Raining Weaver

Game Engines, Which One is The Best?

Introduction

Have you ever started working on a game, only to get frustrated by an overly complicated feature in your game engine or the lack of resources to solve a problem you’re facing? If so—or if you think you might run into this issue—I’ve compiled a list of game engines along with my take on which ones you should use, backed by ratings from other sources! Also, if you need more information on how you should start your project, check out this link for help on making your game development timeline!

What game are you making?

Firstly, the type of game you make is very important to what type of engine you would use to create that game you want. You wouldn’t want to use something good for a 3D FPS and then make a 2D Platformer with it, otherwise, you might run into performance issues and bugs galore. Using the correct game engine for your project can help quicken your progress immensely and lead to a better game experience for your players as well.

Unity Engine Review

Now that I have explained why some game engines would be better than others, let’s start with the one that is recommended for beginners, Unity.

Overall reviews for the engine are positive, with it having a 4.5 out of 5 stars on g2 and a 4.6 out of 5 stars on GetApp, with Unity being described by g2 as, “the world’s leading platform for creating and operating interactive”, and a reviewer named Atharva V. said that “After using Unity for two years, I can say that it is among the easiest game engines to use”, but that “Sometimes, the frequent upgrades cause problems with ongoing projects, necessitating more debugging and compatibility problems.”

Overall, Unity is a very solid 3D and 2D game engine, with the code of choice for the program being C#, which is a more beginner friendly coding path for people who just want to try out coding for their first time and as such it has also gained a large following, leading to large amounts of documentation, making any problem you have with the game engine able to be fixed very quickly due to someone most likely having already dealt with the issue in the past.

Now, my personal review of the game is quite different to the reviews from websites and such, as I will be taking into account of the history of Unity, as it isn’t exactly the cleanest company in terms of giving its customers a good product. To explain what I mean, back in 2024, Unity announced its next version of the game engine, which was called Unity 6, and up until this point the game engine wasn’t really hated at all.

The only controversy that I was able to find was people criticizing Unity’s accessibility being so high that a flood of poorly made, low quality games from inexperienced developers began to be pumped out, but it wasn’t too big of a controversy for Unity’s reputation. But ultimately they ruined their reputation almost entirely in 2024 with the new runtime fee.

In 2024 to go along with their new Unity 6 version, they announced a Runtime fee for all games made using the Unity engine, which meant that any game that had a specific number of installations would be subject to getting taxed for each player that joined the game. This, obviously, is a horrible decision as it means that lower budget studios or games that are free would be massively affected by this change, as it meant that even if a person downloaded their game and didn’t play it, they would still be taxed for someone downloading the game.

This was clearly unfair and would kill free to play games made with unity, with basically the entire gaming community lashing out against Unity the moment it was announced. This lead to Unity hitting a 60% decline in stock all the way to May 2024, along with an overall decline of studios using the Unity engine in favor of other engines.

In the end, the CEO rolled back the idea and instead announced that they would just increase the price of existing plans for Unity annually. But at this point, it didn’t matter, the damage was done and Unity had lost an immense amount of its reputation that it would never gain back from the community that had originally supported them.

Overall, from my personal perspective, I have to rate the Unity engine a 3.0/5 stars, due to the clear disdain the company has for its players and eagerness to squeeze every penny from their fan base’s pockets, I cannot recommend using Unity for any serious projects. But as a tool to start learning how to create games, it is still a fine engine to use, as the immense amount of time and effort people put into documenting all the features of Unity will help tremendously in improving your skills as a game creator.

Unreal Engine Review

Now, to move on from that rant on Unity, let’s go to its main contender, Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine was the 3D game engine created by Epic Games, who you might know for making Fortnite, Fall Guys, Gears of War, or PC Building Simulator 2. The main selling point of Unreal Engine is that the graphics are absolutely stunning for a (partially) free-to-use game engine, gaining it enough reputation to be legitimately used for AAA games.

To go along with that, reviews of Unreal Engine on Gartner show that people do indeed believe it to be special, “Unreal engine has powerful graphics and is famous for its stunning and very high-quality visuals which provide a real feel that is used in AAA movies and games.”, and, “Unreal Engine’s unique ability to leverage Blueprints and superior visual experience makes it one of the top game engines available.”, with the score on Gartner being 4.6/5 stars and on Capterra being even higher with 4.8/5 stars.

Clearly Unreal Engine is a strong engine, but what about the company behind Unreal, what about Epic Games?

Well, a company as big as Epic Games is bound to run into issues at some point in its life, with the first road bump being the court case with Silicon Knights, who helped make Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. Back in 2007, Silicon Knights alleged that Epic was “sabotaging” the people who bought the Unreal Engine 3 licenses, saying that Epic was supposed to release a “ working version of the engine” within six months from the Xbox 360 developer kits being released, and that Epic had missed the time to release Unity Engine 3, and that when it was released, the documentation for said engine wasn’t good enough to use it.

