If you see the impressive images in The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience and haven’t downloaded it yet, you want to act fast – according to Unreal Engine’s websiteit is removed from the play station and Xbox stores on Saturday, July 9. After that date, you can still play and download it, but only if you added it to your library before the shutdown.
The matrix awakens, released in December 2021 for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X, is intended as a tech demo that showcases the “power and potential” of Epic’s next-generation graphics engine, with its ray-traced lighting and “metahumans “. It features digital replicas of Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss, a series of pursuit towers, and a digital city for you to explore.
The main reason to play it is to see the graphics Unreal Engine 5 can generate in real time while running on the latest consoles. You can read my colleague Sean Hollister’s full account of the experience to get to the heart of how well the footage holds up, but here’s my TL; DR review: The Neo and Trinity models were convincing, until they weren’t, and the explosions wouldn’t have been particularly impressive in an early PS4 game, but the virtual cityscape looked stunningly real to me. The experience, which takes up about 25GB of space on my PS5, also has some neat tricks that let you peek behind the curtains to see what the engine is doing underneath.
Epic did not immediately respond to The edge‘s request for comment on why it’s pulling the demo from stores just a few months after release. However, if you haven’t managed to get your hands on an Xbox Series console or a PS5, there’s still some hope – I could add The matrix awakens to my game library on accounts that had no consoles associated with it, theoretically allowing me to download it in the future. Again, it’s free, so if you’re interested in trying out the experience, it’s worth getting it for the Xbox or play station now it’s still possible.
