The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 PS5 Free Download Romslab

The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 PS5 Free Download Romslab The Matrix Awakens is a wild ride into the reality-bending universe of ‘The Matrix’ that features performances by Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss. Step into the world of one of the most iconic action franchises ever made in a technical demo powered by Unreal Engine 5. The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience is an astonishing glimpse into the future of video game graphics. That much I expected, but here’s what surprised me: this technical demo is strangely touching in its message and presentation, particularly for any of you who are old enough to remember watching The Matrix back in 1999. And perhaps more surprising, is how The Matrix Awakens inadvertently highlights the limitations of play as we know them today. ROMSLAB.COM Best Switch Games

The Matrix Awakens An Unreal Engine 5 PS5 Free Download Romslab

If The Matrix Awakens proves anything – a free download is available right now for PS5 and Xbox Series X – it’s that we are now staring down the barrel of photorealism. This Unreal Engine 5 experience isn’t hovering on the purview of the uncanny valley so much as it is diving straight into it, particularly in the moments where a pristinely rendered 57-year old Keanu Reeves breaks the fourth wall to walk us through digital recreations of the Matrix’s most famous sets. It looks good, it looks weird, and it made me a little uncomfortable – it’s interactive storytelling operating at a level of visual fidelity that we’ve never seen before.

Car chases

“In an industry where actors have tried to remain perpetually young,” Reeves says, before his character model smoothly shifts to Reeves looking just as he did when Neo helped us question where the digital age might take cinema 22 years ago, “we wondered about digital faces that can become immortal.” It’s at this point that Carrie-Anne Moss shows up. “20 years ago we asked ourselves how long it would be before faces and bodies could be changed as easily as we change clothes… and what would reality be when a world we can build feels as real as our own?” Conan Chop Chop Switch NSP

The Matrix Awakens An Unreal Engine 5 PS5 Free Download Romslab

Then The Matrix Awakens transforms into a nostalgia rush I wasn’t quite prepared for, allowing us to ride shotgun with a de-aged Trinity and Neo as they banter back-and-forth like it’s 1999 again, all while engaged in a high-speed chase through a dense and beautifully detailed urban cityscape. It’s a visually astonishing sequence, showing characters that exist exclusively in the past running lines that were never committed to tape – filmed with a quality of camera that simply didn’t exist at the time. “I sometimes miss this version of us,” Neo whispers, leaning in towards Trinity. “…Me too,” she responds with a hesitant smirk. I’m not crying – you’re crying.

Open world, powered by Unreal Engine 5

If you go to the official The Matrix Awakens website, text scrawls across the screen that asks us to “step into a world where anything is possible.” It’s funny then, that once we are granted control over this technical demo for Unreal Engine 5, we’re only able to shoot things on-rails until they explode – the same offering video games presented when developers made the transition to 3D back in the ’90s. We take control of a character I can’t say I recognise from any of the original trilogy films or promotional material from The Matrix Resurrections, who bites back at Neo that “I was told that this was a sim preparing me to fight the system.” “Right on,” he responds, before flying off toward the horizon. Concordia: Digital Edition Switch

The Matrix Awakens An Unreal Engine 5 PS5 Free Download Romslab

It’s at this point that we shoot at tires with a massive handgun until approaching cars explode or roll into incoming traffic. It’s an ostentatious chase sequence that you could imagine Sony using to sell a new generation of PlayStation console a decade ago; no depth, all sizzle. The coolest part of this entire sequence is as you take aim at the various Agent Johnsons leaping between cars, the bonnets buckle under his weight. Firing at the Agents will force them to shift around the trajectory of your bullets in real-time – a famous effect from the movies, but one I can’t say that I’ve seen so accurately rendered in-game, in real-time, before.

Performance is just not there

The Matrix Awakens is weird in that it’s undoubtedly the best looking interactive experience on PS5 and Xbox Series X, but it plays just as something on the PS1 or original Xbox might have done. This is just a tech presentation, sure, one designed to showcase the underlying capabilities of Unreal Engine 5, but it’s telling that the language of play used to demo such a host of innovations is so dated. We already knew from seeing the ‘Lumen in the Land of Nanite’ demo from May 2020 that Unreal Engine 5 could push visual boundaries. The Matrix Awakens only confirms that, particularly as the Lumen ‘dynamic global illumination and reflections’. Conduct TOGETHER! Switch NSP

The Matrix Awakens An Unreal Engine 5 PS5 Free Download Romslab

Nanite ‘virtualized geometry’, and MetaHuman ‘next generation digital human’ innovations are shown off alongside Mass AI and World Partition systems – showcasing the way UE 5 can govern large realistic crowds and the speed in which content can now be streamed into the player’s eyeline in an open world setting. It’s truly impressive, and I honestly can’t wait to see the first wave of video games embracing Unreal Engine 5. However, at some point, developers are going to have to reckon with how technology like Unreal Engine 5 can be used to help push the boundaries of play. Maybe a tech demo like The Matrix Awakens isn’t the right venue for that – it almost definitely isn’t – but that isn’t to say that I’m not eagerly looking forward to seeing it.

Note: This game will only run on consoles with the original firmware that are connected to the PSN online account and purchased the game from PSN.

Add-ons (DLC): The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 PS5