They also said that Epic games had “withheld vital improvements to the game engine”, saying that the engine was more game specific, along with Epic taking the licensing fees earned from the engine and using it to make its own titles instead of building up the Unity engine.

In the end, however, the court sided with Epic Games as Epic defeated the Silicon Knights lawsuit along with winning its counter-suit due to cases of “copyright infringement, misappropriation of trade secrets, and breach of contract”, as Epic was able to produce clear evidence that Silicon Knights had stolen thousands of lines of code from the Unreal Engine and put it into their engine, with Silicon Knights attempting to hide the fact that they had done it by getting rid of the copywrite notices and disguising the code.

As punishment, Silicon Knights was forced to get rid of all code related to Unreal Engine 3 along with recalling and destroying all games they had made using the Unreal Engine 3 code, along with paying up to $4.45 million to Epic Games, this immense loss lead to the eventual bankruptcy of Silicon Knights in 2014.

After this, Epic Games had a spat with Apple and Google about letting Epic sell V-Bucks on Fortnite directly from the Epic Games Store instead of from the iOS or Android store.

This isn’t the main big criticism though, as that comes in the form of the FTC child privacy settlement that happened in 2022. In December of 2022, Epic Games was accused of violating COPPA via the game Fortnite by collecting the personal data of children without the knowledge or consent of a parent or guardian, exposing kids and teenagers to cases of harassment, and misleading their users to make unwanted purchases while the user played the game.

This led to Epic Games making a long statement along with paying a combined $520 million to cover the settlement case, along with refunds for users who bought currency in Fortnite.

Overall, the current state at Epic Games isn’t the worst, though the thought that they may be collecting your personal data is a bit worrying it isn’t much to think about as pretty much every single company will scrape any bit of your information to sell to third parties. Other than the few major court cases they’ve had, Epic Games seems to have kept a decent track record of being a reliable company in terms of delivering a good service.

This leads me to my rating of the Unreal Game Engine, with it receiving a 4.5/5 star rating from me personally, as I believe that the company seems to be competent enough to know that they can’t just scam the gaming community like how Unity decided to.

Along with that, Unreal Engine is just a gorgeous tool that produces incredible games much easier than other highly demanding game engines, and thus I believe that if you want to make a modern game in this day and age, you need to use Unreal Engine, it just has everything you will ever need and will continue to have everything you need.

Godot Engine Review

Next, let’s move to a more simple game engine, Godot. Godot is a mainly 2D game engine, though it is able to do 3D as well, with the main selling point being that it is free and open source. There is no official coding language for Godot which can make the process of using it a bit challenging but it isn’t the worst thing to use for a simpler game engine.

PCMAG gives the engine a 4.0/5 stars, saying “Godot proves nothing is stopping smaller game engines from offering impressive 3D support. Browse Godot’s game showcase, and you’ll see many different genres, including side-scrolling platformers, top-down shmups, and strategy titles”, with the reviews on Capterra giving it 4.2/5 stars, with reviews saying “It is a great software for us to get into the game development scenario and the advantage is that it is open source.”

Overall, it seems that Godot is a very easy, simple, but still powerful game engine that is good for both 2D and 3D, but in the end, there is always someone behind Godot, so who created it?

Well actually, this time there isn’t an official company behind Godot, instead there are the two authors who created it, Juan Linietsky and Ariel Manzur, who created the engine back in 2001 for a handful of companies before they eventually released the engine to the public in 2014 as an open source game engine for anyone to use. Overall, from the research I have conducted, there aren’t any controversies surrounding the original authors or the game engine itself, which is to be expected since the engine is open source, meaning it’s not like a giant corporation holds all the rights to the engine itself.

Overall, this brings me to my rating on the Godot engine, with me having to give it 4.0/5 stars. This is due to the fact that, while the people behind Godot are clean and the game engine itself isn’t in hot water, the actual capabilities of Godot aren’t up there with the likes of Unreal or Unity, but in the end it is still a functional game engine that is able to deal with most beginner projects and is a good option for indie devs since it has no fees or plans like unreal or unity, just a simple download and you can start making a game.

Game Maker Engine Review

Now, let’s move on to a game engine that also specializes in 2D game creation, Game Maker. Game Maker is one of those engines that pretty much every new developer will try using at least once, as it is one of the simplest-to-learn engines out there for people to use. The reviews for Game Maker echo this view, saying “GameMaker: Studio is a powerful and feature-rich game development engine that is easy to learn and use. With its drag-and-drop interface, it’s easy to quickly get up and running” but, “its steep learning curve and lack of certain features can be a challenge for newcomers and experienced developers alike.”

Overall reviews give it a 4.4/5 stars, and say that while it is an easy-to-use engine, the learning curve is very high for an engine of its quality. But what about the company, is there anything worrisome they’ve done?

Other than the reviews, my research on the game shows that the company and the game engine really haven’t had any controversies, with the engine being released in 1999 and updates being published for the engine every few years or so, with the most recent one being back in August 2020, after that it was just minor changes to the naming conventions of things about the update and such.

