Steam Deck Review

Specs:

Intro:

Valve’s Steam Deck has been out for a little over a year now and it has been blowing many consumers away with its ergonomics and gaming performance. For the readers who don’t know the Steam Deck is a portable gaming system with support for PC games. The starting price of $399 is relatively cheap compared to most gaming PCs. To the surprise of many, a 7” 1280×800 handheld might just be the best gateway to PC gaming. While this handheld is still priced $50 higher than the Switch OLED it is well worth it due to its higher resolution display, performance, and customizability. 

Feel:

Using the Steam Deck for a few months now I can confidently say it is the best mobile gaming experience I’ve had in a long time. The Steam Deck, while very large in comparison to the Switch, is more comfortable and natural for my hands. The buttons have a much more fulfilling press and the joysticks have a better grip so your thumbs naturally fit. The Switch joycons feel more like a toy rather than a console controller. Having a more console-like feel in a handheld makes gamers that much more immersed in their game. This makes playing games a much better experience compared to the Switch.

Performance:

When playing games on my gaming desktop I’m always interested in the FPS and how high the graphics settings are but when it came to the Steam Deck I didn’t find myself caring that much. As much as I prefer 60+ FPS in games it never bothered me to play games at 30 FPS on the Steam Deck. I just genuinely had fun playing my Steam library on the go or even just on my couch. The Steam Deck is not a high-end gaming PC and it was not designed to be. Coming from a 1440p 144hz display I didn’t find myself missing it all too much on the Steam Deck’s 800p 60Hz display. Most games looked and felt great. The reason for this is that the Steam Deck’s screen is small so 800p looks much clearer than it would on a TV or a monitor. If you are very concerned about such a change I would recommend trying one for yourself because it is something that can be tough to convey through videos or an article. Many of the games I play consist of Cyberpunk 2077, DBZ Kakarot, and Sonic Frontiers. While some of these games are more demanding than others they all ran well with reasonable expectations. In DBZ Kakarot I was able to get a consistent 60 FPS with minimal drops. Sonic Frontiers still ran well but it was not as stable as Kakarot. With Cyberpunk it is safe to say you will not be breaking any performance records but it was very much playable at a solid 30 FPS. Overall, I am quite pleased with performance with every game I’ve played so far.

Emulation:

The Steam Deck gets even better when you step outside your Steam library and look into emulators. This handheld is like a Swiss army knife for gaming. With applications like EmuDeck, you can run generations of consoles, even some of the more modern ones like the PS3 and Xbox 360! Playing games from other handhelds is a breeze for a device like the Steam Deck. As expected it runs GB and DS games very well and it can even run Pokemon Moon at 2x the resolution at a stable 30FPS. This is far better than the original 3DS performance. It gets even better when it runs games from Nintendo’s current console just as well or better. For just 50 dollars more than a Nintendo Switch, you can play Switch games and have backward compatibility with tons of Nintendo’s older consoles like the Gamecube. Nintendo themselves don’t have this level of backward compatibility! Most of the time I play DBZ Budokai Tenkaichi 3 on the PS2 emulator and the Sly Collection on RPCS3. Both games run very well and it’s very nice to play my favorite games on the go. 

Flaws:

This far into the review the Steam Deck seems great and to be honest it is but that doesn’t mean it is without flaws. While the Steam Deck works straight out of the box, basic users may struggle with some things. An example of this would be setting up EmuDeck. Thankfully, this has gotten much easier due to its GUI. I could still see less tech-savvy users having issues. 

Another area where the Steam Deck needs to improve is the compatibility with games that require anti-cheat. Due to SteamOS being based on Linux and not many anti-cheats support Linux many of these games remain unplayable to most users. There is a workaround to this by dual-booting the Steam Deck into Windows but it’s not as user-friendly. 

The battery on the Steam Deck can vary depending on the game you’re playing but overall I thought it was solid for what it is. With handhelds like this, it’s unlikely you’ll get stellar performance and all-day battery life. The Steam Deck runs most of the games I want at a playable frame rate but the battery is far from “all-day.” Users can expect to get closer to the 2 hour mark for intensive AAA games, maybe a little more if you tweak the settings. For less demanding tasks like running a 2D Pokemon game will definitely get you well passed that 2-hour mark and much closer to Valve’s 2 – 8 hour estimate.

Community:

The Steam Deck may not be the fastest handheld on the market since the release of ASUS’s ROG Ally, but despite that, I would still recommend the Steam Deck due to its support from the community. The Steam Deck community is incredibly loyal to this product which allows some of these flaws mentioned to be mitigated. While the Steam Deck at times can be hard to use or have a fair share of bugs, you can definitely count on the Steam Deck community to come up with a fix until Valve addresses the issue. On top of that, the community has already made some mods for the hardware. DeckHD is a site that sells a 1200p screen that can be used on the Steam Deck. It’s support like this that makes the Steam Deck more worth it in the long run compared to its competitors. 

Conclusion:

Overall, the Steam Deck is one of the best handhelds to ever come out due to its performance and ability to play tons of emulators including some games from the PS3 and Xbox 360. There is so much customization and tweaking you can do with the Steam Deck so it can suit your needs. If you find yourself wanting to conserve more battery you can lower the power consumption in the menu and if you want more performance you can raise it. Despite being less powerful than the ROG Ally the Steam Deck has such a devoted community and company behind it makes up for it. Tons of mods can be done with the Steam Deck just because it’s the more mainstream of the two. I would recommend this product to most gamers because it is a great device to get your feet wet in the PC gaming world and it is also great for established PC gamers to play their library on the go. It is also great for gamers that just want to play classic games through emulation. If you are on the fence about picking one up I highly recommend doing so, you won’t regret it!