Steam Deck review: it’s not ready

Both of these things are true.

I'm having more fun with the Steam Deck than any other device I've tested.

The steam deck is a mess. It is rushed, unfinished, buggy, and unstable. People would return the console in droves if Valve sold it.

The $400 handheld gaming PC is not available at Best Buy. The maker of Half-Life and Portal is giving it to fans of the platform that pioneered the idea of selling early access games before they are actually complete. Remember when Valve let an unknown developer sell a broken, buggy game? It changed the world. The bugs didn't outweigh the fact that its formula was uniquely fun and the games it inspired rank among the most popular titles around.

The formula of the Steam Deck is unique. It's a Linux computer that plays games like a Nintendo Switch for a buck. I played a game for over 500 hours and I can't get enough of it.

The early access game console is here. There will be bugs.

It's easy to look at pictures of the Steam Deck, see a Nintendo Switch, and imagine yourself playing a huge library of PC games.

That isn't the Steam Deck that exists today, and it isn't just because it can fit a Switch between its grips. It reminded me of Darth Vader swallowing Princess Leia in Tantive IV. Today's steam deck expects you to tinker more and forgive more than your average PC.

The magic of Steam Deck is that it makes PC gaming portable for the first time.

• 7-inch, 60Hz, 1280 x 800 IPS screen with 400-nit brightness
• 4-core, 8-thread AMD Zen 2 CPU
• 8-core AMD RDNA 2 graphics, 1GB video memory
• 16GB LPDDR5 memory, 8GB accessible by GPU
• 64GB eMMC storage ($400), 256GB NVMe SSD ($530), or 512GB NVMe SSD ($650)
• 40Wh battery
• USB-C port with USB 3.2 Gen 2 data, DisplayPort 1.4 video out, USB-C PD charging
• Dual-band Wi-Fi 5 (2x2), Bluetooth 5.0, UHS-I microSD reader
• 3.5mm headphone jack
• 1.47 pounds (669g)
• 11.7 x 4.6 x 1.9 inches (298 x 117 x 49mm)

What do I mean? Last year, I borrowed a state-of-the-art handheld gaming PC and was able to play through the game on a Windows machine. It never felt like PC gaming to me. There was no point in bothering with the OS because it wasn't good enough to play games like Outer Wilds and Valheim and there was no precision controls for shooting or point-and-click titles. There was no way to quickly and reliably suspend the system.

All that is turned on its head by the steam deck. It's a custom chip with RDNA 2 graphics that's 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465, and it's $400. Control and the Resident Evil 2 remake have enough oomph that I can play them at 60 frames per second outside of big fights, and I can even turn the graphics up. Older and less demanding games can run on the highest settings, like Max Payne 3.

If the game you're playing doesn't need the juice, you can limit the frame rate, clockspeed, or even the processor wattage. It only takes three taps, and the open-source MangoHud overlay gives you instant feedback on your frame rate, clockspeeds, frame times, even how quickly you're draining the battery and how long it's likely to last.

Okay, you might ask, but all the games I just named have gamepad support, what about the decades of mouse-and-keyboard fare? You can borrow or build a wide range of custom control schemes that make them feel at home. In addition to providing an entire traditional gamepad worth of analog joysticks, triggers, and face buttons, I might add, you also get four rear grip buttons and a pair of Steam Controller pads so you can change them at will. You can click, flick, and spin a virtual trackball, and even set their edges to continually move or turn your character. It's confusing and Valve barely explains how any of it works.

I wouldn't be surprised if you thought it was a flop. If you don't want to use the fancy touchpads, you can use a thumbstick to gyro so you can tilt the deck to aim at your target without relying on them. While you have the option of spending hours designing the perfect multi-layered control scheme, Valve makes it easy to add that gyro or a few extra grip buttons and go on with your day.

I did both with Control, making myself a crack shot with the railgun revolver while binding back buttons to let me fly into the air and summon a shield of debris. I reduced thefriction on the virtual trackball so I could use the 2D mouse. For many games, I found that a Steam Controller cultist had already uploaded a great controller scheme, and it was easy to modify it.

I'm not going to tell you that the Steam Controller is better than the mouse and keyboard I've used for 20 years, or that it's a good fit for every game. The full-forearm motion of a mouse just feels right to me, even though I'm sure you can swing a mean sword with the right tweaks.

The best part of the Deck is how you can suspend the entire SteamOS session at any time. I was about to run out of battery in the middle of a boss fight, but I never lost my place. After I hit the power button, I was able to fire it up again and keep playing, even though it took me an hour to get back to a charging point.

