CRYENGINE is a fully featured engine with enough tools to bring a project from an early prototype stage to a completed, shippable game. Crytek has demonstrated time and again the power of the engine with mainline titles like Crysis and their experimental forays into VR with The Climb and Robinson: The Journey. Crytek has developed the engine extensively for their in-house games, but how accessible it is to third-party developers is unclear. Newcomers to the engine aren’t likely to find a lot of information online, as CRYENGINE is a much more niche engine than Unity, Unreal, or even Godot. We’ve reached out to members of the community for help fact-checking this article, so credit goes to CRYENGINE Community Edition server members JACK420 WARDADDY, HPi, HellOnEarth, Driguest, Plasma, and Yumni. Read on to learn what some of the pros and cons of CRYENGINE are from real users of the engine.
What is CRYENGINE good for?
CRYENGINE is good for a variety of genres, as shown by its use in shooters, open world games, VR, survival horror, and MMOs. The ideal use case, though, is an open-world or semi-open-world shooter, as the engine’s foundations were laid in the era of Far Cry and Crysis. CRYENGINE is quite complex, so it’s best used by an experienced team prepared to make use of the engine’s full capabilities.
CRYENGINE is a complete solution designed for AAA game development. The number of features make CRYENGINE a powerful tool, but it’s easily overwhelming for a new user who isn’t familiar with how a game engine works or the standard workflows in the industry. AI navigation, state machines, animation graphs, game logic systems, material editing, and advanced lighting/rendering are all part of the package.
CRYENGINE has a few advantages that offset the intimidation factor. The engine’s editor and source code are available on GitHub to members with a free CRYENGINE account, with the only caveat being a 5% royalty owed on annual revenue over the first $5,000 earned from any commercial project. The built-in tools make getting a working and visually pleasing prototype ready a quick process. The asset library in the Game SDK contains hundreds of environmental props, buildings, walls, and characters to play with. The built-in CryDesign system is also effective for blocking out primitive shapes and creating custom level geometry quickly.
CRYENGINE is especially good for building large, open, natural environments. Crytek has a free vegetation asset pack available, which is usable with CRYENGINE’s vegetation editor for placing dense forests, plains, and jungles quickly. The vegetation system also assigns LODs based on distance which are visible through the vegetation debug view. The terrain editor and painting tool, combined with Crytek’s free assets, makes roughing out a beautiful natural environment possible. The possible results are visible in early videos from the developers of Miscreated on their YouTube channel.
The PBR materials take these basic assets and make them feel integrated into the world. CRYENGINE’s global illumination in particular, seen most recently in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, is a crucial part of the open world lighting system. CRYENGINE’s global illumination, called SVOGI, calculates indirect lighting, which is the way light bounces off surfaces to illuminate nearby objects, even if they aren’t directly hit by the main light source. The system creates a softer and more naturalistic look.
Is CRYENGINE easy to learn?
CRYENGINE is difficult for novices to learn despite the resources provided by Crytek through the CRYENGINE website and the CRYENGINE YouTube channel. The included SDK has many default assets for generating quick prototypes, but the examples aren’t numerous enough to teach new designers how to build most games other than a shooter. CRYENGINE is similar to Unreal in being a complete engine with all the features necessary to build a game, but this makes it intimidating to start with when the learning resources are so much fewer.
CRYENGINE did overhaul their UI with the release of CRYENGINE V in 2016 and began producing new documentation and tutorials showing off the whole pipeline. Their YouTube channel has hundreds of videos covering C++, C#, visual scripting, AI coding, UI, and the editor. The channel includes more tutorials for third party DCCs like Maya and Blender, which show how to import 3D assets into CRYENGINE.
The Tutorials page under the Learn tab on CRYENGINE’s website is also an important resource for new CRYENGINE developers. Crytek provides two build-a-game courses. Flappy Boid is a clone of Flappy Bird, but it serves as an introduction to the basics of CRYENGINE. Students learn how to use the editor, how to implement simple logic in FlowGraph, and how to leverage CRYENGINE’s built-in art assets to finish building a game. The second course, Breeze, shows how to build a platformer. The experience is set on a small island that shows off the engine’s terrain editing, particle systems, and vegetation tools, and it also serves as an introduction to building game mechanics with C++.
The documentation for CRYENGINE has come far, but it isn’t as complete as for its competitors like Unity and Unreal, making it a challenge for new developers to get into using the engine. CRYENGINE’s documentation is light on examples and includes many deprecated features. The fact that documentation isn’t currently a priority was made painfully obvious for several months in 2023-2024, when the documentation was down, with community members recommending the Wayback Machine to gain access. Not an ideal solution for beginners just entering the community.
CRYENGINE uses multiple programming languages and solutions, and the documentation isn’t complete for all of them, making the system confusing for beginners. Developers have the choice between C++, C#, Lua, and two visual scripting systems. The fact that there are multiple options means it’s difficult for a new user to know when to use each one, and a lack of experienced CRYENGINE devs means there isn’t always a clear answer out there. Additionally, the C# implementation is the newest and still isn’t as feature-complete as Lua, C++, or the FlowGraph visual scripting tool.
The workflow is also idiosyncratic. To take UI as an example, Scaleform is responsible for creating the .gfx files which CRYENGINE uses for UI, but Scaleform has been discontinued since 2017. A designer that needs to add a new UI element also needs to follow several distinct steps. First, they must create a new FlowGraph script for the UI, but at the same time they need to register it in a separate XML file in the project’s files. This workflow, where an XML file or a Lua script needs to have its values updated manually to implement a new feature in the editor, increases the chance for failure.
The assets available for CRYENGINE are small compared to other engines as well. The CRYENGINE Asset Database does include the Game SDK with a player controller and an example of a twin-stick shooter among its complete projects, but the full database has less than 200 assets compared to the tens and hundreds of thousands available on the Unity Asset Store and Fab Marketplace.
What are the pros and cons of CRYENGINE?
The pros and cons of CRYENGINE include it being a feature-rich engine on the one side and having a small community of supporters on the other. The engine has proven itself with the Crysis series to be capable of AAA-quality work, and small creators like Alessandro Guzzo have shown the high quality possible with a one-person team. CRYENGINE’s lack of tutorials, detailed documentation, and official support make the engine a hard sell for developers already working with Unity, Unreal, or Godot, though.
CRYENGINE has the following pros which make it a solid choice for experienced open-world or shooter developers.
- A library with hundreds of assets from Crytek’s previous games is readily available.
- The codebase is available to users, allowing developers to customize it to their needs.
- The AI system comes pre-built with quick navmesh and cover generation.
- Use of a less common engine will make a game visually distinct and less susceptible to the same issues that are common in other engines, like problems with optimizing Lumen in UE5.
- Its small community is nonetheless dedicated to improving the engine; the main CRYENGINE and the CRYENGINE Community Edition Discord servers are still active.
CRYENGINE struggles with marketing and community outreach, which is a crucial area that its competitors have taken advantage of. Unreal Engine already had a large community of developers before becoming free to use, so onboarding new developers was much easier. Both Unreal and CRYENGINE are powerful tools without question, but many powerful tools are available. The size of the community and official support are often the features a new developer looks for the most.
The following list summarizes a few of the cons of choosing CRYENGINE.
- Problems are less well-documented since there are fewer users in the community, with a Discord server of about 5,000 being the most active forum compared to the hundreds of thousands for its competitors.
- The engine only receives updates every several years.
- The community forums are no longer running on CRYENGINE’s website, removing both a huge repository of old knowledge and a place to get help.
