EvilVEvil was provided by Toadman Interactive for review. Thank you!
This review used an LCD Steam Deck. OLED details will be coming later.
EvilVEvil might be the most divided I've felt about a game that I've had to review. Some aspects of the game shine out as being fun and make me hope that the game is a success, but other aspects trouble me and make me worry about its long-term future.
EvilVEvil starts you off with a tutorial, which will run you through the basics of the game, and teach you how to use your weapons, their uses, and your abilities. For the starting character, you can teleport and shoot a ball of fire from your hand. Then you have a shotgun-like anti-demon weapon and an assault rifle for dealing with non-supernatural enemies and requiring you to switch weapons depending on the enemy type you're facing.
EvilVEvil's gunplay is easily one of the highlights. Enemies often come at you enmasse, and the gunplay is smooth and gives you a decent sense of power as you fight off the encroaching army. The ability to jump at a supernatural level, and teleport, gives you a good sense of movement, there's also the nice added feature that if you aim down sights when firing a gun in the air, the game will go into slow-motion briefly so you can aim your shots and feel like a badass.
The gunplay and movement feel decent, but I think it's important to state what EvilVEvil is and isn't. While the game does have a story and seems to like to emphasize it, it doesn't focus on it much. Yes, the game is split up into missions, but the way it presents itself in this regard feels very 90s.
All dialogue is shown in a small box at the side of the screen, usually while you're busy mowing down enemies. It's hard to pay attention to what's going on story-wise, and the missions are pretty short with most of them lasting around 20 minutes or less. There's even a toggle in the option menu to disable the storyline, likely in case you want to play the same mission repeatedly for grinding progression.
This brings me to what I worry about most with EvilVEvil. I wasn't aware of this before, and I don't see it mentioned on the Steam page for the game now, but EvilVEvil is a season-based game. After playing through the 11 missions that make up Season 1 and reaching the end, there wasn't a satisfying conclusion to the story. I can only assume it's because the over-arching story is meant to take place across multiple seasons.
This is a huge worry for me with regard to the game's longevity because the 11 missions can be completed in 2-3 hours if you move through them quickly enough. And that's all the content in the game. There's no deathmatch mode, side missions, or even side objectives, just those 11. And if a season lasts for 3 months, you're only getting 2 to 3 hours worth of content every 3 months, people are going to lose interest, fast.
Progression is slow, but again, I'm guessing this is because the developers intend for you to play across multiple seasons to progress. After finishing season 1, 1 of my characters was at level 11/50. The rest I hadn't yet touched. So unless you are prepared to wait several months and multiple seasons to level up your characters and equipment, expect progression to be a bit of a grind of playing the same few missions repeatedly, with no change.
As for the progression itself, there are a decent number of modifications you can make. You unlock character artifacts by playing as a certain character and weapon modifications by using that weapon and unlocking additional slots to fit more modifications. Then, you'll simply be spending in-game currency to upgrade them. This allows some variety in the game, and you have more artifacts/modifications than you do slots to equip them in, meaning everyone in your party is likely running a different loadout to each other.
I enjoy some aspects of EvilVEvil, the gunplay is enjoyable, and the movement is good, but it's wrapped in a package that I don't have much confidence in. The gameplay loop is boring, all the missions are very similar in their design and objectives, and progression is a bit of a grind. I hope that this is something that changes post-launch because if they can get more content in the game and add some variety to the missions/objectives, this could be a much easier game to recommend.
Luckily, this is a multiplayer focused title, and playing it with friends is a blast. You can play it all solo, which does highlight some of these issues with the missions, but playing with friends and trying to coordinate, especially on the higher difficulties, saves it to some degree. You can also somewhat compete against each other by seeing who can get the highest score within the mission, and when all is said and done, this is definitely a multiplayer-focused experience.
There are 4 difficulty options available, including a "Story" difficulty, which is dead easy. When playing in this mode, I didn't die once. The higher difficulties are much more challenging, however, forcing you to take things a bit slower and think through situations more. it's pretty brutal. This could make the game a bit longer if you play on higher difficulties. It seems the game doesn't scale much, depending on the players in your squad. So playing solo might be very difficult.
It's also worth mentioning that even when playing solo, the game is an "online" game, so you cannot pause.
