I've been developing games with Unreal Engine for 2 years, and I still have pretty much no clue what like 80% of the features that it has can be used for.

After the Unity controversy a few months ago, I was happy that I was on the right side of history. The obviously superior beast of an engine Unreal had everything I could hope for. Graphics that sometimes look even better than real life, intuitive visual scripting and access to a lower level option (C++), distinguished animation systems and much, much, much more.

After learning the basics of C++ and doing some rudimentary projects with simple logic I wanted to make a leap to the unknown... C++ in Unreal. At first look, the way Unreal C++ was written looked incredibly strange. It almost reminded me more of a chatroom than actual code. However, I was not afraid. I would get a salary of over 90k a year! I would gain immense recognition from all my peers! And all this I would accomplish with a simple game:

(which of you can see some extremely primitive dev footage in the post.)

After looking at a few tutorials about C++ in Unreal I realize that every one of them recommends a plugin called visual assist for visual studio. This plugin costs like a 100€. fuck. After downloading all the necessary things for my project I happily start my first project. It works! I code for the day and learn some basics. The day after I open my project. Red lines, a lot of red lines. This cannot be. As I struggle for words I open google to find a solution. Someone has had the same problem. There are around 3 comments on the post. One of them has a clue and I try what he suggests. It doesn't work. Below that comment is a guy saying how Epic Games sucks and doesn't care so they haven't fixed the bug. I sigh in disappointment. After spending 3 hours searching for a solution I come to a stop and wonder if the game I'm building would even be suitable for Unreal. So I come up with a list of things Unreal doesn't do well for my game.

• Unreal has a lot of abstractions

  I've always had a love-hate relationship with Unreal for this reason. Everything in Unreal is made to be as easy as possible, if you're making a first- or third person online shooter. Player states, game state, spectator pawn, HUD class and pretty much all other systems except ones for film making are there to help you make a generic first- or third person game. Most importantly though these features ARE MANDATORY!

• Unreal is HEAVY

  Even running Unreal with the default level loaded will crash a pc that was built 10 years ago with budget parts. I've always enjoyed accessibility and with Unreal it is practically impossible to manage for a game that does more than make a ball move.

• The workflow for C++ kinda sucks

  With C++ a lot of YouTubers recommend turning off the live-coding feature, which would stagger an already extremely annoying workflow. Cannot say a lot about this since I could only get it working for a day, but that day made me realize how easy Unity makes it for you with the auto loading of scripts and such.

• 2D is practically nonexistent

  After the depreciation of Paper2D, UE5 has practically not support for 2D and using UE5 for 2D games puts a lot of unnecessary stress on the player's computer.

All of this is to say that Unreal is great for what it is, but I would never recommend it to anyone making a smaller scale game where realistic graphics aren't the focus.