Snag The Stunning Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine Tech Demo Before It Vanishes Forever
Epic Games' Unreal Engine has been evolving ever since its first appearance as the engine powering its namesake, the original Unreal, in 1998. The second iteration wowed us with its wide-open landscapes, the third version came in with impressive new lighting tech, and the fourth full-number revision brought physical-based rendering and substantial improvements on the editor side.
While there's not any retail software using it yet, Unreal Engine 5 is already here, and it has come along with some fairly incredible capabilities. Thanks to its all-new lighting and geometry engines, it can render scenes with absurd polycounts and ray-traced lights at interactive frame rates. There's no better showpiece for this than the Matrix Awakens demo available on the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series consoles. Sure, other demos might look better, but you can actually download this one on your own hardware and see it running in real-time.
According to Epic, as long as you've downloaded it before—that is to say, as long as you've added it to your account on the relevant service—you'll still be able to download and play (or watch, really) the demo. However, if you haven't, you won't be able to get it again. So saying, even if you don't particularly want the demo on your system's limited storage, it might not be a bad idea to go ahead and add it to your account in case you ever want to wow someone with the capabilities of your current-gen game console.
We've e-mailed Epic to ask why the game is being removed from stores, but haven't heard back yet. We'll update this post if we do.
