Excellent for children and beginners

If you are new to programming and have an interest in the way games are made and how they work, then Dark Basic, DB Pro, GDK, and GDK.Net are you
best options for learning.

Definitely dont expected excellent performance with AAA quality visuals. In fact the performance is very mediocre at best, even with very low poly counts, and no shaders in use.

The ease of use it top-notch, and you'll be able to pick it up very quickly.

Stability is so so. You probably wont run into too many problems until you get into advanced features.

Support is great and the community is very helpful and friendly. (I think its the best feature) The documentation is okay, but not the best.

Cons:

Get ready to spend a lot of money with this pack, that pack, etc. When really all of its different packs and plugins are standard features in other engines out there. So there's a lot of additional features they will try to get you to buy, and in the end it really isnt worth it unless you have extra money to spend.

For serious game devs, dont even bother with the Dark engines, you'll never be able to pull off serious performance with current-gen visuals, let alone next-gen visuals.

Worst ever seen

Dark basic, pro or SDK is terrible. It was my first programmation language, thinking it was a game engine. What they want is to sell you anything, then give no support. There is so many better engine out there: DX studio and it is free. It was the worst community I ever seen. We all have to start somewhere, and I felt on that. You have to pay extra to have anything else ex: physic. But the last update is so old, it can't run fluid at all on NVIDIA card, cause they din't update the driver. They say they will and they don't for a whole year. It was just a waste of money all the way. Crash often, debugger not fixed after so many years, on the forum there is just a bunch of fanboy. We never seen a commercial game out of it. If you mention the word commercial you will get all kind of post in the forum of insulted people. Bad.

Good for beginners

Features - 3
It is Dark Basic Pro with its basic features.

Ease of Use - 5
No doubt, DARK SDK is perfect for beginners.

Stability & Performance - 4
Have realized problems since last update.

Support - 3
Needs good documentation with examples although dark Basic Pro can be used for APIs. You will find answer in the forum if you try.

DarkGDK

This engine has had a major overhaul, it is now compatable with VS 2005. There are still some bugs etc but the TGC team are working on an update as I type this.

Its good. but lack of updates is a major problem.

DarkSDK is one of only a few engines that is designed for ease of use and only requires C (and not C++) to use it - making it very simple to use. Its also one of the few that uses the latest version of DirectX 9

It interfaces with the DBPro engine, so it has all the features of that, plus the speed of C, although it does suffer from DBPro's inefficient scene handling.
All commands are in the exact same format as DBPro.

Unfortunately, as of 23/7/06, it hasn't been updated for a year (although hopefully they will get around to to doing that), there are various bugs with FX shaders, which crashes a program.

Its also currently not compatiable with VS 2005 - which is a major detraction at the moment.
However, 3rd party .NET support (which is up and running), but currently not commerical availiable, is being worked on.

Documentation is present, although sometimes incorrect (and can differ from the header files).

Getting access to the 3D objects themselves can be problematic, although access to the DirectX system is easier.

Support is generally good - you generally get a quick answer from the programmers themselves, or from the forum. However, due to the lack of updates, the forums have been rather quiet for the last few months.