When comparing Angel2D vs Engine 001 Game Maker, the Slant community recommends Engine 001 Game Maker for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Engine 001 Game Maker is ranked 62nd while Angel2D is ranked 90th. The most important reason people chose Engine 001 Game Maker is:
An amazing minimal download size at around 100mb.
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Pros
Pro Great for prototyping
The framework is focused on prototyping. It has plenty of features to speed up development. It has a console with a lua interpreter, tuning variables and function calls. GWEN is well supported. Provides a simple interface for Box2D. A simple messaging system with which entities can subscribe to to receive messsages among other things.
Pro Permissive licence and easy to extend
Angel2D is built with the idea that you the game developer should have control over the framework and be able to add features if you like. So the code is BSD-licenced and very easy to extend for anyone that has completed a basic C++ course or equivalent.
Pro Great performance
While Angel2D isn't the best performing framework out there it's certainly no slog when compared to competition. Simply by the virtue of being native it puts itself ahead of engines like Gamemaker and frameworks like Love2D.
Pro Simple interface to lua scripting
If you're not comfortable with a basic subset of C++ it is not recommended to use this framework. But the Lua scripting platform is very nice for generating actors.
Pro Very helpful and simple project set up for newcomers
Often with game engines they throw you into unfamiliar territory and let you explore for yourself. While this wouldn't be a big issue with Angel2D due to it being a very simple framework it kickstarts your game prototyping.
Pro Focused on providing convenient features
Angel was created with game jams in mind, so it's focused on providing as many convenient features as possible, but in a quickly understandable way.
Pro Cross platform
Angel can create games for Windows, the Mac, most flavors of Linux, and iOS. It uses the native build systems on each platform (Visual Studio, Xcode, Make), so you can be up and running as soon as possible.
Pro Low-level code is easily accessible
Low-level code that Angel wraps is always just an easy click away, ready to be overridden or improved.
Pro Very light wrapping on all of the libraries
A very important point that's often underestimated. This framework is designed to be removed. It's not there to provide a complete engine for you which you will have trouble moving away from. The basic interface to Box2D is very spartan. You're given the simplest of Box2D shapes, not even polygonal fixtures. This limitation (seems to be) there so that the integration with the engine is very low. You never create a physics actor with anything more complicated than an enum describing if it's supposed to be a sphere shape or box shape.
Pro Light weight
An amazing minimal download size at around 100mb.
Pro Easy to use
Engine 001 allows you to get to making games quicker since you aren't putting allot of time into figuring out complicated interfaces.
Pro Visual scripting
By using pre-build behaviors\actions and more you can 'program' your game by simply 'linking' they in the editor.
Cons
Con No asset pipeline
Unlike XNA/Monogame, Gamemaker or many other similar platforms, Angel2D doesn't have an asset pipeline. The extents of the asset importing is manually loading individual files in code or naming them according to a convention to load a set of them.
Con No longer supported
Hasn't been updated in 2 years.
Con Incomplete documentation
The entire framework is technically documented at http://docs.angel2d.com/ but certain functionality isn't described in there but rather it's just a list of functions. They all have descriptive names and it should be common to run into a feature which isn't given example to in the "Introgame"-project example.
Con Abandoned by developers
Sadly this project has been abandoned by the developer. The main github doesn't see any pull requests fulfilled anymore. There's a debugline draw fix on the github that's rather simple to fix. It is recommended you pull that fork rather than the master branch. Though the simplicity of the framework still makes it a good choice for prototyping.
Con New tricks for getting more money
As it doesn't have enough tutorials, and they don't wanna make more, so they just add some new services about one on one help which that cost 40$ for an hour.
Con Windows only
The editor is Windows only, no OSX or Linux versions are planned.
Con 3D features may not be enough for some users
The 3D capabilities of the engine are a bit limited (for today standards), and some of the times you'll need to work around to create something.
Con Not for beginners
Even those few tutorials don't teach you the very basics, and first you must learn the basics somewhere else (the submitted pros are by professional guys).
Con No successful/ good games
Just ask them about games made with this engine and you will see that even if you find some good games, those are mostly simple/small ones.
Con Poor performance
If you want to use more than a few actors/light/events, or you're trying to get a pretty look, you will get a significant drop in frame rates. This is especially true if you want to implement a moving light (something like a flashlight).
Con They don't fix the bugs for you quickly
If you encounter a bug or problem and report that as bug report, it will take about 1 week to get any answer, and if they solve that, the fixed version will just come up with next update for engine which that isn't be soon and no specific time, so maybe you have to wait for one month.
Con Some workflows can be confusing
Sometimes you have to do a time-consuming workaround to just do a simple function.
Con HTML5 export is poor
There are significant drops in frame rate; some bugs that can even ruin your game (also, looks like just run on firefox).
Con No IAP or Ads support
Are you a mobile developer? If so it's good to know that it has export for ios/Android but no support for IAP or Ads.