REACTION - Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra offers a tantalising glimpse at the future of Unreal’s evolution
Five card stud.
By Jonathan Garrett
20/03/24
Although tech demo’s are hardly a finished product, they do give a fair indication of the potential for future iteration. Skydance’s reveal of Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra took that a step further, with a substantial in-engine look at story context for Amy Hennig’s upcoming title that showed off the potential of a full fat Unreal Engine 5.
The MetaHuman character models were on full display, with outstanding facial capture and fluid movement that builds on the legacy of Naughty Dog’s seminal Uncharted series by taking a significant leap forward. It’s all very impressive stuff. Whether that translates to a mechanically enjoyable final product remains to be seen, but the potential here is enormous.
Combined with Unreal’s advances in physics and destructibility, which is being used to great effect in The Finals, it’s finally starting to feel like current gen games are pushing the hardware and providing a genuine step up. It has been a weird cross over generation with titles being scaled to cover multiple SKU’s, so anything that Epic can do to evolve Unreal further is a win.
TARPS?
At the bottom of some of our articles, you’ll see a series of absurd looking images (with equally stupid, in joke laden names). These are the TARP badges, which represent our ‘Totally Accurate Rating Platform’. They allow us to identify specific things, recognise positive or negative aspects of a games design, and generally indulge our consistent silliness with some visual tomfoolery.
