• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

Games made in UNITY

A lot of people say that Unity is a game engine only for talentless people who do asset flips. I don't have anything against the engine but I only know of one good game made in Unity, and that is DUSK.


Are there more good games made in Unity? Do tell please. Please don't post asset flip shovelware games.
 
The reason it has a bad reputation compared to Unreal or others is the made with unity splash screen. Paying devs can remove it, and most do. So, few even know those games, like the aforementioned Superhot, are even made in Unity. The asset flippers aren't going to pay a sub just to remove the splash screen. So Unity only gets associated with them. You can even compare most trailers of games made with Unity compared to Unreal. Few games made with Unity have the Unity logo, while almost all Unreal made games have the Unreal logo. Also Unity has been free for almost 15 years now, Unreal has only been free for almost 5.
 
every single game I've ever seen that runs on Unity and is graphically complex, runs like absolute ass... I have yet to see any exception to this.

the only games that run well that I am aware of are 2D games or games with extremely simple graphics.

maybe that's the fault of the developers but that's just how I and many others feel about the engine.
anything that looks remotely current gen and 3D runs like absolute ass
 
Last edited:
are you surprised after how absolutely awful the performance of the game was on console?
Never played it so I'm not familiar. I have this in my backlog and I'll play it someday, but judging from the reviews it looks really solid. Nothing fancy but it's solid. I was not aware Unity is capable of producing these kinds of visuals.
 
There are great games made in Unity. But all talentless devs use Unity unfortunately. And that's what creates the negativity around Unity.
 
It's free and from what I know, relatively easy to get something running on it (not necessarily something good....but something), of course there's going to be a lot of crap made with it.
But there's lots of good games too: Ori, Inside, Overcooked, Kerbal Space Program, Cuphead, Hollow Knight, etc.

I agree though that console performance of everything that's not 2D games tends to be rather bad.
 
Last edited:
every single game I've ever seen that runs on Unity and is graphically complex, runs like absolute ass... I have yet to see any exception to this.

the only games that run well that I am aware of are 2D games or games with extremely simple graphics.

maybe that's the fault of the developers but that's just how I and many others feel about the engine.
anything that looks remotely current gen and 3D runs like absolute ass

The engine isn't well optimised for consoles. It's 'fine' on PC.

In general it's not like UE4 has fantastic performance either. UE3 was much better in that regard.
 
This game changed my life, and is made in Unity.


Yeah, you guessed it, it is made by me ;)
 
Last edited:
La-Mulana 2, the best video game ever made, was made in Unity.

EDIT: Also The Sexy Brutale. What a fantastic game that was!
 
Last edited:
AI The Somnium Files came out a few months ago and it was made with Unity. It did have a few performance issues, but it looked very good imo.
 
"All games on unity are shit"
giphy.gif

yeah, ok
 
the tools are not shit some people just have no experience in optimization you cant really blame some of them they usually make their first game in the engine.
 
Unity is much easier to use than Unreal; it has a very powerful data model that allows you to get going pretty easily. Therefore, it attracts novices in masses along with their first projects.
 
There are TONS of great games built in Unity!
  • Ori
  • Monument Valley 1/2
  • INSIDE
  • Cuphead
  • Cities Skylines
  • Heartstone
  • RUST
  • Beat Saber
  • Fe
  • Overcooked 1/2
  • DUSK
  • Return of the Obra Dinn
  • Escape from Tarkov
  • Superhot
  • Besiege
  • Kerbal Space Program
  • Risk of Rain 1/2
  • Yooka-Laylee And The Impossible Lair
  • Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak
  • Firewatch
  • Enter the Gungeon
Developers are resonsible for optimizing their game. The engine/tools don't magically make it better. Place the blame on developers, not the tools.
 
