Unreal Engine

Since 1999, starting with the forever epic Unreal Tournament, Unreal Engine has evolved into something truly great and thanks to it, we have tens of fantastic games to enjoy today. From that point on, owning the Unreal game engine was a dream for most game developers, and it remained so because of its fairly high price.

However, in late 2014 Epic started to grow generous with UE4 and its audience. Epic set up an affordable monthly subscription plan for developers of all levels, and then it started to issue Unreal Engine 4 to schools and universities for free. Grants were then offered to those who approached innovative designs, and finally, as of 2015, Unreal Engine 4 is free and available to anyone who wants to use it.

Right off the bat, it’s worth noting that Unreal Engine 4 is provided free of charge with all of its tools, features, future updates, and even its source code. The latter, however, doesn’t mean that it’s open-source; you merely have access to it if you need to implement some chances.

There’s no point in listing the features it has because that and absolutely everything else you need can be found in its ever growing online documentation section. What is important to know is that Unreal Engine 4, or rather Unreal Editor (the backbone of your operation) comes with a design that’s as intuitive and easy to comprehend as most high-end tools that serve the same purpose, or adjacent ones.

You won’t stumble into any GUI elements, tools, sections or anything else in a way that could discourage. It’s built-in tutorial system is spot on and anytime you need extra details about something, help is one right-click away. I’d even risk saying that it has a foolproof design.

The freedom and possibilities Unreal Engine 4 offer are there for anyone to see. First person, flight simulators, puzzles, side scrollers, third person, top-down and the list of what genres and styles you can take on keeps going. How things turn up depends on a couple of things, such as creativity, determination and unfortunately hardware.

Unreal Engine 4 is easy to use, it runs well on most machines built in detail, on large scale projects, it’s a beast. On the positive side, whenever one ‘bad’ thing pops up, there are two good ones to counter it and keep you going.