You can play as Superman in The Matrix Unreal 5 demo

April 17, 2022: The Superman game demo built in Unreal Engine 5 is now playable.

Last week, a developer made their own Superman game out of the Unreal 5 demo used for The Matrix Awakens, and announced they were looking to expand it into a proper superhero game. Now, another developer has properly added Superman to this experience – and it’s playable.

The Matrix Awakens was an impressive VR game demo built in Unreal Engine 5. The core of this demo is the detailed cityscape, and now Unreal 5 is freely available, Epic has made this ‘City Sample‘ available to budding developers to play about with. Developer Volod from Amber Studio – which works with Epic Games – used this demo as the foundation for their own Superman-like game.

Volod says that they “cooked my own city grid in Houdini, using Epic’s project files and VEX scripting” and has apparently been “making city-building tools for years on film/commercial VFX work” so they know what they’re doing.

Then Volod plopped a generic character in and gave them Superman-like powers – and now says that they will attempt to turn it into a full game.

A week later, Toybox Games Studios founder Tyson Butler-Boschma went one step further and actually added a proper Superman-like character too – albeit without the fresh, new city of Volod’s attempt. Tyson’s demo is actually playable right now and can be downloaded from their Itch.io page. Be warned, though – the developer warns that the demo is an “incredibly heavy game and lower-end PCs will struggle”.

The original Unreal engine 5 demo was partly created by ex-developers of Factor 5, the studio behind Star Wars: Rogue Squadron… and a cancelled Superman game, according to developer Salvatrix – who was lead designer on the cancelled game. None of the Unreal team worked directly on that, however, but its city creation expertise was “the foundation and engine” of Superman – just like with Volod’s and
Tyson Butler-Boschma’s games.

Hopefully, Superman will get a proper game soon, maybe even from the Gotham Knights studio – it’s certainly long overdue. Thanks to Fortnite, the Man of Steel’s no stranger to Unreal Engine 5, anyway.

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