This software is in early release, and whilst some features are very impressive indeed it is made by a one-man development studio so you may need patience waiting for new features and refinements to the existing systems, but he is steadily adding features and refining the engine and it is already very impressive.

There is a free for all version, v 1.45 available on the developers web site. I recommend you do try the full free version if you are not sure (but please note, projects created in the 1.45 free version can't be imported into this version due to different handling of animations). Full games have already been made with earlier versions of this engine (for example Darksoul)

Pros and Cons
PRO:

• Visuals are stunning, true AAA quality
  
• 3rd person or FPS character
  
• Ocean systems, weather and environmental controls are very impressive
  
• time of day, day and night cycles with variable weather and affects can be implimented
  
• A very clever visual scripting system (game engine) for AI etc
  
• PNG heightmaps are easy to import
  
• Your own 3d assets are fairly easy to import
  
• the small number of included assets are very good quality.
  
• the price is a steal and the licensing terms could not be more generous: make what you want, sell your games,you'll owe the developer nothing.
  
• the developer engages well with the community, listenes to suggestions and helps with problems
  
• previous version of the same engine used to make Darksoul and other games.
  
• produces standalone games/applications at the click of a button which you can share/distribute freely.
  
• good physics Nvidia PhysX
  
  CONS:
  
• Early access, there are bugs, crashes and features not yet in the software
  
• Learning is required. Its not handed to you on a plate. Good tools are supplied, its up to you how you learn to use them. It will crash, it has bugs. It isn't perfect. It is a work in progress.
  
• lacks the easy plugins and templates of engines like unity or or unreal
  
• FPS issues for some users -although it runs without issues on my modest system (i7, 16mb ram, 750ti)
  
• Currently 32bit/DirectX9
  
• limited number of included assets (but good quality)
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  comments:
  Maybe a possible alternative for you to CryEngine or Unity if you are starting from scratch and looking to the future a bit, If you are in it for the long haul you ought to have a good look at what this engine can offer, then have a bit of faith in how it will develop - Its is undeniably a very impressive one-man creation.
  
  S2 doesn't hand everything to you on a plate with plugins and templates as yet, although DLC is available to make more of a game than a walking simulator now. And it does have a clever visual AI scripting language, and a bunch of integrated tools to control animations, import models etc.
  
  Don't fall into the trap of thinking this is "press button X for the perfect game" software. You will need to put hours into viewing the tutorials and reading the manual before you really get started.
  The developer has been working on S2 engine for around ten years before the Steam release of this new S2 engine-HD, so he isn't going to vanish overnight.
  It is very simple to grasp most of the basics although one or two things are frustrating (different) if you are used to other engines.

I was a bit skeptical when I first purchase this but once I started understand the pipeline, it became clear this is a very powerful piece of software. I’ve used Unreal Editor, Unity and cryengine. Out of those 3, I found Unreal Editor to be the best to use. Now S2ENGINE HD is easier than all of these in my opinion. The interface layout is easy to understand and the visual editor called GAME MACHINE is very straight forward. The script files that are created can easily be modified using notepad. One feature I do miss is building rooms. While other game engine uses subtractive method, this engine uses additive which is not a problem when you are constructing Open World type games. I would recommend this for the creative thinkers out there and the price is perfect for independent groups trying to create something wonderful to share without getting hit hard financially.

Here is a sample of what I’ve designed so far with this engine.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=685300644

https://youtu.be/aR1La8um56c
+ Pretty easy to understand many of the tools and features without needing to reference tutorials
+ Visually you can make some pretty stunning environments with great lighting, ambient occulusion, vegetation painting, and post processing effects
+ Very easily able to change the weather, day/night cycle (position of sun), wind, sky/clouds, and so fourth
+ Great looking water waves with a lot of variables to change it to your liking (for instance a calm ocean tide, or large dense story waves)

- I felt the move/roate/scale tools could be improved a bit. With a high sensitivity mouse like mine it was hard to make precise changes

I bought S2Engine a long while ago (2016, 2-3 months after release), but I refunded it due to performance issues. I was a heavy user of Unity back then and still am today. I have experience with many other game engines and frameworks, including Flash, HaxeFlixel, HaxePunk, PhaserJS, NeoAxis, Unreal, and BGE just to name a few. My favorite engine has been Unity for a long time, and I don't really see myself moving away from it anytime soon, but I'm always open to trying new things and keeping an eye on the competition for that matter.

In 2016, S2Engine was unusable, so I refunded it after about a hour just trying to make it work. I had just upgraded from a 750 Ti to a 1060, and I was surprised to see the engine's scene editor was like 2 fps, and the play mode made it to maybe 5 fps if I was lucky.