There are TONS of great games built in Unity!
  • Ori
  • Monument Valley 1/2
  • INSIDE
  • Cuphead
  • Cities Skylines
  • Heartstone
  • RUST
  • Beat Saber
  • Fe
  • Overcooked 1/2
  • DUSK
  • Return of the Obra Dinn
  • Escape from Tarkov
  • Superhot
  • Besiege
  • Kerbal Space Program
  • Risk of Rain 1/2
  • Yooka-Laylee And The Impossible Lair
  • Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak
  • Firewatch
  • Enter the Gungeon
Developers are resonsible for optimizing their game. The engine/tools don't magically make it better. Place the blame on developers, not the tools.

but there is a pattern here... you either have games on this list that are simple (2D or very low poly) or games that run like absolute shit on anything but good PCs.
and some of these are both... they look below average and run like shit.

of course it's not necessarily the fault of the engine, but there has yet to be a single game that is graphically impressive and runs well made with this engine. meanwhile we have stuff like Yooka Laylee, looks worse than Mario Odyssey and runs worse than it on every single console.
and that's where the engine got its bad rap, people look at all the games out there that use it and all of them follow the above mentioned pattern of either simple graphics and decent performance, or complex graphics and awful performance.
 
meanwhile we have stuff like Yooka Laylee, looks worse than Mario Odyssey and runs worse than it on every single console.
So a vetern development team with potential influence on hardware with nearly unimited budget and indie team with 30 people are equal?

and that's where the engine got its bad rap, people look at all the games out there that use it and all of them follow the above mentioned pattern of either simple graphics and decent performance, or complex graphics and awful performance.
Most developers fall into the trap and don't leave time for optimization. One of the problems with tools like Unity and Unreal is they are so easy to use that you end up doing too much. Unreal you have developers shipping with too much content built in Blueprints and Unity you have developers pushing the renderer too hard.
 
As a developer, I far prefer working in Unreal than I do in Unity. The difference is night and day for me. However, I also haven't touched Unity since version 4. Neither are perfect.

Regarding whether it's shit or not, it's more of a best-fit for some things over others. My preference is more comfort in the environment.

Unreal, much to my dismay, does not have the ability to write shaders in code. This is why you get more visually stylized stuff in Unity. In turn, Unity can be very painful to work with in shipping something visually ambitious on the high end.

If you get the right people, they can make magic in Unity.

Ori and the Blind Forest and Oddworld : New and Tasty are great examples of this.
 
As a developer, I far prefer working in Unreal than I do in Unity. The difference is night and day for me. However, I also haven't touched Unity since version 4. Neither are perfect.

Regarding whether it's shit or not, it's more of a best-fit for some things over others. My preference is more comfort in the environment.

Unreal, much to my dismay, does not have the ability to write shaders in code. This is why you get more visually stylized stuff in Unity. In turn, Unity can be very painful to work with in shipping something visually ambitious on the high end.

If you get the right people, they can make magic in Unity.

Ori and the Blind Forest and Oddworld : New and Tasty are great examples of this.
What does this mean? I'm not a developer, coder or anything but I always like listening to professional tech talk.
 
What does this mean? I'm not a developer, coder or anything but I always like listening to professional tech talk.
There are a couple shading languages out there and you write them in code.
Shaders are small programs that run on the GPU and they basically dictate how pixels are colored (and you can do more fancy stuff with them too): by applying different shaders on different objects you can get graphical effects such as water, translucent glass and so on. That being said, shaders are used everywhere and they are responsible for low level features such as lighting, too. Anything graphical, a shader creates.

Unreal has a Material editor in which you author materials with a node-based system. Those materials are fed into the shaders Unreal provides.
If anyone likes, he can create custom shaders in Unreal too however, because Unreal comes with the source code, so creating a new shading model is open to everyone; it's just not as exposed as writing shaders in Unity.
The node-based system is more accessible to artists and is less interesting for graphics programmers. However, both can achieve virtually the same thing. Unity also introduced shader graph recently, which is basically the same thing as the Unreal Material editor.
 
What does this mean? I'm not a developer, coder or anything but I always like listening to professional tech talk.
In summary, Unreal does it through its Material Editor (Blueprints) but in Unity you have to script it (even though there's a beta phase for Unity's version of Blueprints right now).
 
As a developer, I far prefer working in Unreal than I do in Unity. The difference is night and day for me. However, I also haven't touched Unity since version 4. Neither are perfect.
Do you have experience with consoles?

I'm curious about the performance of Unity on the Switch's Tegra T210 vs Playstation 4's AMD APU. I have seen a few games performing far better on Switch, like Broforce: It peforms fairly well on Switch while it has long loading times and it struggles like hell in the last levels on Playstation 4 Pro + Boost Mode.

It could be a resolution thing, i havent measured them.
 
Last edited:
Since no one has mentioned it I'm gonna point out that Furi was also made with Unity. It doesn't run amazingly on consoles but it is fully playable and easily belongs in the pantheon of fantastic games.
 
