Grand Theft Auto V - This Unreal Engine 5 Superman Demo Is Mind Blowing. 4k
Not long ago we got The Matrix Awakens, this amazing, unreal five-tech demo that showed us what was possible with a city environment, and now modders that are also Superman fans are starting to get into it. Hi folks, it's Falcon, and today on GameRanks we're going to talk about this Unreal Engine 5 Superman demo that is absolutely mind-blowing.
So a few days ago, this mod was posted on itch. Io. It's by a guy named Tyson Butler Boshma, and it's simply titled "a Superman Style Flight Experience," and it is exactly what it sounds like, a small proof of concept for a potential future Superman game. Like, remember that undefeated game that came out on Steam a few years back?
We talked about that here on this channel, and frankly, it's a really enjoyable experience as well. The modders have been sneaking Superman into games like GTA 5 for quite a while now, and there is very clearly a lot of fan support for a game starring the man of tomorrow. This mod may be the most impressive thing we've seen yet, and that is partially because it uses the visually impressive Unreal Engine 5 matrix demo as a base and replaces the character from that with a superman like model along with sounds and animations.
Right now it's relatively simple but the results are mind-blowing, like the potential for a real next-gen experience is here and right now this is probably the closest thing we've got to seeing. Obviously, part of that is that we haven't really seen a Superman game that looks good. We've seen a lot of mods, but another part of it is that they really look good because the developers are really careful about staying on their itch.
Io, Page: This is not actually Superman. For legal reasons, they made sure to make the character generic enough not to offend any rights holders, but it's also clearly meant to show what a Superman game would be like, and being able to control him in such a stunningly detailed environment with a pretty good moveset just leaves us hungry for more.
It's interesting because at this point. I've gotten pretty used to the matrix demo, like I've played around with it. I've watched a lot of other people glitch it and find little things they can get out of it. There's a particularly interesting article on how to get out of the borders, so you can go check out the city beyond the actual city.
It doesn't yield anything, particularly. But it's certainly interesting, but I've been waiting for a while to see if someone would actually make a mod for it. A lot of the reason why people don't is because it was a console exclusive, but Epic Games released the city as a project that people could load up using the Unreal environment, and another developer packaged it as a regular game and put it up on Google Drive as a 17 gigabyte download, and people have been starting to tinker with it.
This demo is basically the first big result that I think we're going to see from people using this city as a sort of starting point for their own projects. It should come as no surprise that the demo is stunning and uses pretty much every trick in the new Unreal Engine 5 playbook to show what a truly next-gen experience would look like.
This is, of course, talking about the Unreal 5 matrix demo, but like this is the list of systems you can find here: Nanite lumen chaos, rule processor, mass ai, niagara, metahumans. Mata sounds, and temporal super resolution. There's a ton of buzzwords, but it basically adds up to why Unreal Engine 5 demos can look this good and also be able to run at all on modern hardware; there's a lot of stuff going on in the background.
To get all of this to work, now all you can really do with Superman is fly around, but the effects combined with the visuals create this really visceral feeling to the experience of flying that very few other games have managed to achieve. Like, look at this. It is stunning, and it just feels cool as hell.
Of course, we'd like to be able to do a few more things like use Superman's ice breath or heat vision or just punch someone through a building, but it actually seems like this mod author isn't interested in exploring this any further. It's going to be up to future creators to take the ideas here and expand on them, but the thing that's interesting there is that some guy just basically figured out Superman's flight in article games.
Again, this is something that many developers have taken on and no one has really successfully done. What I would love to see is a proper, AAA Superman game, but the best we ever seem to get are these types of mods, so I guess we'll just kind of take what we can get. It's also important to keep in mind that, yeah, this looks incredible, but it also comes at a price.
This isn't very optimized, and it even struggles to get a decent frame rate on even our beastly PCs with NVidia 3080s, so keep in mind it's not perfect again. A large reason why is that this is just built on a project file of the matrix city that was released to PC and that people are basically just starting to tinker with, but the idea is such a simple and fun one that it's pretty easy to overlook.
Just make sure you've got a PC with some horsepower before even deciding to try to load this up. It is, at the moment, a system melter. Compare this to the last officially licensed Superman game. Superman Returns, and I mean seriously, that game is now over 15 years old and it looked pretty rough back when it originally came out, so it looks ancient now.
The fact that someone is able to make something that looks this good using a demo city and some stock assets is simply incredible, and it really shows how far gaming, as a genre, has come. Keep in mind that the guy who created this mod isn't just some random. Tyson Butler Boshma is actually the creative director and founder of Toybox Games, so he's not just some nobody.
He has some experience working with the Unreal environment, and that's a big reason why this mod, though small, does look as professional as it does. However, it's still just one guy, and even though all you can do is fly, he still managed to add some pretty cool features here. There are five different poses you can cycle through while flying, and this is a super fast flying option.
You can even do a heroic landing by fast flying directly into the ground. It's all really impressive and slick, and once again, I just look at it, the whole thing is visually incredible. The city itself looks almost photorealistic. At times, the real-time shadows, heavy traffic, and large crowds make it really impressive.
That's mostly the matrix demo, and it's definitely not perfect. When you go around exploring the matrix demo, you can find some really strange imperfections. There are places where, like, rooms in buildings look really bizarre. There are alleys that no human could actually walk through. There are also places where two buildings come up against one another and clearly a window overlaps.