Many years later, the engine had been at its all time lowest price, $4 USD, so I figured why not give it another go. I'm surprised it's as good as it is. I've barely used it, so I'll update my review as I use it more, but from what I can tell, it's a very competent game engine with some really nice terrain editing tools and good demo projects to get you started. The framerate on my 1060 is a steady 50-60 fps on the default zombie scene from the demo projects (in play mode), and on my 3080 Ti, it's basically off the charts, never seeing anything lower than 300 fps. That's pretty good considering how complex the scene is.

The water in the zombie project looks fantastic. It has shoreline foam, ocean scale rendering, and underwater effects! Great staple for any engine. The water, however, isn't straightforward to edit. I'll have to watch tutorials in order to figure that out. I think it might be part of the scene settings somewhere. Regardless, it's definitely worth $4 just to toy with this stuff.

Some room is available for improvement:

Scene editor takes a poop sometimes for no apparent reason. You have to wait 2-3 minutes for it to think about what it's doing and then it works itself out, but then you can undo whatever was done. In my case, I was using the terrain ramp tool on a dirt track in the race demo scene where the player car object was, and when I raised the terrain, the scene editor froze for 2 minutes to figure out where to move everything. When it was done being stupid, the edit I made was totally bizarre and the player was well below the terrain.

The demo projects aren't really well designed for any purpose. They don't act as good starting points for much of anything. The default two projects are a race scene and a first person shooter zombie scene. The race scene isn't even a race. It's just a drive-around scene with a dirt track, and it has awful sound effects. It has a minimal GUI/HUD, but it really doesn't do you any favors. Perhaps it could help a new user figure out how the GUI works? I think a better racing demo project would go a long way to sell the engine and teach new users best practices.

I can't seem to find any info on whether or not S2 Engine supports VR. The closest I can find to confirmation is this post from 2018 that says VR and character generation are planned for 2019: https://steamcommunity.com/app/443970/discussions/0/1732090362048436125/
The character and VR DLCs aren't anywhere to be found, so I assume these features are taking a lot longer than planned to implement. I think the lack of VR support is the primary reason to stay away from the engine in my book. Half my life is centered around VR and mixed reality, so not having that in this engine definitely hurts my ability to use the engine for my most fun projects.

My overall impression so far is that it's a good engine with some very promising built-in features to help new indie developers jump into the scene. I would pay $4 for this again. Is it worth full price? Well, Unity and Unreal are both free to get into but have royalties after a certain project margin, while S2Engine doesn't have royalties at all. They have a Patreon you can use to show further support if you want to, and there are DLCs for the engine which are 100% optional. I say get the engine on sale for sure. It's the price of a McDonalds kids meal. Everything else, well, that's up to you. I'm a pro Unity user, so I probably won't switch to S2Engine for any big projects, but it's definitely fun to toy with, and I'm probably going to put a few hours into it every now and then just to learn the workflow.

This engine is really good. If you want to make the games you want, all you need is to get that "groove" or "feel" of the engine, y'know? You just gotta know how it works then you can start making awesome stuff. I would recommend reading the manual they have because it pretty much explains everything: http://www.s2powered.com/Docs/html/index.html

But yea, this thing is awesome. Only thing that i dont like about this is that the basic stuff that you should need in any type of engine, is literally dlc. Sure, the base game comes with buildings, nature, thirdperson, and first person, and some other ones, but wow, i need to pay extra money just to get a simple survival type gui for my first game?? The easy game pack should have come with the base game atleast for me, but IDK. Its up to you to buy this awesome thing or not.

Simply Fantastic Indie Game Engine to play around with and learn to use which also has a good amount of excellent tools and graphics.

It has a lot going on for it which may seem a bit uneasy to look upon at first but there's plenty of starter tutorials to get you going in the right direction.

And as with anything there's a few obvious rough spots when running it that are bound to put some ♥♥♥♥♥♥ in your armor when using it so as with anything it's not going to be 100% perfect mainly for being indie and a fairly new release.

An example of such would be the free version from the website I downloaded initially to try before I buy which did not start up. Also, I've noticed several warnings appear in the console though most were from the fps example. And the S2Engine is a bit heavy on my cpu compared to Unity and UE4 since every time I run it my fan goes absolutely beserk until I exit the engine.

Luckily though, the Debut dev has promised to fix it up as often as he can while adding in much needed improvements based on community feedback. So far he is also providing good forum support for potential problems or questions instead of ignoring them like other devs do which is a plus in my book.

So, other than those things above I've yet to experience any issues with this Steam Version of the S2Engine and it's going pretty well so far. I will be updating my review more in-depth once I'm further into development and understanding this engine a lot better.

Aside from all that I consider it a must-have for any aspiring indie developer and it's worth every penny especially for what it can do!

