Opinionated: Sorry Switch – The Steam Deck Just Stole Your Job
As someone who still occasionally plays on their Atari Lynx, it is fair to say, I like handheld gaming. I have happy memories of Mortal Kombat 2-player, via a cable on the Game Gear. Ah, those wonderful, battery-gorging beasts of the early 90s. I never quite loved my Switch as much as I perhaps should have. I have still been playing TxK and various other arcade and RPG bangers on my PS Vita a decade after the world forgot about that beautiful OLED-screened console. Persona 4 Golden remains one of my favourite games of all time, and was perhaps one of the last times I HAD to keep playing a game through the night (to find out who the murderer was).
It is a couple of years old now, but on a recent sale, I decided to treat myself and pick up an original Steam Deck (there was a 20 per cent off sale). Ironically, having paid the money, I wasn’t really “sold” on the Steam Deck until I actually got it in my hands. The thing is bigger than I was expecting. It runs on very efficient Linux software (which seems a huge improvement over trying to run Windows in a small form factor).
Perhaps I can talk about the negatives first. The Steam Deck is not super powerful. As I understand it, it has roughly the same gaming power as a PS4 Pro. If I were in the market for something I wanted to use handheld AND docked, I would probably look at the Switch 2 more closely. I have never tried to play the Steam Deck hooked up to a monitor (I have a gaming PC, and this was not the use case I was going for).
If you buy a Steam Deck, expecting to play a CD Projekt Red game, with ray tracing and all the bells and whistles, you are likely to be disappointed. Having said that, if you are expecting a 330 Euro handheld to work as well as a 2000 Euro desktop gaming PC, then perhaps you should think about that again. Honestly, I think a PS4 Pro-powered system, in your pocket, sounds great. It feels streets ahead of my ageing Switch.
The battery isn’t brilliant (I bring a USB Battery pack for train rides). There are certainly more powerful gaming PCs (or things pretending to be Xboxes) on the market now, however the efficiency of the Steam Deck, and the fact that Steam can rely on their Software Marketplace to keep the price of the hardware low, means, for me at least, that the ratio of price to usefulness to quality is really unbeatable right now.
Personally, I never wished I could get out a mouse and play on a gaming laptop on a train or Bus, but naturally, the Steam Deck is perfect for this.
The build quality is good, it isn’t as heavy as I imagined, and the LCD screen is decent enough for games to look pretty. The Steam Deck feels comfortable in the hands, and the layout of the controls, buttons and design of the software are on the down-low, really elegant, clever and well implemented.
Steam have made it seem really easy to make what is generally considered to be mouse and keyboard gaming into a large game controller, and for the most part that all works fine. Steam is also good at explaining which games are well-suited to the Steam Deck and which are more challenging.
Steam have not offered the Heroic game launcher as standard (it allows Linux users to run Epic and GOG games), but neither have they made it difficult for users to download that for the Steam Deck either. Having your Steam Library, after all the Humble Bundles, sales and impulse purchases of the last 15 years, is an incredible thing. Having your Epic and GOG purchases on there too, with minimal fuss, is the cherry on the cake.
People who have tried the OLED version say it’s wise to spend the extra and get the OLED version. As an OLED fan boy, I believe them, but the LCD version was on sale, and the OLED version wasn’t, which meant a huge difference in price between the two models.
What would I recommend you play on the Steam Deck? Well, I guess that depends on you, but there are several genres that really shine. Tactical Breach Wizards is great fun. I imagine XCOM-style games would also work great, but I haven’t gotten around to trying them quite yet. The first is Metroidvania-style games like Dead Cells, and Dave the Diver is also great fun. There are a ton of excellent RPGs to play, including Persona 5, Infinite Wealth, and Octopath Traveller. All work fantastically well. I was a bit hesitant to try the remake of Silent Hill 2, but it runs smoothly, looking totally fine, as far as I am concerned (again, if you are comparing it to your expensive gaming PC, perhaps you need to check your expectations. Vampire Survivors is available for about £5, and it is an 8-bit styled game, where you walk around (the attacking is automatically handled). You see how long you can survive the waves of undead, and it is a riot.
Being able to play a game on your PC, then have “just one go” come bedtime, is pretty fantastic. The Steam Deck is going to be a product I enjoy for years to come, without ever running out of brilliant games for it (unlike my beloved VITA).
