When comparing Construct 2 vs O3DE (previously Lumberyard), the Slant community recommends O3DE (previously Lumberyard) for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D game engines?” O3DE (previously Lumberyard) is ranked 14th while Construct 2 is ranked 24th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Quick to pick up
Construct 2 is fast to pick up, get into, and belt out some pretty impressive games in a relatively small amount of time. Seems to be built for people who don't have a lot of programming skills, but want to make great games.
Pro Simplicity - it is made for everybody to use and love
Construct 2 is a tool for not just programmers, but artists as well. You can create a game with only visual coding, which is easy to learn and doesn't require any previous programming knowledge. You can focus on making your game better instead of just coding. It has some limitations of course, but it's definitely worth it.
Pro Little programming knowledge needed
Using Construct 2 requires very little programming knowledge because it's all drag'n'drop, intuitive, visual and event-driven instead of code-only.
Pro Built-in physics system
Thanks to the great power of Erin Catto's Box2D, Construct 2 is able to make physics games which are similar to Cut the Rope and Angry Birds.
Pro Cordova support
You can use Cordova plugins from the community
Pro In-depth event system
Construct 2's event system allows for deep, detailed control over all aspects of your game. You aren't limited to just a few options. Rather, Scirra has thought of nearly everything in advance with access to any desired parameter of any object all paired with simple and intuitive ways to interact with them.
Your events can be organized with event sheets (that can be included in other sheets), event groups, sub-events, loops, and functions that make the coding portion of your game as efficient as possible. You don't need any programming knowledge, but if you do have some, you'll feel right at home with the freedom C2 offers.
Pro Supportive community
Construct 2 has a supportive community. Their forums have tens of thousands of topics with ten times more posts. The core maintainers are very helpful and friendly and often reply to questions or issues that may be discussed in the forums.
Pro Easy to create particles and animations
With spriter file implementation and internal animation editor Construct 2 provides an easy way of creating particles and animations.
Pro Free (feature limited) version available
A free version of Construct 2 is available. It's not time restricted in any way, but is feature limited.
Pro Active plugin ecosystem
Construct 2 has an active plugin ecosystem providing behaviors and features that smooth the workflow for certain game types.
Pro Export control for all major platforms
All platform exporters are part of the subscription. There are no additional fees and new exporters are added quickly and maintained well. Currently, 15 platforms are supported, including HMTL 5, iOS, Android, Windows, Chrome Store, PhoneGap and Scirra.
Pro Built in behaviors make development workflows very efficient
Behaviors add pre-packaged functionality to object types.
Pro Very fast preview
In Construct 2 you can preview your games instantly at any time. There’s no need to wait for compiling or other time consuming processes.
Pro Available on Steam
You can also download Construct 2 on Steam.
Pro One-off cost
It's a one off cost for Construct 2 and all updates to the Construct 2 editor are free for life.
Pro Supports camera, microphone, speech recognition and synthesis
Can use cameras in PCs and on mobiles. You can use the synthesis that can recognize your speech or you can write something and it can talk for you.
Pro Interface similar to that of MS office
This engine provides an intuitive workflow for people that are used to the Windows environment.
Pro Runs great on mobile
Performs well on most devices and browsers.
Pro Rapid development
After using a few quick tutorials you can quickly catch on to the event system this program uses and quickly be able to build any type of 2D game you want. You can download a few sprites from google and put together a working level of Mega Man with character movement / animation / enemies / collision detection / scoring / Tile map and AI within about 2 hours.
The built in behaviors are incredible. It's amazing how Construct can simplify the most redundant tasks in game development.
Pro Allow server-less multiplayer game creation
Construct 2 uses WebRTC technology to support it's multiplayer functionality. The nature of the technology allows peer-to-peer connection which does not require game developer to create server side architecture to allow communication between games.
Pro Supportive devs
The developers are always available to help.
Pro Built-in animation/image editor
Basic sprites and tiles of 2D games can be made with engine's built-in tools.
Pro Built-in pathfinding
Has built-in solutions for pathfinding.
Pro Built-in tilemap object
The tilemap object allows tile-based games to be designed more easily. The object's tilemap can also be edited in the layout view using the tilemap bar.
