If there was one franchise that was ever suited to gaming, it's 'The Matrix'.
The Wachowski sisters are avowed gamers, going so far as to direct 45 minutes of brand-new footage for 2003 tie-in game 'Enter The Matrix' and even appearing as themselves in the 2005 game 'The Matrix: The Path Of Neo'.
With a new 'Matrix' film hitting cinemas next week, director Lana Wachowski found time to team up with Epic, the developers of 'Fortnite' and creators of the Unreal Engine to create a tech demo for the Unreal Engine 5 and show gamers what the new engine is capable of.
In a word, it's simply breathtaking.
For a tech demo it's incredibly impressive and shows what Unreal Engine 5 can do.
Following a live-action intro from Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss, players are thrust into a shooting sequence on a motorway where players most hold off cars full of Agent Smiths.
The camera zooms out to establish a city and you're waiting for your brain to process the change from live-action to gameplay, and it never happens.
Video games have finally achieved movie-quality graphics.
Typically gameplay looks less impressive than a scripted cutscene, but with Unreal Engine 5, the moment-to-moment gameplay now looks identical to a cutscene.
Cars explode and fly off the road with particles falling off in real-time, and is like stepping into the middle of an action movie.
After the on-rails shooting sequence on the motorway, the player is then set free in a vast open-world city.
While there isn't an abundance of stuff to do like 'Grand Theft Auto', players are given free rein of a richly detailed and sprawling city.
Players can traverse the city by foot, in a car, or fly around in typical 'Matrix' style, and when the realisation sets in that this city is as dense and sprawling as a real-life one, the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
The infamous E3 2012 demo for 'Watch Dogs' looked like it was too good to be true, and nearly 10 years later, gaming has finally caught up to that vision of the future.
A press release from Epic stated there are over 7,000 buildings in the city, 35,000 pedestrians, 45,000 vehicles, 512km of pavements, and 260km of roads.
There are certain moments in gaming when you realise the landscape is going to shift forever, such as the first time you run around a 3D castle in 'Mario 64' or strain your PC to boot up 'Crysis' in 2007, and 'The Matrix Awakens' represents the next giant step for gaming as an art form.
The power of Unreal Engine 5 and Epic pledging to make it accessible to third-party developers is a mouth-watering prospect, and if this can be achieved within a year of the new consoles hitting the market, what can be done with the engine within this console generation?
'The Matrix Awakens' is a head-spinning show of force, so if you're fortunate to own a next-generation console you owe it to yourself to download this tech demo.
It's a tech demo and not a finished game, but it's the perfect example of what the future of gaming could hold.
If the tech demo is this good, a full-length triple AAA title using this technology is an incredibly exciting prospect.
The future is here.
