This could be so much better

I found PR very easy to use. If it wasn't for the hideous support, it would be awesome. The creator just doesn't seem to care at all about the engine. There is no community whatsoever. So if you can't get the creator to help you, your stuck. Basically you figure out what you can and that's as far as you can go. There's no one to help on the forum and the creator may or may not respond. So many forum questions go unanswered, and don't expect any quick email response either. If you are within your license period, you may get a response in a few weeks or months, otherwise don't expect help. I will be leaving PR as soon as possible. It's hard to leave an engine once you're tied to it, but having a community and good support is so important, that I'm leaving anyway, no matter how much work I lose.

Warning for future buyers

Re-edited review.

Thanks to ChrisE for having substantially improved the download speeds of the customer's FTP :) This actually was my main grievance against this engine. Like I said, it comes with lots of examples, cool tools and the documentation is fairly detailed, especially those of Power Render 6. Sure, it takes some time to get used to (especially PR6 which now integrates AngelScript and Newton Physics SDK ...), but if you're used to reading game development books all the time as I do, then you can engage it with relative confidence.

I assessed other solutions in the past namely Cipher Game Engine and more recently the Dark Game SDK; but eventually, I keep having a preference for Power Render, it's a very complete package and updates pop in regularly. Cipher is dead obviously, dated and incomplete and relies exclusively on 3DS Max for 3D modeling. The Dark Game SDK is a good option for prototyping an idea quickly (I use it for this purpose btw) but the syntax of its rather enclosed API is ... weird, unprofessional. There's no documentation per se besides the straightforward API reference and the few example programs thrown in are everything but educational.

Now, I wish the the PR community would be more dense and active. Let's hope the new Power Render 6 changes that in the coming months.

A few things

If you need personal support you should be emailing devrel@powerrender.com. The forums are for the community so you should not expect replies from the author on there (even though I do reply to many!).
Support has been difficult while the new engine has been in development for the past year and a half, however it will be better now that the engine is stable.

The servers were downgraded in the spring and are going to be upgraded to faster speeds again once the PR6 community grows. It doesn't make sense for us to pay a lot of money for fast servers when the new engine was still in beta and there were no new customers using it. Standard licensees also receive the latest engine on CD, so the FTP is just there in case you don't want to wait for it, and for getting smaller updates.

So in short, expect better support, a bigger community and faster servers in the future now that the engine is out of the beta phase.

Good all round engine

I have been using power render for a while now, and have to say the feature set in the newly release version 6 is excellent. For the low Shareware price, I beleive it to be one of the more powerful easy to use engines around.

New version has HDR, Newton Physics Integration, Normal & Parallax mapping, the list goes on.

I for one will definatly keep using this engine, especially if these cool new features keep coming.

Cheers
Dazza