EvilVEvil is a bit of a mixed bag regarding how it performs on the Steam Deck. It does support 1280x800 as a resolution, so we don't have any black bars around the screen, and the controls work well on the Steam Deck, but UI scaling is a bit of an issue. Prompts to interact with objects and the objectives on the screen are small. Fortunately, the prompt always has the same button, so you know what to press when it appears. The objectives are marked with a visual icon, so knowing the objective is unnecessary.
In your SteamOS settings, you'll want an FPS Limit of 60 FPS / 60Hz or just no frame limiter, as we'll be using the in-game limiter. We won't be setting a TDP Limit here either.
We essentially run the lowest settings possible, with the exception of Texture Quality, which we will have on "Extreme." Don't worry; even on Extreme, the game really doesn't use much VRAM. Shadows, Particles, and Bloom, we all want on either Off or Low. Strangely, the game only supports FSR1, no FSR2 or FSR3 support, odd for a 2024 release.
We are keeping the resolution at 1280x800, as we would at least like the chance to be able to read the text in the game! We're also setting the "Max FPS" in-game to 30. It does have some inconsistent frame times, but it doesn't introduce input lag as the SteamOS frame limiter does.
Here's a screenshot of the settings I used for reference:
Using these settings, EvilVEvil will maintain 30 FPS a decent amount of the time. However, when a lot of enemies are present, which is a fairly frequent occurrence, expect the FPS to drop into the high 20s, occasionally to 25 or so. This is a CPU issue rather than a GPU one. The GPU is surprisingly not taxed at these settings, but we need to keep the power draw low on the GPU so the CPU can take whatever it needs.
In my opinion, the game remains playable. It's not super strict about how accurate your aim has to be, and since it's co-op rather than competitive, you won't be fighting against other players, meaning there's a lot less pressure to react quickly.
My power draw was generally in the 18-20W range, so expect around 2 hours of battery life on a Steam Deck LCD and 2.5 hours on the Steam Deck OLED.
The temperatures are high, around 70-80C. The fan did have to kick up to a high level occasionally, but it often quickly went down again.
EvilVEvil has no accessibility options. You can adjust camera sensitivity and invert the controls, but that's about it.
EvilVEvil has great potential; the gunplay and movement are enjoyable, so the basics are in place. I just hope there's enough content built around the gameplay to make it an enjoyable experience for a long time. Right now, Season 1 doesn't seem to be offering much content for players to enjoy. I worry that unless additional ways to play, or unless the Seasons are much shorter lived than the "Seasons" in other games, EvilVEvil will become stale, fast. More variety in the game's missions would be good, too; almost every objective in the missions is "Plant explosives" and "Destroy these objects".
I also have some concerns over the game's difficulty balancing. Playing on the hardest difficulty seems incredibly brutal, especially as a solo player where you can't be revived. I had the most fun playing on the "Medium" difficulty solo, which is difficulty 2 out of 4. Difficulty 3 and 4 were out of my skill range, I'm afraid.
Performance on the Steam Deck is mixed. The basics are in place, there is good resolution support, and the controls work just fine, but the frame rate is a little unstable, with frequent dips when in intense combat. The game remains playable, but if you're particularly sensitive to frame drops, you might find it difficult to play.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.
Dead Island 2 was provided by Deep Silver/PLAION for review. Thank you!
This review used an LCD Steam Deck. OLED details will be coming later.
After a year of being an Epic Store exclusive, Steam users can finally get their hands on Dead Island 2. But was the game worth the wait? And how does it perform on the Steam Deck? Well, let's find out!
If you aren't familiar with the game, Dead Island 2 occurs during a zombie outbreak in LA, often called Hell-A. Due to the sudden outbreak and general mass panic, players will end up as part of a rag-tag group of survivors who aim to escape Hell-A. It is slightly confusing that the game is called Dead Island and yet takes place on the US Mainland, but let's ignore that small detail for now.
The focus of Dead Island 2 is surely the combat, and thankfully, it's one thing that Dead Island 2 does well. The combat is very gory and takes advantage of a new system the developers created, allowing you to deal realistic damage to bodies. Cutting a zombie with a sharp object will cause their skin to slice exactly where you swung your weapon, while blunt objects will likewise cause body deformation.
