The Binding of Isaac was a pretty big game made in Flash with ActionScript 2, and you can read a postmortem on Gamasutra.

On page 3 and page 4 there's a sections entitled "Performance and Feature Issues with ActionScript 2" and "Too Big in Scope for Flash" that are pretty relevant to your question.

Hope that's helpful! :)

Should be possible but there are some caveats. If the game is huge and complex (i.e. 3D, networked, large levls, complex behaviours, etc...) then flash will probably not be able to compete with other technologies, but then if that is your target it is going to be an uphill struggle whatever you use.

Pros:

Fast to get things working,

AS3 is easy to develop in and debug (especially with the right ide - use FlashDevelop it is free pretty powerful).

Flash, despite what a lot of people think is fast, thousands of on screen sprites are no problem if you use Stage3D (GPU).
You could (depending on mechanics) easily port the game to android and IOS.
You could allow people to play a "demo" version online before they even have to download the full game.. which is neat.

The Flash IDE makes building ui and assets very easy.

Cons:

Flash is not as quick as c++ or c#... but it isn't a million miles away.

Some useful language features are missing but it is not prohibitive.

People just don't like flash.

What kind of game are you thinking of, if you were able to share with us a brief of some kind we could probably let you know if flash is up to the task.

Ah thanks, so they did!

While there a few versions of that game, both 2d and 3d and from fairly simple to complex destructible scenes most of the logic will take place in 2d and should be pretty straight forward!

Pretty sure flash is up to something like that.

Personally I loved Flash and actionscript. Using it to make a stand alone game? I wouldn't have chosen to go that route. For me, Flash is great to deploy some cool games in a web browser, but if I were to make a stand alone game, depending on the target, I would go with Java, Blitzmax or MonkeyX. I choose these languages because thats what I am familiar with and they are very easy to use, BlitzMax and MonkeyX being languages focused for making games.

There are other languages/ Software/ Engines that purely focus on game making, like RPGMaker, Cocos2d, Unity3d, Gamemaker studio, torque2d/3d, Unreal Engine, CryEngine, etc out there, but I haven't tried any of the other ones (except Torque, didn't fit me too well).

Going with Java, C++ or C# you have to delve a bit deeper, find and include some 3rd party modules and do a bit more figuring things out to get that same game up and running.

I always engcourage going with a langauge that is focused on game making for beginners. In the end though it will all depend on what your goals are and how deep you want to go!

The Binding of Isaac was a pretty big game made in Flash with ActionScript 2, and you can read a postmortem on Gamasutra.

On page 3 and page 4 there's a sections entitled "Performance and Feature Issues with ActionScript 2" and "Too Big in Scope for Flash" that are pretty relevant to your question.

Hope that's helpful!

It might be worth mentioning that AS3 is significantly faster than AS2 (JIT compilation was added with AS3 and the difference is massive (AS2 was quite awful, even things like the length of your function/variable names had a measurable performance impact), most of the fla/swf size issues can be worked around by splitting things up and loading them at runtime, AS3 also added the GameInput classes (for dealing with gamepads, joysticks, etc) and a whole bunch of other nice features, a pre-made native extension for steamworks exist on github (fresteamworks), There are still issues with Flash (such as awful/non-existant support outside of Windows and OS X for example) but i wouldn't dismiss it based on a postmortem for a game that was made using an ancient version of the platform.