Pro No royalty charges and completely free
Pro Amazon has announced 3 in house games using it developed from Amazon Game Studios
As a proof of how much Amazon is committed to the project.
Pro Advanced VR support and VR Samples to bootstrap your project
Advenced stereoscopic reprojection to save rendering time.
Pro Landscape editor
Sculpting and painting tools for terrain and instanced details.
Procedural generation of terrain.
Pro Roads and Rivers tool
Built-in support for roads and rivers to ease the design of rich game environments.
Pro Free development license, including source code
Full source code for Engine Editor and every tool.
Pro Easy to create full realistic natural environments
Thanks to built-in terrain, time of day, ocean and volumetric fog systems. There is also a gfx pack with various environmental meshes, cloud, particles, materials and skyboxes.
Pro Very lightweight and scalable entity component system
Multiple entity contexts, reflection, serialization, replication, script binding, event bus (EBus) messaging, fully cascading prefabs (slices).
Every reflected property can be fully exposed in the editor with a customizable gui control and can be animated in the built in animation tools.
Pro Cloud gems
Online oriented plugins composed by both client, server and administration components to easily add various online capabilities without further work (es leaderboards, login, message of the day, downloadable contents).
Since version 1.7 they has been released at a steady rate.
Pro In-editor 3D modeling tool for fast level prototyping
Very advanced 3D prototyping tool with many modeling features and UV mapping support available. If you want you can build any kind of fully textured static mesh without relying on external tools.
Pro Total Illumination v2 Realtime GIobal Illumination
Realistic looking lighting bounces.
It doesn't require long offline precomputation times like other static and dynamic GI solutions based on lightmaps or other similar techniques.
Pro Uses AWS cloud
Other than common aws functionality it supports game specific Game Lift for autoscaling game servers.
Pro Slices a very powerful nested prefab system with hierarchical property inheritance
Modular workflow and flexible cascaded propagation of changes.
Pro Modular system
To easy add and remove modular functionalities to a project and easy share them.
Modules are called Gems and can contain code and/or assets.
Pro Very Flexible Base Shader with many built in techniques
Tessellation and Displacement.
Various Parallax Mapping techniques(POM siluette).
Translucency and Sub surface scattering.
Detail Mapping.
Material Blending.
Emission.
Advanced uv transformation and animation.
Pro Rendering of volumetric fx with full light and shadows support
Global environmental volumetric fog and/or hand placed custom shaped volumes with featuring full lighting and shadows.
Pro High quality free assets packs
Amazon made available a selection of triple A quality scenes filled with high quality assets.
Pro Specular reflection antialiasing
Implements the most recent technique available (published in 2017) from Anton Kaplanyan.
Pro Flexible uber shaders with cache and hot reloading
You can modify shaders while testing the game.
Shader files are modular and annotated to setup the material editing gui and filter out mutually exclusive options. All shader permutation are compiled almost instantly from the asset processor and cached for later use.
Pro Built-in Twitch support even by visual scripting
You can create games that react to keywords entered in a designated Twitch channel and let streamers to invite targeted viewers into their game sessions on demand with ease.
Pro WWise LTX Audio
It is still possible to use the non LTX version with few changes.
Pro Lua scripting with the built-in IDE
Built-in Lua editor with remote debugger to debug Lua scripts running in any device.
Pro Virtual file system with live reload on any device
Optimized versions of assets can be streamed live to any device connected over the network.
This makes possible to implement asset types that hot reloads reducing drastically the time to test new content and little changes on device.
Pro Every aspect of the engine is made with scalability in mind
Multiple grain of control over any kind of engine setting and various kind of Lod systems. Settings can be grouped and applied in batch.
Pro Is the first engine to feature SpeedTree 8
Pro Perforce versioning system pre-integrated with the tools
Perforce also comes with a free version for a limited number of team members.
Pro Cutting edge character shaders
Has skin shaders with subsurface scattering and weighted wrinkle maps, eye shaders with refraction parallax, hair with anysotropic specular reflections, etc.
Pro Order independent transparencies
A must for problematic things like hair , vegetation and scenes with complex solid transparent objects(es glass of water with ice cubes).
Pro Implements the state of the art for Temporal Antialiasing from NVIDIA Research
Special iteration of Temporal AA to battle the ghosting issue omnipresent in engines using other Temporal AA techniques.