As you might expect, you can also dismember limbs to incapacitate zombies or decapitate them for the killing blow. I discovered that failing to decapitate a zombie can cause it to return to "life" moments later, so it's good to ensure you've done the job properly before moving on and turning your back.
Most of the time in Dead Island 2, you'll use melee weapons. There are ranged weapons, such as firearms, but they're few and far between, and melee weapons are much easier to come by and, in certain situations, much more wise to use to their ability to knock back enemies and crowd control.
The combat is very satisfying, and being able to push back zombies and then deal a devastating swing to take them out feels oh-so-good. The game isn't for the faint of heart, though. It's about as gory as you can get, with visible organs inside the body, burnt flesh, and plenty of icky environmental stuff going on, too. Fortunately, you're probably too panicked fighting back the horde to be squeamish.
Visually, the game also impresses. The game is still a visual treat, even in the lower settings I was playing. The environment of LA/California is pleasant and sunny, and it'd be a nice place to stroll if there wasn't an angry horde of zombies trying to bite your face off at every street corner. You can even run with some upscaling on with the built-in FSR2 support, and the game holds up well.
The only visual effect I wasn't a huge fan of was the bloom effect when exiting a building, which blinds you for a few seconds. It's likely used to give you a sense of unease about not being able to see if there are enemies outside when you first leave a building, but it felt a bit unnecessary, and it can't be disabled in the options.
Story-wise, Dead Island 2 is pretty forgettable. You start on a plane trying to evacuate people from LA, and the zombie pandemic has already begun. However, as it turns out, one of the passengers is infected, resulting in the plane being shot down to prevent the quarantine around LA from being breached.
After this point, the story revolves around repeated attempts to get yourself and the group of survivors you run into out of LA. There are a couple of twists and turns here and there, but none of them are particularly thrilling.
Depending on your character, you might find story interactions and cutscenes more or less bearable. For example, one of the protagonists you can choose is a Paralympian who, despite the ongoing zombie apocalypse, repeatedly says during the game that they must escape LA to get to the Paralympic trials. It's a small thing, but I found it pretty irksome that your main goal for escaping LA is to attend the Paralympics in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.
I did find some issues with the objectives in certain quests. It's not always 100% clear what you have to do in every situation, and it's quite easy to get lost in some of the environments. Sometimes, the game will guide you quite well by placing waypoints for you to reach, but other times, it leaves you with a vague objective with no concrete instructions. I found this needlessly frustrating, where you want to move to the next area and face some more enemies.
I didn't play the game to solve puzzles or find hidden objects. Going on a "treasure hunt" to find 4 items is pretty much just filler in every game it's ever been in, and it's the same in Dead Island 2, and it interrupts an otherwise fun experience. I understand the game might be shorter without these artificial obstacles thrown in the way, but it is frustrating nonetheless.
Dead Island 2 does have co-op support for up to 3 players, although I only got the chance to play the game solo. The game does scale difficulty, so you should find the game a reasonable challenge regardless of the amount of players you're with, depending on your difficulty setting. I imagine a game like this is much more fun with friends, as you can sort of gloss over awkward story moments.
Dead Island 2 gets off to a great start. Its menus and gameplay have full controller support. The game defaults to the Steam Deck's 1280x800 native resolution, and it supports AMD FSR2 upscaling, which helps it achieve a few extra frames of performance.
There's not much else to say, so let's get straight into the settings preset I have for you today. There's only one, but I think the game still looks great with the settings as they are, and we get to run the game at 40 FPS.
Here are the base settings I used. For the graphical settings, you'll need to go to the "Advanced" settings at the bottom of the Display menu shown here.
In your SteamOS settings, set an FPS Limit of 40 FPS / 40Hz, and we won't have a TDP limit here.
To get up to 40 FPS, I set everything to its lowest setting possible, except Texture Quality, which I put on Ultra, and FSR2, which is set to Balanced. VRAM takes a bit of a pounding here, but I didn't find it caused stutters in this case.
With these settings, we can get 40 FPS in most cases. However, there are some situations where FPS will drop, and we can't avoid that. Particularly when swinging a weapon and making contact with a zombie, the deformation/gore system in place seems to hit the Steam Deck's GPU pretty hard, and you'll likely drop into the high 30s at these points.
