The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience offers players their first return to the Matrix's green-hued simulation since Enter the Matrix, The Matrix: Path of Neo, and The Matrix Online.
The Matrix Awakens truly demonstrates what Unreal Engine 5 can achieve through graphical fidelity, which was not capable with previous games in The Matrix's franchise. Recently, a developer with a unique outlook on The Matrix games has compared Epic Games' latest experience with The Matrix's older games.
Chandana Ekanayake, a former game director, art director, and character artist at Shiny Entertainment, shared his admiration for how far graphics have come since his work on Enter the Matrix and The Matrix: Path of Neo. The Matrix: Path of Neo released two years after Enter the Matrix and therefore has comparable graphics. But Enter the Matrix, when compared to Epic Games' The Matrix Awakens, is much less rich in immersive detail, texture, and fidelity, and is much more low-poly.
Comparisons are inevitable due to their relativity to one another in the franchise. Ekanayake shows close-up frames of Trinity in The Matrix: Path of Neo compared to The Matrix Awakens, and while the former has done commendable work representing her it is clear that lighting effects and realistic facial model textures are superior in the latter. Ekanayake goes as far as to share photos of 3D scans for Enter the Matrix's Niobe character model that were made "using patch modeling techniques" from the PS2, which further differentiates it from The Matrix Awakens technologically.
But these particular comparisons have been made as a result of The Matrix Awakens' freeway traffic gunfight reflecting that of Enter the Matrix's. This comparison has led to the resurfaced desire for an Enter the Matrix remaster where it could be given a facelift similar to The Matrix Awakens. Indeed, the lack of texture and draw distance in Enter the Matrix pales in comparison to The Matrix Awakens' high fidelity and immaculate renders.
It is unsurprising that graphics have indeed received upgrades through advancements in contemporary technology and platform hardware, but the improvement that such upgrades have made in nearly two decades is a phenomenal feat between Enter the Matrix and The Matrix Awakens. If The Matrix Awakens is a sample of what players may expect next-gen games to look like, there is a lot of emergent technology that could sustain a fully-fledged game in The Matrix franchise, whether it is a remake or a new installment.
Enter the Matrix is available on PC, PS2, GameCube, and Xbox. The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience is available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.