Clickteam Fusion 2.5

I do recommend this product, but with many caveats. I'm quite familiar with Clickteam's line of software creation tools, going back to the original Klik 'n' Play and each new iteration. Back in the day I put some serious hours into Multimedia Fusion in particular, which this product seems to be a direct update of, and anyone familiar with MMF or any of the others will find this familiar and easy to jump back into. Now, first off - you're only going to be creating 2D games here. Yes there is a paid-for 3D extension available but it is very limited, difficult to use and woefully supported. The base Fusion will let you make decent 2D games, and you do have the power to go way beyond what would be possible on retro consoles depending on your time and ability. The event-based system is great for people with little to no programming experience, however you will find yourself needing a decent grasp of maths to pull off a lot of things that you'd expect to be more simple. In fact, this is a common problem you'll run into - things that seem like they should be easy or straightforward often have limitations, bugs, or simply don't work they way you'd expect, and you'll find yourself spending time coming up with elaborate workarounds when you shouldn't have to. There's also artefacts from the old software which feel outdated and can conflict with the newer features that have been retrofitted. For example, the old movement-types have stubbornly stuck around with no improvements or modernisation, the standard 32-directions of old conflict with the smooth 360 degree rotation. I can understand this is to try and keep as much backwards-compatible as possible, so you can load up your old TGF or MMF games without too many issues (though you'll still probably have compatibility issues), but it ends up making the UI quite unwieldy. The sprite editor is perfectly serviceable, very much designed around clean pixel art with MSPaint style tools. It will get the job done for a lot of things though you might want to use something a bit more powerful, like a dedicated art package. Luckily it's very easy to import (and export) graphics from elsewhere, but you'll still find the default editor useful for touch-ups. There are plenty of extensions, some free, some paid, that you can add to give extra functionality, features and effects. Some of them are legacy extensions from MMF, there are some new ones and some updated, and there are a lot that add some things you might be missing from the default feature set. These can be anything from AI pathfinding, improved sprite movement sets, networking, and you'll probably need a lot of them when you start creating more in-depth engines. Now this review might seem overly negative but that isn't my intention. This is a great piece of software and most people with basic computer skills would be able to put together a simple game, e.g. a platformer or shooter, with few issues and without the need to follow tutorials. It's just if you expect to do anything more than this, be prepared to put some serious effort in and expect to find strange hurdles and roadblocks that will take even more time and effort to fix. One last thing, there is a DLC called CTF 2.5+ which adds some features and bug-fixes which should've been a free patch, but not only is it paid-for but fairly expensive. I find this practice very scummy.