The main saving grace here is that while in the swinging animation, you aren't doing too much, and there's so much going on that the FPS drops didn't feel terrible. The times when you're simply walking around the world map and going through menus all ran at 40 FPS for me, so I think it's an acceptable compromise.
I think the game still looks great.
The screenshots above were taken when this preset was expected to be 50 FPS. However, later in the game, I found that framerates deteriorated, and the power draw got unreasonably high, specifically at night. So, while the graphics look the same, I recommend you lock the game to 40 FPS, not 50 FPS. I didn't retake the screenshots as I wanted to present the game in various situations, and you can't go back and repeat missions in Dead Island 2.
The power draw isn't too bad. It ranges from 19-24W with the 40 FPS lock. If you were to lock the game to 50 FPS, the power draw would be around 26-29W. Steam Deck LCD users shouldn't expect much more than 2 hours of battery life.
Temperatures tended to hang around 75C for the most part.
I debated making different presets for Dead Island 2, but ultimately, the above settings were my sweet spot. With the 40 FPS lock and low settings, the framerate is quite solid throughout most of the game, and I just found it nicer to play that way instead of going for 50 FPS and experiencing jarring drops in framerate.
Running at 30 FPS is also difficult, as the SteamOS frame limiter introduces unacceptable input lag, and the in-game frame limiter introduces micro-stuttering, neither of which is ideal.
Dead Island 2 features some accessibility options, such as bindable keys and adjustable sensitivity, as well as the ability to display subtitles and the size of the subtitles.
The UI is not scalable (aside from the subtitles), although I generally found it reasonably easy to read on the Steam Deck.
If you want a game you can dive into, have mindless fun, and chop down the zombie hordes, maybe even with some friends, then Dead Island 2 is probably the game for you. It's not a game to be taken seriously; the storyline lets it down if that's what you're here for, but the visuals and combat impress, and for many people, those are arguably the two points you want to impress in a game like this.
Performance on Steam Deck is mixed. We can hit decent performance targets, but the combat in the game takes a heavy toll regardless of our settings, so expect frame drops here and there. The control scheme, however, is excellent and works well in every aspect of the game I tried. Don't let the frame drops dissuade you from playing this game on the Steam Deck; it's a good time, regardless.
The developers make the following note about the game's Steam Deck compatibility, which you may wish to read HERE. This mainly covers issues when linking your Epic Games account to play online.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.
GUNHEAD was provided by Alientrap for review. Thank you!
The game was tested with a Steam Deck LCD. OLED testing is coming soon.
With so many games launching, keeping up with it all is pretty challenging. GUNHEAD slipped me by when it first launched, but it's a Roguelike FPS game, a mix of genres I love. After playing Gunfire: Reborn and Roboquest, I've kept an eye out for other games in the genre, and GUNHEAD fits the bill perfectly.
The gameplay loop starts with you deciding on 1 of 3 randomly generated destinations varying in difficulty and type. After selecting one and warping to it, you select a mech suit to use and board the enemy ship, where you are tasked with disabling its systems and, ultimately, destroying its core. These systems range from Shields that protect other systems, to repair systems that can fix the ship, alarms, or even nukes that cause an explosion whenever you disable a different part of the ship. After you have destroyed the core, you will be rewarded based on your performance. Then, the cycle continues with the upgrades/unlocks you got from your previous mission!
Overall, the gameplay is fluid and fast-paced. I like how you control your mech, including the ability to use a jetpack to dodge and fly around the ship's internals in all directions. It can be a little confusing initially, but I think it works well once you've got a handle on things. Your mech can have up to 4 weapons equipped at any given time and an item slot, and you can find new weapons and items on the ship. There are passive upgrades to find as well that are permanently applied to your mech (until you die). These upgrades reward exploration and ensure that you thoroughly clear out each ship you've boarded in the hopes of finding that perfect buff.
GUNHEAD has a cel-shaded visual style that, while I usually enjoy this style, I did find it somewhat difficult to distinguish enemies from the background on occasion. This may be why the developer has added a "radar" feature to the game, showing enemy positions by putting a rectangle around them, showing them on the map, or showing them on the game's 3D Compass. All of this makes me think the developers knew there was an issue here, and they tried a lot of workarounds instead of fixing the core issue. The enemies have a similar design to the ship they're on and can easily be mistaken for just another part of the ship.
