Steam Deck review

I just realised that today (22nd of May, 2024) marks exactly 1 year since I acquired the Valve Steam Deck¹. Since I love this device, I figured it would be a great first non-game review to post. Maybe a bit late (y’know, a few years), but then again which review here wasn’t?! :D

The Steam Deck is… a console? A Computer? A bit of both. Though it is definitely tailored towards using Steam and comes with a neat joystick-centric UI, it is much more open than Xbox or PlayStation. It literally runs Linux!!! That means that even if Valve closed down tomorrow, I could just move to another distro (or stay on SteamOS) and continue having an amazing portable machine. There are people already using it as a normal “laptop” or “desktop”, installing 3rd party stuff through flatpak. How useful would a Switch be in a world without Nintendo? How many drawing suites can you install on PS 5 Slim? That might not matter to some, but I love being confident in device that I bought being future-proof in terms of software, not just hardware.

The initial reason I got one - apart from it being an insanely cool machine - was that I travel a lot. Not “rich businessman” levels, but enough to consistently spend a portion of the year thousands of kilometers away from home - and coincidentally my gaming PC. This looks to continue being the case as I enter university age, so definitely made the right call in that regard.

I’ve been really enjoying it for lighter-weight singleplayer games, which just so happens to be what I’ve been gravitating towards lately. My desktop is amazing, and I obviously cannot match my skill from custom keyboard and 27" screen with a tiny handheld. But to use it, I have to sit at a desk, which gets tiring. The Steam Deck allows me to enjoy games such as Stardew Valley from comforts of my bed, where my neck doesn’t want to die from wearing headphones for too long. So even when I’m at home, the Steam Deck has a role to fill.

Hardware

Now, the hardware is one of the areas where I treat more like a console. It has a specific CPU, and amount of RAM, and even battery’s mAh count that you can find online. Do I know them? No. Helps keep the magic.

I have a level of expectations when it comes to what it should be able to run, and I simply live by it, without trying to squeeze a few extra frames per second or run recent AAA. In fact, I’ve been actively avoiding FPS counters and other performance metrics - I know from experience that looking too closely can make you perceive the game worse than it actually is. I fought with settings too much in the past, and the conclusion was - leaving defaults and just enjoying games is better than spending most of the gameplay fighting technical difficulties. The Steam Deck is a relatively low-power device in the space, and that’s fine.

I will say though, it ran what I wanted (that is to say, low performance and older games) well. Off the top of my head, Stardew, Journey, Deep Rock Galactic and Bioshock Infinite ran at steady 60 FPS. Battery may be one of the worse sides - you won’t get Switch levels for most games - but then you also wouldn’t be able to run Talos Principle 2 or Baldurs Gate 3 on it in the first place. My assesment of battery life is ~1-2h for somewhat demanding games, and up to 5-8h for lighter ones (like Stardew, which became my main SD game). It seems like the modern Steam Deck OLED enjoys noticeably longer battery life too. One (obvious) trick I learned embarrassingly late is that playing with device plugged in is better for the battery than re-charging every time you run out. So if you - like me - often play at home, don’t be afraid to leave a charger in the device!

The build quality is fine - no complaints or notes regarding that, it’s just fine in a nice and reliable sense. I particularly like inclusion of gyro, touch panels and back buttons, which allow for playing some of the more complicated games. The screen is acceptable for the level of fidelity and games that I outlined above, though OLED version probably looks stunning.

Overall, I don’t regret buying the Steam Deck, even at a relatively high price. In fact, I might even get a Steam Deck 2 if that’s ever released. Though if you buy one now, you might want to go for the OLED version.