I am more comfortable with Unity than Unreal in terms of workflow.

However, Unity tend to have sometimes some very lacking features. So I wonder if I should just go with Unreal that might have exactly the features that I need, or with Unity.

I want to make a mortal Kombat like game.

That means I need some good rigged animation, some sort of collision tests, and good graphics.

Does Unity provide all the required tools for good rigged animation? I am not certain. Unity tend to advertise itself as having all those stuff, but when you get to work with it, you discover it has a lot of limitations.

For instance navmesh is very limited in Unity.

Collision tests don't need to be sophisticated I guess, since Mortal Kombat like games are mostly going on one line, I guess the collision can be “hacked”, you don't actually need to test the actual model's mesh for collision?

Regarding graphics, I think Unity can do quite a lot, but I think it might be nice to also try out RTX which Unity doesn't have in current official version. Beta versions might have RTX though. I know Unreal has RTX.

Maybe RTX is not really that important right now to sacrifice so much for it.

You're asking if you should use Unity or Unreal, yet in your entire post you're complaining about Unity's lack of features… I think you've already answered your own question.

@undefined

Mechanim is a pretty robust system. Where are you getting rigged animations and why would you need a navmesh for MK? There's no engine in the world going to program your game for you.

You need to get familiar with the game-engine first I am an Unreal Engine 4 developer and I have to admit it is more complicated than Unity. However, if I have to say which one you should learn it should be Unity. Knowing from your post you are inexperienced so I have to recommend you take up some time learning the basics on either engine through YouTube tutorials or paid tutorials on Udemy which there's nothing wrong paying for an online course because I am doing it myself. It takes time to get familiar so here's my advice how I got started.

1. Learn how to program using Unreal Engine 4 or Unity look up tutorials on YouTube or Udemy for basics courses.
2. Learn how to 3D modelling, rigging, UV Mapping, and Animation. Do not take it in conjunction with a courses that also teaches you how to develop video-games. I recommend you should take courses that only focuses on teaching you how to 3D modelling, rigging, and animation because you will learn professional workflow especially if you're using Maya or 3Ds Max, but Blender or other 3D software works best as well. I recommend Blender or Maya you choose which one.
3. Start working on alpha video-game don't worry about the sounds or story just get your earliest alpha done and prepare to learn marketing strategies which to me is way more complicate if you understand Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Google advertising services.

Note:

It is good practice to know 3D modelling, rigging, animation, texturing, sculpting, and programming as a single game-developer.

I am experienced in both Unity and Unreal, I just asked the “innocent” questions on purpose.

I believe I can make the game in either engine, the question is which engine will have more standard gaming tools that will let me focus more on the game itself rather than implementing things that have been done many times before.

I have a 3D artist that will make the models for me.

I recently focused on 2D games, because 3D games are more work, especially if you are doing the art yourself.

But I know very well how to code 3D graphics. The thing is, everything takes time, even for experienced developers.

I know how to code my own mesh skinning in OpenGL, but that would take a decent amount of time I can just have the engine do it for me.

So what I am asking is, which engine will let me focus more on the game itself, and which will be lacking things that I will have to implement on my own.

For instance, Unity doesn't have as much tools and plugins and pre made stuff for FPS like Unreal Engine has. That doesn't mean you can't write an FPS in Unity, it just mean you will have to work harder to implement on your own things that are already exist in Unreal.

I had experience with Mechanim, I think it's pretty good, I hope I won't hit some big “Oh oh” later on with it.

I tried to use navmesh for an FPS game, to make it much easier to create levels for FPS games, but the navmesh “jumping off mesh” wasn't really good in Unity.

Navmesh in Unity is more used for RTS, and even then it's pretty bad.

In Unreal I am sure you have all the tools you need to create an FPS out of the box.

@undefined i would say unity, and here is why? I started working on a fighting game, having gone thru coding from scratch, I decided to try Universal fighting engine plugin for Unity. It was on sale, at first I was a bit disappointed due to lack of tutorials. However, it took me litteraly two hours to figure out the basics. I was able to build a fully functional stage with my custom character.