Physical Engine

I played with the provided demos and had some fun with the 2D war game. I haven't done anything with it past that though.

Not yet, but I liked the NewtonGameDynamics Physics engine...

I don't know whether you need 2D or 3D, for 2D the Physical engine seems to be very useful..

I wanted to make some sort of 2d jump'n'run with an physics engine. But I'm still not sure how this would affect the style. With Physical I would have a simple possibility of destroying the environment by weapon systems, but how useful is this.

If one makes to many areas destructible the player would not take the way a designer wanted him to. If there are not much areas it's to much overhead for implementing such a system just for eye-candy.

I'm pretty unsure about it yet, but nonetheless thanks for your comments.

I like destructible environments. Having those in a platformer would be really cool. But, as you said, might make some parts too easy without indestrucible parts, too. Getting the right mix of destructible and indestructible could make a pretty nice game.

And the overheard shouldn't be too much on a modern PC. If, however, you're targetting older PCs, you might want to consider a solid physics engine, like ODE, or a higher level one like OPAL. You can get some nice 2D physics out of these engines, with some tweaking.

I find it a pitty that fewer games have been made with Physical. It looks like a pretty nice library. I don't expect its "Take an object from any game and put it in your game" idea to work very well. That's possible in programs like GameMaker and Stagecast that let you create games without coding, but its very rarely useful.