Pro New Fbx Importer adds support for every software exporting in fbx
It now works for both static models and animations and support advanced setups(es lods and physics).
Pro Full HDR renderer path with output support for HDR tv standards
Updated renderer pipeline to leverage the full spectrum of precision, luminosity and image processing features of the latest HDR tv.
Pro Cinematic multitrack tool with full featured animation editing
Animation Spline editor supporting huge range of keyframing and tangent editing tools.
Pro Advanced in-game UI with 2D and 3D placing
The UI uses the entity component system so it's fully modular and easily expandable. The UI is easily skinnable and supports border scaling images (scale 9). Powerful layouting system supporting multiple screen resolutions. Being based on the entity system every property can be fully animated.
It is elegantly managed in a separate entity context so it doesn't get messed up with other kind of entities and their components like in other engines, but it's fully decoupled communicating with entities in other context on specific event buses.
Pro Full source code repository with updated development branch now on GitHub
See here.
Cons
Con Poor mobile performance
Construct 2 is focused on Javascript. Javascript isn't as fast as native code, which results in poor performance on mobile.
Con Free version is severely limited
Although a free version of the engine is available, it lacks features that are essential to creating a high quality product.
Con The editor is Windows only
Although Construct 2 is able to export projects to Windows, OS X and Linux, the program itself currently only runs on Windows.
Con HTML5 is very dependent on browser performance
Theoretically all browsers should run HTML5 pretty much the same way, but thats not always the case.
Something that worked fine on Chrome, for instance, might malfunction on Firefox (or vice versa). And there's nothing the devs of Construct 2 can really do about it, but to hope next Firefox update might fix it. Internet Explorer is not even recommended.
Add to that the fact that exporting to mobile or desktops rely on these sort of stripped down versions of web browsers (Node webkit, Crosswalk, Ejecta) that you pack with your game, and you can have a real headache if you're trying to make your game work properly through multiple platforms.
Con Does not export to native mobile code
Construct 2 builds to HTML 5 only, which can cause performance issues on mobile devices depending on the HTML5 engine that the OS is using since that will be the biggest bottleneck. Even though it's not really the engine's fault, it still is at a disadvantage compared to native game engines.
Con Discontinued as of July 2021, in favor of Construct 3
Construct 2 licenses cannot be bought anymore since July 2020, and support has ended on July 1st 2021 with the release of the final r280 version (see here). Existing customers can still use the game engine, but it will no longer be updated.
Con Clickteam Fusion Clone
This is a copy of the Clickteam softwares
Con Dependency on 3rd parties for all exports
Unless you are creating a game strictly for browser/HTML5 usage, exporting to desktop or mobile is risky, as Scirra have no control over your final export quality. Since desktop uses NodeWebkit and mobile is Crosswalk, Phonegap or CocoonJS there is no guarantee that your final export performance and quality will be up to scratch for pro level 2d games. These 3rd party "browser wrappers" are very prone to breaking and introducing lag and bugs that can't be controlled from Scirra's side.
Con HTML5 Only is extremely limiting
If the software could export natively to mobile devices and PC/Mac/Linux it would be extremely powerful. The developer's choice of sticking to only HTML5 has created a bottleneck for anyone wanting to develop with this software.
Con Tilemap object could be better
C2 requires that there's a tilemap objects for each tilemap layer meaning each tilemap object has to be updated when modifying any layer. This could be simplified by adding layer support for tilemap objects.
Con Buggy
Experience regular crashes and inexplicable project file corruption.
Con Unreliable access to online resources
Unreliable access to online resources such as online tutorials and forums, plus extremely outdated offline manual.
Con Some Legacy systems are still incompatible or not fit well with the new entity component system
At first it is common to try a feature and then understand that it is meant to work with the legacy system and not with the newest one.
Legacy systems get replaced or updated to work well with the new entity component system in every new version, but there is still some work to do.
One example for all Flow Graph visual scripting is meant for the legacy entity and Script Canvas is the visual scripting conterpart for the new entity system, but it is still not available at the moment.
Con No source code repository with updated development branch (requests for Github support currently pending)
You need to wait up to 30 or 60 days for fixes as they are shipped with the next official release.
There is no comfortable way to submit fixes and changes to the engine as the forum is the only tool for sharing code.