The Matrix Awakens on PS5: This is how fantastic the Unreal Engine 5 looks in real time

You want “next-gen” optics and want to know what’s possible in terms of graphics on PS5 and Xbox Series X in the coming years? The tech demo The Matrix Awakens delivers the answer in a really impressive way with the help of Unreal Engine 5. We were able to see the showcase including the playable demo in advance and want to reveal what you can expect from today on the current-gen consoles.

Was ist The Matrix Awakens?

This is not a game in the strict sense of the word. Rather, the interactive demo shows what will be possible with Unreal Engine 5 in the future. Not only did we get to see a short, impressive in-engine trailer, we were actually allowed to go to the pad ourselves, experienced an action-packed escape scene and, in the third person view, were able to explore a huge, lively American city completely freely.

But one after the other. This is all in The Matrix Awakens:

• Keanu Reeves: First, a three-minute cut scene with 57-year-old Matrix star and colleague Carrie-Ann Moss is shown, which raises the question of what is real and what is fiction. And yes, some of the pictures look so lifelike that it is difficult for us to tell the difference between the two worlds. What the UE5 conjures up here on the PS5 is impressive.
• Interactive escape scene: Pan, it goes into the streets of New York. Young Neo and Trinity are sitting in a car. A scripted chase begins, we have to puncture the tires of approaching cars, gun in hand. Here the UE5 shows what it can do in terms of explosions and particle effects.

Open world gameplay from the third and first person

But that’s not all. The heart of the tech demo is a mega-metropolis that is visually similar to New York. Surprisingly, we are allowed to explore the entire city in the third person view with a female character. If we press the triangle button, we also get into a drone mode, experience the big city from the first person view and are allowed to float in lofty heights, look at the hustle and bustle from a bird’s eye view.

A shame, however: The interaction with the game world is very limited. Buildings cannot be entered, we are not allowed to get into any of the cars and otherwise it quickly becomes clear that we are here in an optical showcase, not in a finished game. It is still fascinating, especially due to technical finesse such as ray tracing and the dense population of the game world. If the streets in a Cyberpunk 2077 are partly empty, countless cars drive past us and there are many passers-by on the sidewalks.

This foresight: But what really impressed us is how far we can look into the distance. If we hover over “New York”, we see the high-rise canyons miles away. The skybox is also quite impressive.

See the full tech demo “The Matrix Awakens” here

So that you have all of this in mind, we recorded our play-through session unfiltered from start to finish:

16:40

The Matrix Awakens – Check out the full PS5 tech demo of Unreal Engine 5 here

Classification of the editorial team

Dennis: Seeing the Unreal Engine 5 in action for the first time on the PS5 at home in real time was quite an experience. Especially character models and the populated big city look really good and show what is possible in the future.

However, it should be clearly noted at this point that a tech demo only shows what is possible with the engine as part of a concentrated showcase. At the beginning the focus was on detailed faces, during the escape scene explosions and particle effects, in the open world it was the detailed representation of the game world including its sheer size. Other areas such as the animation of NPCs and the interactivity within the world were left out.

You see what the Unreal Engine 5 is capable of in theory, but please don’t expect that in 3-4 years open world games and story adventures will look exactly like this. In a real game, interactions within the game world eat up all sorts of resources that are at the expense of technology. A game from Quantic Dream (Detroit), for example, could show visually impressive figures, a GTA 6 could show great foresight including busy streets. Especially in technically complex open world games, however, there will be cuts due to the limited computing power of the consoles. Be it the frame rate, animations, resolution, etc.