The battery is a weak spot, but it is not as bad as I thought. I played Control on the Deck at 60 frames per second and 60 percent brightness, but it took me nearly four hours to play it at 30 frames per second or less. If you see 20W in MangoHud, you know you'll get roughly two hours out of the Deck. Control, Max Payne 2, and Nidhogg only drew 6W. Resident Evil 2 pulled over 20W at 30 frames per second, and many games crossed the 24W mark at 60 frames per second. When I tried to play Call of Juarez at the same time as I downloaded games at high speed, the system was stressed and stuttered.

The sessions were long enough to satisfy me, but I'm always close to a high-wattage battery. The original Nintendo Switch only got 2.5 hours of Breath of the Wild on a charge, but it wasn't held back by that. iFixit shows it's not easy to remove the battery after a year or two, so I worry about that.

The battery is one of the replacement parts that Valve will offer, and it takes a lot of effort to protect it while charging. I never saw the system draw more than 30 watt unless I was playing a game, it dropped to half-speed when it got three-quarters of the way, and the last 10 percent took 15 minutes to complete. The charge takes 2 hours and 45 minutes, and it won't keep charging forever, because Valve lets it drain to 95 percent after a long period of time.

The Steam Deck's fan doesn't satisfy me. Valve's designers tell me that they are still tweaking the curve and improving the ramp rate, but high end games that max out the APU will likely not.

I feel like I can take PC gaming with me when the steam deck works. I play the new God of War or XCOM 2 or Streets of Rage 4, let my fingers melt into the fantastic controls, feel the rousing music come out of the truly excellent stereo speakers, and sigh with delight.

The word is when because the steam deck's software is coming in hotter than any other device.

Enter desktop mode with the power button.

I put some of that to the test and found that it still has a full computer with a port that supports peripherals and displays. I took the full Linux desktop for a spin, but only if I didn't try to do anything else.

I installed the Dolphin emulator and got the game to run perfectly on the steam deck, but I had to keep the external mouse and keyboard connected until after I launched.

I worked from the Steam Deck and downloaded a bunch of software to write this post.

I took a break and watched some videos.

I added Dolphin, Chrome, and Discord to the desktop version of Steam so that I could launch them via SteamOS as well as building specific profiles in the Chrome web browser for Stadia and Netflix so I wouldn't have to rely too much.

I ran into issues with the Chrome browser, Dolphin, and Discord when I was in SteamOS. When I had two extras mounted on the desktop, SteamOS only seemed to detect the Deck's directly connected card. I was surprised that the game could fit on the screen of the steam deck and the keyboard and mouse controls.

I'm a Linux n00b, and I haven't yet been able to get the Epic Games Store up and running to see if I can force its games through Proton as well. Is there too much dependency, not enough sudo? I installed some native Linux games from GOG and the Humble Bundle, but they wouldn't play audio and Cave Story+ wouldn't recognize the Deck controls.

If you don't know Linux, you should know that anything beyond flatpak apps are at-your-own-risk, and anything you install outside of flatpak may be wiped with the next SteamOS update.

I didn't know how many times I had to restart the system or connect a device because of the malfunctioning devices. A few games I downloaded never finished installing, randomly stopping in the middle or running out of space. Some games told me that their content was locked, or that they had corrupt update files. I destroyed one card after the deck froze, and I reset the console because I never do that while writing to flash. It really sucks to find out you can't play a single-player game like Control, because there were times I couldn't reach the Steam server to download save games or verify ownership. In a pinch, my phone hotspot worked.

The system would sometimes lock up. Sometimes theUI would scale badly while connected to an external monitor. I didn't have a lot of problems playing games or installing games, but I had a lot of issues transferring between the internal drive and the external drive. I had to download Elden Ring a second time after I had already pre-installed it, because games would suddenly need new updates or need to randomly re-verify a gigabyte or three worth of contents. When the steam deck has no internet, it takes a long time to launch games, presumably to see if it can download a cloud save.

A lot has changed over the past two weeks, as Valve's developers admitted they spotted a bug. TheUI used to be very choppy, but it is much better now. I can stream games reliably from my PC even if I can't use the Deck gyro controls. It is finally stable after three huge changes to the frame limiter. A lot of additional games were enabled by the huge update to Proton.

