Oh God, where do I even begin with this review? How about with what the product describes itself as. A "easy to use and most enjoyable game creator" could not be further from the truth and acts as a propagandist scheme in order to entice those with no game development knowledge to buy their product. The gameguru devs clearly had a vision for which way you should use the engine and that vision was to create linear games similar to half life as by making anything slightly open world puts your game at risk of crashing from the first bullet you shoot and draining the fps of even the most intensive of pcs. This cannot be countered in any way as it's not a lua problem and instead is just the engine being highly outdated and alike to using a toaster. You would think using a strategy that has been adapted by major franchises such as using fog or adding obstacles to hide the longer distances would help out yet you would be mistaken as these only boost fps within linear levels and don't make a difference on the likeness of you crashing in an open world level.If you don't follow the gameguru devs vision or want to make anything past a roblox lookalike shooter/exploration game your standalone game simply put will become a broken mess which will require external software to reduce the numerous problems the engine faces or lua coding experience. Do you want to create a racing game with gta-like mechanics? Not happening, Do you want to create a soulslike? Again not happening. Thus “if you want to make a game without the hustle of coding” will not apply to anyone who wants to create a quality product.

As someone who has been actively using the Gameguru classic engine for over two years I can tell you that producing a good final product is a gruelling and stressful process due to how sheer awful this engine is. From being a modified version of Fps creator this engine suffers from major limitations that the developers attempt to hide away from you! Constant crashes are inevitable, Large scale levels need to be covered up with fog in order to have a stable fps and linear to stop loading/shooting crashes, Ai is clunky with no sense of direction often bugging out or flying when touching an obstacle (The zombie npcs are a perfect example), importing your own models is a whole quest line and adding in your own weapons is akin to bashing your head against a brick wall for a month straight, even the smallest amount of bloom giving noticeable frame drops weapon shooting causing crashes in standalones, Graphics card detection is horrible, adding in your own lua code often gets rejected by the engine or breaks your level. These are only a couple things that i have experienced and you would be likely to as well, There is a reason why most indie devs who created a masterpiece within the engine never touch it again, because it's a unstable mess to work with!

So the engine was published in 2015, therefore it does have to have at least some sort of good graphical setting menu you can work with right? Well to put it simply, it's mid. The graphical menu is decent but nowhere near what indie games of its time would look like therefore to make your gameguru game actually look presentable you would need to alter the graphics once again using an external tool like reshade and spam bloom. The problem with using bloom in such an outdated engine is it causes major frame drops which isn't a thing you would want a player base to experience. The graphical menu is most definitely one of the better things included within the engine as it is easy to use and gives a lot of variety, the way you could make water and the skybox look just speak for themselves and if the devs put more effort into bettering it instead of running away to work on gameguru max it could have been perfect and would have resulted in users not having to rely on reshade. The devs could have even made an option for a player to use the graphics menu within a standalone but chose not to for some reason even after being requested on numerous occasions, you can still enable it if you choose to but would have to mess around with the standalone games files.

If you have created a game, I recommend that you keep it to yourself, friends and family instead of going public and publishing it. The community surrounding this product is one of the most toxic out there, if you create a game that does not have original coding or self created assets you will be hunted down, stalked and harassed by reddit lurking “sigmas” whom often have a patrick bateman profile picture or their account being unironically private. Negative feedback is necessary for improvement of a game although when following what the engine markets itself as should not result in hate spread upon a starting creator just because they are new to game design.This point normally would be out of the hands of the engines creators although it does not seem like they do anything to discourage this sort of behaviour from its fanbase, as the opposite those who suggest changes that could help the engine be more user friendly get suppressed within the forums and become targeted by moderators.

The multiplayer portion of the engine is just a joke! You cannot make a multiplayer game that others can play unless they also use the engine due to it being the host of the server. So what exact reason did the developers have for this? Oh yeah being greedy and wanting more people to buy their product! If as a developer of a game i want a self hosted free multiplayer campaign game that the player can download for free i should be able to do that as ive already myself paid for the access of the engine.

The stock assets given when just buying gameguru alone are ripped from fps creator so they already look outdated for when the engine came out, this was clearly done with an intention of selling you the overpriced dlc packs that came with the engine. For example if you don't like how the fps creator buildings look you could buy the “buildings pack” for the cost of £22.99, that's more than what some high poly original unreal engine assets go for! And this is done to capitalise upon the gullibility of new game developers, a simple search on
sketchfab will provide you with lookalikes to the pack for as little as completely being free.

The documentation for the engine is poor as Lee Bamber decided on only making a few youtube videos and steam guides dedicated to gameguru classic before spamming content blogs about gameguru max, if you stumble across a problem that you are unsure on how to fix its more likely that you will be persecuted on the forums then given useful advice and the only youtube tutorials that have any useful info are made by indian youtubers with 144p quality videos in hindi, not exactly the type of help you would want when trying to use a product that advertises itself in english.

I have personally given advice on how this engine could be bettered by firstly adding simple features such as better image importation. As of now you have to create a new decal in the “entitybank” folder, Fiddle with the notepads script, rename files to a certain name and make sure the image you are importing is the correct size and format. This could be made easier by the creation of an importing tool similar to the one within blender and source. Instead as always all suggestions go unanswered and it's not only my suggestions that go unanswered, for ages users of gameguru have been asking for an achievement system to be added with the devs openly overseeing the comments and ignoring them.

If you are new to game design or want to make an indie game here are better FREE alternatives that have proper communities who are willing to help you out if needed: Unity, Unreal engine, Fps creator black ice mod and Godot.

As of now Gameguru is broken buggy abandon-ware, DON'T BUY IT.