I did enjoy playing GUNHEAD, and I'd love to dive back in and try to progress further with a bit more time. It's a challenging experience, and once you learn the enemy types and how to pick them out from the busy environment, it's a good time.
GUNHEAD supports the Steam Deck's native 1280x800 resolution, eliminating any black bars we might encounter. It also has excellent gamepad support, allowing complete control of the menus and gameplay with gamepads.
One note that's worth mentioning, however, is that when I tried the game with Aim Assist turned on, the camera would often get stuck moving in a direction I didn't wish it to. I would strongly recommend disabling Aim Assist in the options if you play.
In terms of graphical settings, we don't have much choice since there's only one option to change the visual quality of the game. From "Fastest" to "Beautiful." Regardless of what I tried, running on higher settings always resulted in FPS drops when a lot of action happened, so we're stuck to relatively low settings on the Steam Deck. A surprise given the game's artistic style, I've seen games with a more detailed aesthetic run better on the Deck.
I opted out of making a "Battery Life" settings preset for GUNHEAD, as the graphics aren't too scalable, and 40 FPS is what I would consider a minimum for a game as fast-paced as this.
As GUNHEAD is an FPS title, my aim going into this review was to achieve a 60 FPS experience, and thankfully, we can just about do that!
I chose to forego any TDP limit here, but we can run at 60 FPS a lot of the time with a 12W TDP Limit, I found that stutters were more frequent and egregious with a limit on, and for the smoothest experience possible, it's best to just not have a limit at all.
In SteamOS, we have a 60FPS/Hz lock, and we have the settings clocked in at "Fastest."
Even though we've gone without a TDP Limit here, this game is still pretty light on the CPU most of the time, so we're only pulling about 15W from the battery on average. This means we should get about 2 and a half hours of battery life, which is pretty good for 60 FPS. Temperatures also stay relatively cool at around 65c.
Even though this is the "Quality" setting, unfortunately, the Steam Deck can't handle anything beyond the "Fast" quality setting. Going beyond this can be fine for a lot of the game, but when action is on screen, the performance just drops, exactly when you don't want it to. So we're having to stick with the "Fast" setting here.
We can set a TDP Limit of 12W here, as the drain on the CPU is low now we're only at 40 FPS. We can set a 40 FPS/Hz lock in SteamOS, too. Ultimately, this gives us about 12W - 13W of battery drain. This means we get 3 hours of battery life out of our Steam Deck. Temperatures remain the same as my recommended settings, about 60c - 65c.
In terms of graphical quality over the 60 FPS settings, we're mainly gaining some color grading and fog effects like the green shown in the image above. These are absent from the recommended settings, but I would rather play at 60 than have these couple of added effects.
It holds 40 FPS well, with the very occasional stutter, which didn't affect my gameplay.
It's also worth noting that if you are immediately up against a lot of transparency/alpha effects, such as smoke or transparent lighting, the FPS will drop extremely low, into the low teens. This is unavoidable on any graphics setting I tested. Fortunately, it only lasts for less than a second each time, but if you have something like a rocket launcher that fires several rockets, each leaving a smoke trail, this FPS drop can affect you more frequently and be annoying.
Here's a screenshot of an effect that the Steam Deck doesn't like. You can see the sharp FPS drop at the top left:
GUNHEAD has almost no accessibility options. You can disable camera shake, make some UI elements larger, and the voiced dialogue lines in the game do have subtitles at the top left of the screen, but that's about it. Given the often convoluted nature of navigating the enemy ships, the fully 3D playing space, and the game is fast-paced at times, this one might be best to avoid if you aren't able to react quickly or are visually impaired.
GUNHEAD is a fun, single-player roguelike FPS that ticks most boxes for me. Once you get the hang of navigating the ships, you can enjoy the fantastic progression and combat systems.
With four difficulty choices, I feel like most players will be able to find a challenge here. I chose the Normal difficulty since I don't play many FPS games. Even still, I found the game rather difficult and would struggle to win more than three missions in a row. In hindsight, perhaps "Easy" would have been my better choice.
