came out in 1972. It was just a black screen with two pixilated bricks and a pixilated ball. We are now in 2021 and just look at our games, especially the cut-scenes in most legitimately look like movies and the new Unreal Engine 5 demo is pretty unbelievable, the most realistic I've ever seen a video game experience look. Next year it'll be the 50th anniversary of games, since it was just black and white 2D pixels. That is insane when you think about it, considering that's not a long time when you really think about it. Sure the years are double my age, but in the grand scheme of things, it's still not long at all.

It makes me wonder where we'll go from our current technology, is virtual reality the TRUE future? Will we all have outlets in our heads and be plugging into a Matrix like world in another 50 years or less from now?

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.

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.