The thing that originally dragged me into using Irrlicht is the fact that you can get started immediately, there are no external dependencies and it loads a variety of model and texture formats. Getting started is as simple as clicking an example project and pressing the compile button. The API is intuitive, docs are great and the community is large, friendly and forgiving. It does have its shortcomings, you need to use community made plugins and do some hacking if you want next generation graphics, but overall it is a great engine which performs well on older machines, it is easy to extend to fit your needs.

Irrlicht is a great engine that's really easy to get used to and is constantly being improved by the dedicated developers. Obviously when selecting an engine to use for your project you should stress test it if you're doing an ambitious project... You'd be an idiot not to! But even if there are parts of Irrlicht which are a bit heavy handed for your needs you can just cut around them in the source yourself! Simples!

Irrlicht Engine is really good. I disagree that it's slow, I remember my friend's game which was written in C# using NeoAxis Engine (which is based on OGRE) and on my ancient PC I couldn't get more than 1 FPS, even on the main menu. My game, of fairly same complexity worked on NVIDIA 5200 FX with 11 FPS. It has no support for hardware skinning and the collision system is sometimes actring strangely, but it's really easy-to-use and powerful (especially when you include a lot of plugins made by the community, such as XEffects by BlindSide, which is brilliant), it has good and active community and easy to understand and heavily commented tutorials, it's cross platform, two software renderers... I have no words for Nikolaus :D

I just started using this engine, and it's so easy! Lots of features, tools. Cool community!

Awesome engine !

Irrlicht is a strong engine and it's improving each day, one of the best choice...

Must have for beginer 3d coders, good quality code, style and effective programming

Excellent 3D engine!

Nice tutorials!

iiru

super

Great engine!!!

kewl

used the engine since 2005 in multiple projects. Very good code base. Excellent code comments. Helpful community with friendly people

very good project . i like it

tres bon rendu 3D. Super in dotnet

Very genial engie

Fast, Lightweight, cross-platform, great features

Best free 3D engine in the world! Irrlicht FTW!

it`s pretty engine, now i can fast develop game on it :)))))

i Like it alot, very good samples too

Cross platform, simple, growing nicely. Extremely strong community which is important, some good changes on the horizon

Great framework, is really fast, fantastic support from the community, nice tools like IrrEdit. Nice additions from community too.

Two thumbs up! Fast, relatively easy to implement, big bonus for cross platform and by far the most liberal license out there!