There is a new issue where the Deck no longer connects to the internet, even though I have auto- connect checked, and Valve has yet to fix the issue with Bluetooth, which never fails to lag, skip, and fail to connect after waking from sleep. The auto-brightness adjustment has never worked for me. The last update broke the download progress indicator. I think you understand the picture.

In an interview, Valve candidly told The Verge that it knows many things won't be ready on day one, and that it had to focus on showstopper bugs and hardware production while deprioritizing other work.

Is frequent updates a bad thing? Early access can be nice. It's exciting to see new features appear, like how I could play my games on an external monitor with three different kinds of upscaling, which you can apply to any game.

If you want to hear how well the Steam Deck runs Windows before you buy one, it's not a good idea.

The most frustrating thing about the Steam Deck is that it runs Windows, despite Valve's best efforts.

Valve's Proton compatibility layer, which is built on top of Wine, really does make many Windows games run on Linux, and run incredibly well. I only saw the rare glitch, like weird effects around flashing lights in Max Payne 3, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear if those plagued the Windows versions as well. As of February 24th, a team of people were reviewing the entire Steam catalog to see how games play. If you want to see which games work in your own library, you can try Valve's checker.

When it came time to play, I couldn't completely rely on any of those sources. All of them have holes. Duck Game is certified gold on ProtonDB, but is not supported on Steam Deck. I played a few minutes without issue despite the fact that Valve did the work to fix it. I don't agree that Deathloop plays great on Deck because of the low frame rate and stuttery Xbox gamepad emulation I saw when I tried to play. The default control scheme for Half-Life 2 didn't work for me, though a custom one did.

Even if the listings were accurate today, there is a chance that they won't be tomorrow.

If you want to play some of the biggest games in the world, which often use anti-cheat software, you may need Windows as well. Remember my analogy at the beginning of the story? It doesn't run at all. I discovered that the steam deck wouldn't run the most important games I play with my friends, and none of these are a coincidence. Most of the game developers refused to answer the question of whether they would allow anti-cheat now that Valve has built-in support. Tim Sweeney told me that the rewards don't justify the work it would take to convince themselves that they aren't letting cheaters in.

Valve doesn't differentiate between the Windows or Linux version of a game, so you need to watch out if a game quietly has both. The Windows version of Shadow of the Tomb Raider doesn't launch at all, and the Linux version of Rocket League doesn't offer any modes of play. You can force the Deck to download the other version, but there is nothing to warn you which version is which.

Every smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it. It is impossible for us to read and analyze all of these agreements. We started counting how many times you have to agree to use devices when we review them.

Signing the Steam Subscriber Agreement and the Valve Privacy Policy is required if you plan to load a different OS on the system.

There are two mandatory agreements in the majority of cases.

I don't blame Valve for shipping the steam deck before it's ready. I might have made the same choice, since Valve has at least half a year to fulfill all of the preorders before a single new customer will experience the Deck. A lot of early adopters will be willing to endure some bugs to be part of the club. The Deck's impressive performance might not be that impressive in the future, since their RDNA 2 integrated graphics are starting to make their way into thin-and-light laptops and presumably other portables to come. Valve doesn't want to sell old chips.

It also means that reviewers like me didn't get to properly test it all, since we're still waiting on the Linux browser version to recognize the Steam Deck. The Verge does not review gadgets on potential. We look at what we can see and touch.

I have faith in Valve, as an owner of an original Steam Controller, a passive observer of the Valve Index VR headset, and a pundit who can draw a straight line between the failed Steam Machines. Bug fixes and feature updates were given to the Steam Controller and Steam Link after it was clear they weren't going to change the world.

If early access isn't your beverage of choice, you might just want to wait for a steam deck 2. Because Valve is not a big believer in the Osborne effect, they are already suggesting that a sequel is on the way. In a new interview, Valve said that Steam Deck should be a multi-generational product. The second iteration of Valve will be more about the capabilities that mobile gives us, according to Valve founder Gabe Newell in a chat with Edge.

I told you why I was putting money down when I flew to Valve's headquarters last August to see the Steam Deck, I loved the idea of taking my PC games on the go, resuming them right where I left off on my desktop. I can only hope that the part of the steam deck that is mostly working out will get better.

Game developers may target the Deck. Maybe they will come to terms with anti-cheat. It will stare down at me from a shelf, forever taunting me with its potential. This one seems to have a decent library of compatible games from the start.

I'm having fun. I will probably swap in the SSD I already bought for the 64GB model that is coming in Q2 because I will be able to access the eMMC storage early.