is the a way to render the game with a different render engine or am i stuck with the blender game renderer?
Yeah, you basically only have access to the BGE renderer. It’s possible that you could perhaps get a Python OpenGL library to recognize Blender’s OpenGL context and on and on, but I don’t know about that. You’d do better to implement the process yourself at the C++ source level with a different rendering method. But honestly, it’s not worth the trouble - I would recommend just sticking with the BGE renderer.
Are there certain features of other renders you would like to see the BGE renderer having?
mostly better lighting
Eh, it’s better to just deal with the problems and fake (or use) advanced techniques than try to code in another rendering method. Bake your shadows (if you want to still have shadowing on objects, you can fake it with shadowmaps - check out my Lightmap resource in my signature) and ambient occlusion, and use dynamic shadows only when you need them (don’t use a lot of them in a large scene).
Anything specific about lighting? Would deferred lighting help?
well i think that one thing is it would be nice to have real-time shadows on something other than spotlights, and the render engine seems to be in-efficient such as on my pc once i get above 15k vertices it starts drastically dropping, but(for comparison) unity it starts dropping once i get above 150k. personally i like the render(er?) for the unity engine better, but i love the programming and modeling of blender. but i can work with whats built into blender 
try luxrender. its free and does a very great job at rendering!
OP asked for “real-time”. I have yet to see LuxRender take less than 5 minutes for a scene!
well give luxrender a try even though it may not be “real-time”. it renders very good quality and is a small file and is easy to install.
No, he is looking for a game engine renderer. LuxRender is for creating static images or animations. You can’t have interactive content with it.
Perhaps “rasterizer” would be a better word, to avoid confusion.
I don’t think there is any alternative to the BGE renderer outside of either GameKit (which doesn’t support advanced GLSL effects), or maybe Crystal Space (there was a plugin, I think, that allowed Blender to interface with Crystal Space), but I have no experience with that.
The Blender2Crystal plugin actually is pretty advanced, see here:
@skykooler - While that is Yo Frankie, and was made with Crystal Space and the BGE, the project eventually was rebuilt completely in the BGE as Crystal Space apparently didn’t have support for something that was extremely necessary for the game to run, so I wouldn’t recommend it.
Well, there are two versions: the BGE version and the Crystal Space version. The BGE version is obviously more highly developed. However, I am just putting out there that Crystal Space is an alternate game engine that can be used to a fairly high level. I do not know what the advantages (if any) of such a setup would be - anyone know whether Crystal Space allows for real-time sun shadows?