In summary, Unreal does it through its Material Editor (Blueprints) but in Unity you have to script it (even though there's a beta phase for Unity's version of Blueprints right now).

There are a couple shading languages out there and you write them in code.
Shaders are small programs that run on the GPU and they basically dictate how pixels are colored (and you can do more fancy stuff with them too): by applying different shaders on different objects you can get graphical effects such as water, translucent glass and so on. That being said, shaders are used everywhere and they are responsible for low level features such as lighting, too. Anything graphical, a shader creates.

Unreal has a Material editor in which you author materials with a node-based system. Those materials are fed into the shaders Unreal provides.
If anyone likes, he can create custom shaders in Unreal too however, because Unreal comes with the source code, so creating a new shading model is open to everyone; it's just not as exposed as writing shaders in Unity.
The node-based system is more accessible to artists and is less interesting for graphics programmers. However, both can achieve virtually the same thing. Unity also introduced shader graph recently, which is basically the same thing as the Unreal Material editor.


2018, but still creating some confusion / issues with the work they are doing with the HDRP and the low defi... ahem universal render pipeline apparently. They are changing so many huge parts of Unity that is kind of scary until it settles down, maybe next year (physics engine, DOTS stack, C# high performance subset/burst compiler, new job system, etc... they may be gaining lots of features and ways to extract performance from the HW, but they may be losing a bit the easily approachable by non too technical artists / designers on tons of platforms that got then started)...
 
Last edited:

2018, but still creating some confusion / issues with the work they are doing with the HDRP and the low defi... ahem universal render pipeline apparently. They are changing so many huge parts of Unity that is kind of scary until it settles down, maybe next year (physics engine, DOTS stack, C# high performance subset/burst compiler, new job system, etc... they may be gaining lots of features and ways to extract performance from the HW, but they may be losing a bit the easily approachable by non too technical artists / designers on tons of platforms that got then started)...
I've not really used Unity much, but from what I read about all the different packages that are incompatible with each other I'm glad I chose Unreal as my main tool. This tweet comes to mind:


Unreal tends to have some features stuck in experimental limbo too (think Environment Query System), but the workflow with the engine is so smooth overall.
 
but there is a pattern here... you either have games on this list that are simple (2D or very low poly) or games that run like absolute shit on anything but good PCs.
and some of these are both... they look below average and run like shit.

of course it's not necessarily the fault of the engine, but there has yet to be a single game that is graphically impressive and runs well made with this engine. meanwhile we have stuff like Yooka Laylee, looks worse than Mario Odyssey and runs worse than it on every single console.
and that's where the engine got its bad rap, people look at all the games out there that use it and all of them follow the above mentioned pattern of either simple graphics and decent performance, or complex graphics and awful performance.

Escape from Tarkov is surprisingly scalable. Game is incredible.
 
Do you have experience with consoles?

I'm curious about the performance of Unity on the Switch's Tegra T210 vs Playstation 4's AMD APU. I have seen a few games performing far better on Switch, like Broforce: It peforms fairly well on Switch while it has long loading times and it struggles like hell in the last levels on Playstation 4 Pro + Boost Mode.

It could be a resolution thing, i havent measured them.


I do, specifically in the context of VR for current day stuff for Unreal and Unity, and non-Unity engines for older (Vicious Engine, Renderware and a bunch of custom environments).

I can only speculate on the issue you're describing, as I'm on the creative and production side of things, so I know a little about it on the bird's eye view level as it impacts design, performance optimization, testing and planning, but not the hardware side. More technical folks may be able to describe the below better.

Sometimes it's not specifically the hardware, but issues where a version of X Engine - say Unity - won't play well with the platform-holder SDK. Sometimes one is ahead or behind the other in terms of bridging the ability to turn features on and off, or fix bugs allowing that to be as-designed.

For example, a former team I advised built the Ghostbusters VR games, and a key tech issue was that the team couldn't spatialize the audio in VR because the audio driver in Unity would cause a major crash bug when deployed through PlayStation's SDK. So we had to scrap spatialized audio... until we eventually just delayed the release to focus on something else, and the issue was fixed for when the team could come back to finish it.

