I’d be really curious to see what a talented programmer or two could do with the engine by themselves, without bringing an artist on board. Is the Unreal engine flexible enough to do low fidelity, 2D games or are you just better off coding up your own engine at that point?
The only reason to use Unreal for a 2d game is if you want easy cross platform support and an asset pipeline, otherwise you would probably just make your own or use one of the existing 2d engines.
To be honest 2D games are more art heavy than 3D games. At least in 3D games you can get a long way with shaders, textures, geometric shapes and store-bought meshes. In 2D games everything is custom art.