Overall, it’s just a simple game engine, there isn’t much to talk about other than the fact that it is free to use, simple to learn, and if you are going to make your first game it wouldn’t be a bad idea to try it out using game engine to figure out the basics of what game you want to make.

For my rating, I give it a 3.5/5 star rating, just because the software is getting a bit old but it’s still functional, and hey it doesn’t have any controversies connected to the company behind it, so it’s overall fine to use.

CryEngine Engine Review

Finally, let’s talk about one of the hardest-to-learn game engines, CryEngine. CryEngine is one of those game engines that you probably haven’t heard of as much as Unity or Unreal Engine, but it is still a very powerful tool for game development, specifically for games that heavily focus on realistic 3D graphics. CryEngine was created by a company called Crytek, who you may recognize for creating the Crysis series, which was widely known for pushing the graphical limits of gaming back when they first released.

The main selling point of CryEngine is the graphics, with the graphics that CryEngine is able to produce being pretty solid. The engine is built in a way that almost guarantees your game will have visually stunning environments with high fidelity, realistic lighting, and lifelike textures, but of course, there are some downsides to that which we’ll get into later.

Looking at the reviews of CryEngine from a few different sources, the ratings are pretty solid. G2 has CryEngine rated at 4.3/5 stars, with a reviewer stating that “With this engine you can create high quality graphics games. Cryengine supports VR so you can create amazing stuff for this. Lots of tools for creating amazing stuff (volumetric clouds, fog, etc).,” but also noted, “It is c++ so it is a little bit harder than c#. Scalability is not that good for small projects. Documentation can be a little outdated.” Capterra gives CryEngine a similar rating of 4.2/5 stars, praising its high graphical fidelity but also pointing out that “it does have a relatively steep learning curve and can be quite difficult for beginners to grasp. Additionally, there is a lack of documentation and tutorials which can make it difficult for developers to understand the engine’s features and functions.”

This already gives us a good view of what CryEngine is, a powerhouse in terms of graphics, but not the most user-friendly when it comes to developing your game.

But of course, the game engine itself is one thing — the company behind it is another. So what has Crytek done as a company? Well, surprisingly, Crytek has had quite a rocky history. The first major controversy came in 2014 when Crytek was reportedly failing to pay its employees for months on end. Several reports came out from Crytek developers stating that they were working without pay for extended periods of time, with the company promising to “pay them soon,” but failing to meet those promises.

This resulted in several developers leaving Crytek to work for other companies, and the company’s reputation started to take a hit. Eventually, Crytek admitted that they were having major financial problems and even had to shut down several of their studios in different countries to stay afloat.

The next major controversy came in 2018 when Crytek filed a lawsuit against Cloud Imperium Games, the developers of Star Citizen, a game that was originally being built on CryEngine but later switched to Amazon’s Lumberyard Engine (which is a modified version of CryEngine). Crytek sued them, claiming that the developers were still using parts of CryEngine despite the switch and were violating their licensing agreement. This case dragged on for a few years before eventually being settled out of court in 2020, but it further damaged Crytek’s reputation within the gaming community, especially since many people saw the lawsuit as nothing more than a cash grab from a struggling company.

To make matters worse, Crytek has also been criticized for abandoning their games post-launch. A prime example of this was Crysis 3, which had a promising launch but was quickly forgotten by Crytek, with minimal post-launch support and updates. The same can be said for Hunt: Showdown, which initially gained a cult following but was neglected in terms of updates and patches, leaving the player base to slowly die off. This track record of Crytek’s lack of long-term support for their games doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in their game engine either, as it raises questions about how long CryEngine will continue to receive solid updates and support.

Crytek has also postponed Crysis 4, which would’ve been the newest entry into the Crysis series, but due to financial difficulties due to most likely over hiring during the Covid period, they had to fire 15% of their staff to keep themselves afloat, so I do not have faith that the engine will remain updated or relevant for a long time.

So, with all that being said, my personal rating for CryEngine has to sit at around 2.5/5 stars. While the engine itself is incredibly powerful and can create gorgeous visuals like Unreal, the combination of Crytek’s sketchy business practices, lack of proper documentation, and minimal community support makes it very difficult to recommend for beginners or small developers.

If you’re someone who just wants to make a game and doesn’t want to spend months learning an overly complicated engine, CryEngine is not for you. However, if you’re someone who is specifically aiming to make a high-budget, graphically intense game and don’t mind spending months learning the ins and outs of the engine, CryEngine might be worth your time, just don’t expect Crytek to be very helpful if you run into any issues.

Outro

Overall, there are a lot of game engines out there—you can even create your own if you’re up for it! In this post, I only covered five of what I consider to be the biggest game engines right now. If you’ve found a better option than the ones I mentioned and want to use it for your project, that’s completely up to you—I have no control over your true opinion on game-making. These are just my thoughts based on the research that you can check out below.

Research & References