Хороший движок!
+ Приятная графика
+ Есть уроки на ютубе
+ Удобный интерфейс
+ Можно импортировать 3D модели из Blender
Но:
- Иногда вылетает

Моя оценка: 8/10

================================================
It's Good Programm!
+Pleasant graphics
+ there islessons on Youtube
+Convenient Interface
+You can import 3D model from Blender
But:
-It sometimes crashed

My Valuation: 8/10

i din't buy it to actulyl make a game but rather support the developer
who is a single persion but i find this engine extremly good
i'm a ue4 user and was looking to make a RTS game so i purshased the s2engine to hlep the developer who has spent10 years on this engine and i thought why not give it a go
i ahve never looked back i'm in a fight if i should use the engine or not and i will tell you why

i spend 12 hours so far in this engine
that's not mutch to even create a game and no i ahve not mae a game in it yet beacuse it's such difficult to use
there is no working docs that tells you how to use every single tool and why they are behaving like that and how to fix it just tells you where stuff are and how to access them not how to use them wich is a shame
there is a few tutorials out there but they are mainly focused on AAA games and creating a main menu nothing too serious, i dived straight into s2engine and was hoping todo a serious project with it but unfortunate i have to self learn everything as there is no support and the forum nobody answers you're question or they do but after 3 weeks when you figuered it out you're self...
however there is a discord they give great answers when they actully answers there is bearly any activity and s2engine feels like a engine for kids...
it's difficult and the FSM (visual scripting) is hard to use but once you get the hang of it it's quite nice to use

here is my inside view
Good graphics but any engine can have that as long as you learn it s2engine is simplified with this and makes it easy to edit the graphics with it

FSM finally a engine that uses visual scripting as properitary but wait ue4 uses that too and has great scripting built it however i find FSM more simplified and easier but some fucntions dosnt exist and can take a longer time to use

constantly updated it takes quite some many months to get a okay update sometimes i wonder what the developer has been doing the past 10 years when he developed this i constantly find bugs and errors and it often crashes but the developer always comes out with fixes and some improvements

startign a project with it is easy and fast but the developer once stated in a forum that it will be as easy as gameguru
and gameguru is a failing project so i hope the developer takes another path why is gameguru failing? beacuse letting kids drag and drop free assets or paid assets and claiming they can code is brain washing and if they use free assets they will anyway get DMCA takedown if they sell the game or assets...

DLCS i don't recommend having any dlc for a game engine the engine is supposed to work like a engine buying bunch of dlcs to help you create a game is a waste of time and waste of money + it's not really creating a game you're editing a game with what you want to be inside it can be good for artist but not for real game makers

Do i recommend the engine?
yes it runs fine few crashes sometimes every 3 hours but i guess i can live with that

will there be any games made with the engine?
like it is now i would say NO beacuse peolpe don't want to get involved into a engine that contains full og bugs when there is other engines ot there that has tutorials and proper documentation but if you know the engine and know how FSM works im sure the engine can produce great games

what's the worst of the worst with s2engine
ads ads ads
booting up s2engine you get to see the logo of s2engine and thats fine but when you export the game and choose runtime name wahtever you set there will be s2enginehd_app whatsoever
+ not to mention every single .dll file is named s2engine + that awful splash screen contains s2engine logo when you boot you're game
i can understand he wants to advertise but i would go for unreal instead beacuse it only contains 1 advertisment at the runtime folder and that is the splash screen and it can even be disabled..

if you're lookign to get into game development and think yuo can make great progress but at the same time don't want anything advanced but nothing too simple an nothing too complex go for s2engine you wont regret

This game engine has to be the BEST Indie that I have ever used. It is beyond fantastic although in the development phase. And believe me, I am not a new comer to game engines. My job, using Esperient Creator, is producing VR training simulations of electronic communications equipment and test equipment. I get paid big money to do it also... I have tried so many game engines, too many to be even named. Cryengine is my favorite commercial engine, which is now free to use, but has the royalties hanging over its head. When I look at S2 I see a Cryengine look-alike, especially with the real-time graphics when developing. The graphics are stunning! The look and feel is awesome to go along with it. These little people who write negative reviews are making fools out of themselves, most likely either competitors, children, or amateurs that are writing them. For the power you get with S2 compared to price, S2 has absolutely no competition! I am also a big fan of Axis Game Factory and Game Guru, where each one has its own purpose and useage, and all three with great pricing. For all who consider getting S2, do it! Never mind the morons who post negatives, they are wrong. The ones who complain about low FPS... BS... I have zero problems with the FPS, mine is very high. What do you expect when running such high end graphics on a pice of crap slow computer? What happens when you max our graphics on Cryengine, it runs SLOW, if YOU have a piece of garbage. So do NOT blame S2 for your slow piece of junk. I bet most complainers use a $100 to $300 video card? What do you expect, get a clue! I STRONGLY recommend S2, AGF, and Game Guru as your top 3 engines!!! For sure, you can NOT go wrong with S2!!!

As an indie game engine all is good. But developers need a larger team to optimize all the system pipeline.