Does UE4 is the best engine? That’s kind of a loaded question to try to answer. Historically, UE definitely has been popular, at least in part because it is extremely flexible and pretty easy to work with. But UE3 has extreley high system requirements (rather odd, considering the first two were extremely scalable), so it likely won’t catch on for a while.
The vast majority of game though still use engines that are developed in house, rather than paying for licencing an engine such as UE. In some cases, these engines are written for a single game (and thus extremely streamlined for the needs of that game) and then discarded.
UE’s current competators would be Half-Life’s Source Engine and Cryware (the Far Cry/Crysis engine line). AD-X is a smaller one, but strangely popular with Capcom. SquareEnix is developing an engine formerly called the White Engine (don’t remember what they renamed it) for FF XIII, and plan on using it for every project they ever do, but no word on if they plan on licencing it.
I personally highly prefer UE4 over all I’ve tested so far but don’t just overlook the huge amount of engines there are out there.
We have Unity3D, Anarchy by havok, Cryware is technically CryEngine for some of the free once (though there are quite a few more).
There is Anvil vom Ubisoft, Frostbite from EA and a few more… though in house engines are for general consumers quite a lot less interesting since they are usually a lot harder to get your hands on at all and then getting people to learn the workflow compared to “free” engines for which there are probably people out there who can hire directly cuts down quite a bit of cost (generally favorable for indies ;D).
If you’re just looking to start a hobby project I’d suggest just testing all (major) free engines for like 2 weeks or a month each and pick your favorite one. Or if you already know what you want to do look up engines with the strengths you need. Which seems to fit your needs best.