Other variants of an engine-to-platform SDK bug included a "hall of mirrors" re-projection bug which despite being psychedelic/trippy, would induce nausea that would happen between a version of Unreal 4 and PSVR. Unfortunately it was the latest version of the engine at the time, and it was needed to ship to PSVR, so we were stuck. Meanwhile, this issue affected anything needing re-projection, like our 'Spider-suit briefcase' and the 3D environment loadscreen we wanted.

spider-man-homecoming-virtual-re.jpg

This was because of the same issue described above - the SDK and the deployment environment had some issue between them where features wouldn't work in the context of engine + SDK.

So for Spider-Man Homecoming VR, we had flat 2D loading screens, instead of the small target play area we wanted where people could mess around while the game loaded.

For BroForce (one of my favorite co-op games I unironically played-through with my younger brother), I'd guess it's something to do with memory management at real-time or too many shaders with transparencies on them. I'm not sure if Unity is still 'faking' 2D (running 2D objects in a framework that is running in a 3D engine), but sprite/texture sheets, unless managed very carefully, eat up draw calls and that tends to affect performance on games that don't look like they should have those issues. And yeah, could be a resolution thing; i.e, it wasn't optimized for it, but just running through the upscaler thing.
 
Last edited:
There are great games made in Unity...Atom RPG, Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity, the recent Shadowrun titles, Satellite Reign, ...among others. However I don't like this trend of "accessibility", because not only does it attract people who shouldn't be developing games, it also creates games that look or feel similar. Do we even have true geniuses left? Because all I see is games developed in the same development environments, and Unity ain't the only engine that developers rely faaaaaaaaaar too much on.

Develop your own engine as much as possible people, preferably open source so that other can learn from it, or build further upon it (maybe beyond the point of recognition).
 
Last edited:
There are a couple shading languages out there and you write them in code.
Shaders are small programs that run on the GPU and they basically dictate how pixels are colored (and you can do more fancy stuff with them too): by applying different shaders on different objects you can get graphical effects such as water, translucent glass and so on. That being said, shaders are used everywhere and they are responsible for low level features such as lighting, too. Anything graphical, a shader creates.

Unreal has a Material editor in which you author materials with a node-based system. Those materials are fed into the shaders Unreal provides.
If anyone likes, he can create custom shaders in Unreal too however, because Unreal comes with the source code, so creating a new shading model is open to everyone; it's just not as exposed as writing shaders in Unity.
The node-based system is more accessible to artists and is less interesting for graphics programmers. However, both can achieve virtually the same thing. Unity also introduced shader graph recently, which is basically the same thing as the Unreal Material editor.

Perfect reply. *chef's kiss*
 
There are great games made in Unity...Atom RPG, Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity, the recent Shadowrun titles, Satellite Reign, ...among others. However I don't like this trend of "accessibility", because not only does it attract people who shouldn't be developing games, it also creates games that look or feel similar. Do we even have true geniuses left? Because all I see is games developed in the same development environments, and Unity ain't the only engine that developers rely faaaaaaaaaar too much on.

Develop your own engine as much as possible people.

Look and style is most certainly a developer issue. If you rely on the renderer but you don't have a distinct art director who understands lighting (what tends to characterize a renderer's look out the box), you won't have a distinct looking game.

I had ZERO idea that Ori and the Blind Forest was built in Unity. Genuinely thought that was on Unreal. I would've though the same regarding Oddworld's New and Tasty as well, but I have friends on that team.

Point is, the engine is built the way it is.

And Sable is Unity as well. Look at this sexy mfker...



931e5dd215f6614871c42fbf852df02e.PNG
 
Last edited:
I think unity is pretty good if your not making a big game and usually those games have small dev teams or solo devs.
 
There are great games made in Unity...Atom RPG, Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity, the recent Shadowrun titles, Satellite Reign, ...among others. However I don't like this trend of "accessibility", because not only does it attract people who shouldn't be developing games, it also creates games that look or feel similar. Do we even have true geniuses left? Because all I see is games developed in the same development environments, and Unity ain't the only engine that developers rely faaaaaaaaaar too much on.
There is tons of innovation happening and having access to tools like Unity and Unreal are helping with that, not hurting. Games are hard to make and while you can get the 'same feel' you also get something radical.

Develop your own engine as much as possible people, preferably open source so that other can learn from it, or build further upon it (maybe beyond the point of recognition).
Why? From a cost benefit perspective, what does someone gain by building their own renderer and tools when they can use something off the shelf and probably for free.
 
Top Bottom