Unreal Engine has become a dominant force in video games, and that’s still true for the latest version of Unreal Engine 5. Just about every modern game seems to be running on this engine, but not everyone is happy about it, especially in the PC gaming world.
With the “stutter struggle” on PC, bloated installation sizes, low frame rates, and often very little apparent visual return, UE5 has developed a rather poor reputation among gamers. Of course, not all of these issues can be laid at the feet of the engine itself, but for whatever reason UE5 games on PC tend to land as sloppy unoptimized messes. So if you’re tired of struggling with the Engine everyone loves to hate, why not play a few games that are certified Unreal-free?
10
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1 & 2
Both Kingdom Come: Deliverance games run on a modified version of the Crytek CryEngine. The same one that underpins the legendary Crysis games. Crytek is still a master of graphics technology, and it’s a pity that they haven’t been doing well on the business side, because KCD 2 in particular shows off what’s really possible. The first game can have some wonky performance, though that’s largely ironed out by even entry-level modern gaming systems, and even my PC handheld does a good job of running KCD 1, but the second game managed to look far better and run even better on the same hardware compared to the first games.
You can skip the first game if you like, though I wouldn’t recommend it, but if you just want to play a modern game with zero performance issues, amazing optimization, and a virtually flawless gameplay experience, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is your game.
9
Baldur’s Gate 3
Baldur’s Gate 3 runs on Larian’s in-house Divinity Engine 4.0. Larian’s been doing this a long time and this version of the engine was actually developed for Divinity Original Sin II, which is another awesome CRPG everyone should play.
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Despite not being a DirectX 12 game, with options for DX11 and Vulkan, the game looks great and after years of patches it runs pretty great on just about anything. I particularly enjoy playing this game on my M4 MacBook Pro, where it’s butter smooth at some pretty high settings. When the game first dropped there were some serious CPU-related performance drops in the third act of the story, when you’re in the densely-populated titular city of Baldur’s Gate, but that’s no longer much of an issue.
8
Elden Ring
Elden Ring isn’t really my type of game, since I don’t have much interest in “Soulslike” games, but you can’t argue that it’s not one of the best-regarded video games in history. It may be an open-world take on Dark Souls, but FROM Software hasn’t succumbed to any of the most annoying aspects of open-world games today.
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The proprietary engine used to make the game, however, could be better. Yeah, not every game on this list has a great engine or performance, and on PC in particular there are still serious issues, but great game though. Great game.
7
Cyberpunk 2077
Ah, Cyberpunk 2077 my beloved. I have several hundred hours sunk into this game at this point, and that was before the excellent Phantom Liberty expansion. Since I played the PC version at launch, I missed most of the disastrous technical issues that plagued the original console release. That said, CD Projekt RED has been working on this game relentlessly since launch, and today it’s one of the most technically polished and complete games you can play.
Not only that, but this RED Engine game has become the test bed for all the latest graphics technologies. Which means that Cyberpunk 2077 will run on handheld PCs at playable framerates with good visuals, but can bring even the mightiest PC to its knees if you crank everything to the maximum level, while earning that performance penalty with its peerless graphics. It’s a real shame that the developers have decided to leave the RED engine behind, with the next installment in the franchise using—you guessed it—Unreal Engine 5.
6
The Horizon Games
Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon: Forbidden West represent an original IP from developers Guerilla Games, known for the (also excellent) KIllzone games. Using their in-house Decima Engine, Guerilla has managed to create dazzling open world games that look impressive today even on lowly PlayStation 4 hardware. The first game in the series recently got an update to bring it more in line with the sequel, but the second game remains one of the best looking games ever made.
What’s even more impressive than the looks of the game is how well it performs. These games are tuned to perfection when it comes to performance, and whether on console or PC, I’ve never experienced anything like the stuttering or wild performance swings you get with so many UE5 games. Apart from the technical wizardry on display, this is an excellent post-apocalyptic hard sci-fi adventure, and you get to fight freaking robot dinosaurs!
5
Death Stranding
Though often (incorrectly) described by its detractors as a “walking sim”, Death Stranding is a game that defies description in many cases. It’s an action game, a city builder, a survival horror adventure, and more. Depending on how you play it, it can be some or none of these things. That’s before we get into the marvelously bonkers story, which is worth the price of admission.
I think most people who give this game a chance will get what creator Hideo Kojima was going for and enjoy the ride, but even if you’re not a fan there’s no getting around how good Death Stranding looks and runs. Kojima Productions borrowed the Decima Engine from Guerilla and really made it their own. Whether on PC, PS4 or PS5, Xbox, or even an iPad—Death Stranding runs like a dream and looks good while doing it.
The last game Hideo Kojima worked on before going his own way, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is a flawed gem. The game is clearly unfinished in terms of content and story, but it’s also one of the best stealth action sandbox games ever created, so from a gameplay perspective it’s almost peerless. Content and gameplay aside, Konami’s Fox Engine is extremely impressive, and this game looks and runs amazing on any system that can run it. In particular, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 don’t look like they belong on that generation of console hardware, and yet the frame rate is solid (ha!).
It’s a real shame that Konami hasn’t done much with the Fox Engine other than make soccer games with it, if it were licensed out to other developers we might have had some gorgeous and performant games from the deal, but for now it seems the company is happy to sit on its IPs and spit out the occasonal remake of past glories.
Metaphor:ReFantazio uses a proprietary in-house engine, and when it was first released on consoles and PC it had severe performance problems. There were stutters, problems with low GPU usage, and low frame rates even on low-end cards. There was a fan-made fix pretty quickly using the Special K tool, but an official patch seems to have sorted it all out.
This is good, because Metaphor: ReFantazio has been widely lauded as one of the best modern-day JRPGs, at least until Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 came out, but that’s a UE5 game, so it’s not on this list! Also, I didn’t like it.
2
The Last of Us Games
Though the storyline in the Last Of Us games can be divisive, there’s little argument that both the games, especially in their latest (re-)remastered forms, are graphics and gameplay powerhouses. Naughty Dog developed its own in-house engine for The Last of Us and it was time well spent. Event the original PlayStation 3 version stands up today.
While the PC versions of these games had some performance issues at launch, they seem to be in pretty good shape now, though arguably they’re still best played on PlayStation 5.
1
Modern DOOM Games
In the past, it was id Software’s engines that everyone wanted to license. There’s a whole generation of games that are based on the Quake II engine, which has now been renamed to id Tech 2. The latest game to be based on id Tech 8, which powers Doom: The Dark Ages. The iD Tech engines are known for being technical masterpieces that can drive high frame rates without compromising on the visuals.
Their latest game might require ray tracing and give older hardware a run for its money, but even if your rig can only spit out lower frame rates, they still do so with almost unheard-of consistency compared to UE5 games.
The truth is that so many developers are choosing UE5 not because it’s going to provide the best experience to players, but because it makes game development easier and cheaper, helping boost profits. In the right hands, UE5 games can be great, but it’s sad that so many in-house engines are being mothballed. So let’s show a little support for non-UE games while we still have them.