Review: Steam Deck OLED

 My brothers bought me a Steam Deck OLED as a birthday present.  I remember playing the heck out of the PS Vita back when I bought one, and a device that has access to my entire collection of PC games was exciting.

The worst thing about the Steam Deck is the compatibility. The device runs Linux instead of Windows, and is meant as a platform to sell steam games. I don't have a big steam backlog, and in fact, most of the games I own are on Epic Games due to the large giveaway library. To my surprise, both Epic and GOG installed nicely by my brother functioned really well, to the point where I could play The Witcher 3 and Rise of the Tomb Raider (as well as the original) and to me when I launch both games there's no distinction between them. Other libraries, however (EA Connect and Ubisoft Connect) did not install no matter what I did and time spent tinkering with them was a total waste of time. What's worse, the initial installs of Arkham Asylum and Arkham City failed as well! My brother had to tinker with it, installing different compatibility libraries and in the case of Arkham Asylum deleting and redownloading it to work. My Windows PC has its share of compatibility problems, but not to this extent! For instance, XCOM-2 ran, but I couldn't make a single move!

Cloud saves on Epic Games and GOG didn't work either, so in all cases I had to restart games from scratch. Maybe this is to be expected, but if the device had run Windows I bet it wouldn't have all these problems. (Valve promises that some day they will have fully supported Windows drivers --- I'm not holding my breath --- what incentive do they have to make that work?!!)

The games that work, work well. I happily played The Witcher 3 and Tomb Raider ran well and had an immersive experience. So did the Batman games, once my brother got it running for me. Obviously any of the weaker games (like Braid) would just work as well.  Bluetooth audio connect to my Pixel Buds Pro worked well, and with no discernible latency, which was impressive. One interesting glitch is that the device is very aggressive about awake from sleep. If I pulled out the Pixel Buds Pro within pairing distance of the Steam Deck, it would wake up from sleep! I eventually turned off the Steam Deck completely so as to avoid that.

The battery life was much less impressive. You can get about 120 minutes of either of the triple A titles mentioned above. When connected to the 65w powerbank, you can nearly get through a 6 hour coast to coast flight. That's probably good enough --- my Pixel Buds Pro wouldn't make it past that anyway!

All in all, this is the device that will get me buying games on Steam again. Well done!