Recs.
Updated
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Great editor
The editor GUI is very powerful and intuitive. It allows pausing gameplay and manipulating the scene at any time as well as progress gameplay frame by frame. It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection.
This allows it to be more powerful than other, simpler drag-and-drop engines such as Game Maker Studio, although it can take a bit more experience to learn the workflow.
Pro Usable for small and large projects
Games have been made in Unity at all levels of the Video Game industry. If you want to make games, this is a great engine to learn. Learning Unity will teach you the basics for any engine, and if you want to get a job at a big studio, there is a chance that you will be working on this engine there as well.
Pro Easy to learn
It is one of the biggest and best tools available, and there are a lot of tutorials available to help learn how to make great games. Even without knowing how to program, there are assets in the Asset Store that can help you by allowing linking scripts inside the game engine.
Pro Offers choice of scripting languages
Unity provides a selection of programming languages depending on preference or knowledge. C# (CSharp) is arguably the most powerful, while JavaScript has the widest selection of tutorials. It should be noted that it's probably best to avoid Boo (a flavor of Python).
Pro Provides access to a huge list of assets through Asset Store
For those developers who can't afford an artist, or aren't skilled enough to create their own art, Unity features an Asset Store full of a wide variety of free and paid assets that can be easily added to a game. The Asset Store has more than just music and art. It also has code and modules that can be added to games including unique lighting or GUI systems. It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection.
Pro Lots of resources to learn from
Unity3D provides an exhaustive documentation where everything is given a full description supplied by a number of examples as well as video and text tutorials and live training sessions to understand the ins and outs of the engine. In addition there's an ever-growing community that can offer advice to help resolve any situations that may arise.
Along with the official Unity resources, there are many high quality (and often free) third party tutorials available.
Pro Well structured
Overall, a coherent engine with a rational approach. People who complain a lot about being forced to hack around it usually do not read the docs, like the one that describe orders of execution, or specific functions hooks and such. Some like to say it lacks raw power where people who are used to standard optimizations have no problem. For example It is not uncommon to encounter users who complain about low FPS but forgot to activate occlusion, flag static elements, activate animations culling, and so on. As for complaints about C#, people who are transitioning from C++ were already bad at C++ before being bad at C#. They often come from the PC world where the sheer power of today's machines is very forgiving compared to the platforms we had to develop for in the 80s~90s. One of their errors is for example to never read this doc.
Cons
Con The official documentation isn't the best
Many video "tutorials" for new users, only explain the basic functions of Unity as they relate to the engine itself. None of them actually show you 'how' to do something, just what is possible in the UI. This makes it rather difficult for a new user to understand the program, and get started.
Con Adds too many features without fixing earlier issues, rapidly increasing number of bugs that will never get fixed
Unity continues to add many new features without fixing earlier issues. Unity is either understaffed, overambitious, or both, resulting in a continual increase of problems and degraded experience across a number of platforms. Many bugs are reported daily and never get addressed, and there are many bugs from previous versions that are never looked at or fixed.
Con Encourages bad coding practices
A lot of Unity code feels like a hacked blur of arguable coding practices. C# and .Net usage in Unity is questionable. A lot of the API is done in "C Style" (public static methods, available at all times), encouraging the use of public fields for everything, a lot of questionable implicit casting. The list goes on.
Con Hard to maintain projects due to vendor lock
Unity3D is proprietary, closed source game engine. Unity asks money for features like basic version control support, etc. It is impossible to migrate a game from Unity3D in case performance does not satisfy growing requirements of a project.
Con Very self-centered engine
Unity3D uses very unique approach for doing things. Most of the knowledge acquired while using it, would be completely non transferable to other engines. Advanced Unity3D programming is really dealing with Unity3D bugs, and finding loopholes around engine issues - nothing to do with graphics, etc. Skills which would be valuable with other engines.
Con Asset bundles can be cumbersome
Asset bundles are a way to load external resources that are not packed with the game or application and offered as a separate, optional package. However, they may not be compatible between versions or even platforms (you have to create them separately).
Asset bundles need to be loaded and unloaded, avoid concurrent loads from web or cache or a naming collision can happen. You can find workarounds with static objects (load obj
files and textures by code), but for animated game objects you are pretty much stuck with this.
Con Comparatively high learning curve
Although C#, JS, and Boo have documentation available online, it could still be difficult to wrap your head around the library and Unity's component based system. You need to have a good understanding of vector maths and physics to play around with 3D game objects.
Recommendations
Comments
Flagged Pros + Cons
Con Comparatively high learning curve is putting it nicely
Expect to spend days upon days researching basic functionality. Although C#, JS, and Boo have documentation available online, it can still be difficult to understand the library and Unity's component based system.
Con Mobile builds (Android, iOS) take about 18MB at least
Even a Blank Project, Needs 18MB for the APK file (on Android).
Pro Lots of assets can be found in the Asset Store
For those developers who can't afford an artist, or aren't skilled enough to create their own art, Unity features an Asset Store full of a wide variety of free and paid assets that can be easily added to a game. The Asset Store has more than just music and art. It also has code and modules that can be added to games including unique lighting or GUI systems. It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection.
Pro Allows a choice of scripting languages to use
Unity provides a selection of programming languages depending on preferences or knowledge. C# (CSharp) is arguably the most powerful, although the majority of tutorial languages are for Javascript. It is probably best to stay away from Boo (which is a flavor of Python).
Out of Date Pros + Cons
Pro Cross-platform
Unity 3D supports 12 platforms in all, including Windows, Mac, Linux, Web, iOS, Android, and even consoles.