Guess whose Steam Deck came in a day early! Mine!
I've now spent about 5 hours with this thing, which is not at all enough time to give it a review, but I can give you my thoughts.
First, the hardware on this thing is honestly pretty impressive, for a handheld*. See that asterisk? Assume that any time I mention how impressive the hardware is, it's in relation to it being in a small and relatively light form factor. This thing will not replace a high end gaming PC, or even a medium end gaming PC. But it will serve as a decent enough gaming PC on the go, or in bed, or just kicked back in a recliner, and that is really what makes this thing shine. Imagining being able to play Spider-Man on the bus and having it look as amazing as it does on the big screen with ray tracing and real time reflections? You are in a fantasy land, that's impossible**, certainly not at this price point. But you can play Spider-Man at 1200x900 resolution on medium settings, and on this small but sharp little screen it still looks pretty damn good, especially at 60fps.
**ok, it's kinda possible IF you have a really fast home network and are within range of that network, in which case you can stream Spider-Man or any game from your PC to the steam deck and it works pretty flawlessly. I don't have a super fast wifi network, so my image was a little compressed and text was a little blurry, but it still looked damn good, ran at a constant 60fps, and had no noticeable input lag, so if you're going to be playing this thing at home, every game on your steam library can become steam-deck approved just by streaming it from the PC.
I've also tooled around with downloading some emulators on it. Going into desktop mode, the deck itself runs SteamOS, a linux distribution, and so going into the discover window on the desktop I was easily able to download the linux version of retroarch, download some cores, download some roms, and give it a try. As expected, it works pretty fantastically for all of this, with the caveat that it will take a little time to get everything set up properly.
And therein lies the biggest flaw I can find with the deck. This is NOT a console experience. This is 100% a PC experience, with all the pros and cons that come with it. You will need to mess with configurations, you will need to experiment with configs, you will need to become familiar with steams controller abilities if you plan on playing a game that doesn't support gamepads, or if like me you hate playing a shooter with analog sticks and want to use the touchpad/gyros to aim instead. You'll also have to be comfortable with exiting out of steam and tooling around in a linux distro every now and then, and maybe even have to plug in a keyboard and mouse every now and then to really set some things up, especially since the steam desktop controls are a little wonky.
I'm going to have to spend a lot more time with this thing before I'm able to give a fully fleshed out review, but it's an impressive bit of kit. It is not, however, something you can just take out of the box and play games on, and so anyone getting one of these is going to have to keep that in mind.
I've now spent about 5 hours with this thing, which is not at all enough time to give it a review, but I can give you my thoughts.
First, the hardware on this thing is honestly pretty impressive, for a handheld*. See that asterisk? Assume that any time I mention how impressive the hardware is, it's in relation to it being in a small and relatively light form factor. This thing will not replace a high end gaming PC, or even a medium end gaming PC. But it will serve as a decent enough gaming PC on the go, or in bed, or just kicked back in a recliner, and that is really what makes this thing shine. Imagining being able to play Spider-Man on the bus and having it look as amazing as it does on the big screen with ray tracing and real time reflections? You are in a fantasy land, that's impossible**, certainly not at this price point. But you can play Spider-Man at 1200x900 resolution on medium settings, and on this small but sharp little screen it still looks pretty damn good, especially at 60fps.
**ok, it's kinda possible IF you have a really fast home network and are within range of that network, in which case you can stream Spider-Man or any game from your PC to the steam deck and it works pretty flawlessly. I don't have a super fast wifi network, so my image was a little compressed and text was a little blurry, but it still looked damn good, ran at a constant 60fps, and had no noticeable input lag, so if you're going to be playing this thing at home, every game on your steam library can become steam-deck approved just by streaming it from the PC.
I've also tooled around with downloading some emulators on it. Going into desktop mode, the deck itself runs SteamOS, a linux distribution, and so going into the discover window on the desktop I was easily able to download the linux version of retroarch, download some cores, download some roms, and give it a try. As expected, it works pretty fantastically for all of this, with the caveat that it will take a little time to get everything set up properly.
And therein lies the biggest flaw I can find with the deck. This is NOT a console experience. This is 100% a PC experience, with all the pros and cons that come with it. You will need to mess with configurations, you will need to experiment with configs, you will need to become familiar with steams controller abilities if you plan on playing a game that doesn't support gamepads, or if like me you hate playing a shooter with analog sticks and want to use the touchpad/gyros to aim instead. You'll also have to be comfortable with exiting out of steam and tooling around in a linux distro every now and then, and maybe even have to plug in a keyboard and mouse every now and then to really set some things up, especially since the steam desktop controls are a little wonky.
I'm going to have to spend a lot more time with this thing before I'm able to give a fully fleshed out review, but it's an impressive bit of kit. It is not, however, something you can just take out of the box and play games on, and so anyone getting one of these is going to have to keep that in mind.