I barely scratched the surface of all the unlocks, and I am intrigued to see just how crazy things can get if you get far into a run. Here's just a look at some of the weapons and upgrades you can find in the game:
GUNHEAD plays well on the Steam Deck, being able to hold 60 FPS quite nicely, as well as drop to 40 FPS for a slight graphical improvement. The control scheme is also as good as you could hope for, so it rightfully holds a "Verified" Steam Deck compatibility rating. It currently has a "Mostly Positive" review rating on Steam, which I think is fair given some of my difficulties, but overall, I would recommend it if you're looking for an enjoyable roguelike FPS experience.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game. Information was correct at the time of writing.
If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.
Wizordum was provided by Apogee Entertainment for review. Thank you!
Ever since I first saw Wizordum, I was captivated by its art style. The pixel-like visuals, combined with the 2D sprite enemies and props in 3D environments, work exquisitely with the color palette and world that is built. I love games that utilize two different versions of aesthetics like this to form a captivating experience, and this game succeeds in it wonderfully.
Wizordum is currently in early access, so it isn't feature-complete yet, but it has a solid amount to offer initially. You will have 1 full episode of the single-player campaign, with 2 more on the way, a full custom-level editor to create your own complete episodes with online sharing support, and online leaderboard support to compete against your friends to see who can complete the levels in the quickest time.
From what I have played so far, I am loving it. I can see the creativity coming through with the aesthetics, level design, unique weapons, and modding tools. I really love having such an accessible level creator too, as it means more people will hopefully make levels and could create a near-endless amount of content to go through. Unfortunately, this isn't as easy to control with a gamepad, but if you are willing to use the touchscreen or connect a KB+M, this will be great to use. Placing props or terrain using your finger on the touchpad is quite nice, especially when you can drag your finger to place terrain in multiple squares at once.
Since it is in early access, I can't say anything definitive about how good the game will be on release, and everything is subject to change, but this is a fantastic start. And, for the most part, it is a treat to play on the Steam Deck.
As for performance, Wizordum holds up quite well on the Steam Deck. Most condensed areas work flawlessly out of the box with a battery drain under 10W, but there are some open spaces that tend to drain a bit more, hitting around 13W. These are minimal and will change as you run around the levels, which makes the battery life stick to higher numbers. As for framerate, 60 FPS is achievable and easy to hit, though there are a few areas where I noticed slight hitches when moving into them.
There are some stages that will drop to 50 FPS when looking in certain areas but will bounce up to 60 FPS when turning away. Since the game is in early access, I am sure it will be fixed and optimized as it progresses. For an initial launch though, the game works exceptionally well!
While the bulk of the game works perfectly well with a controller, navigating the main menu was a bit harder at first. The controller wouldn't recognize it, so I had to use the touchscreen to bring up the cursor. Then, when the controller was recognized, it would go through the menu in a weirder way (skipped over leaderboards and then went back to it when scrolling down). It wasn't a huge deal, and I never encountered any issues while in-game, but it's noticeable getting into the game.
There are a lot of areas where the prompts in-game will show keyboard prompts instead of Gamepad ones. For example, it will say to use "E" to inspect corpses when it should be saying "A" for the gamepad.
As for accessibility, there are multiple different toggles for bobbing, screen flashing, amount of gore, auto-switching weapons, showing gameplay time, autorunning, and audio sliders.
The game does have good gyro support as well. Selecting the "Gyro to Mouse [Beta]" option in the controller settings of Steam Input will allow you to enable Gyro easily while using gamepad controls simultaneously. I would recommend lowering the sensitivity down to 1.75x, though.
Wizordum does support 16:10 resolutions, so no black bars, and does have cloud save support.
From what I have played so far, Wizordum definitely has a lot of potential to be a fantastic retro FPS that is essential on the Steam Deck. The aesthetics are fantastic, while the gameplay is tight and enjoyable. The level editor is also great to use, even if it doesn't work well with a gamepad. There are some performance hitches, and controller optimization is needed, but it works well so far. For an initial launch in Early Access, I am extremely happy with the results!
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.
After a long time of waiting, Overwatch 2 has finally arrived on Steam. So, what does this famous Free-To-Play Hero Shooter bring to the table?
There are over 30 characters or "heroes" to choose from, each with their own unique moves and playstyles, so you should be able to find one that fits how you like to play. Characters are split into 3 main classes: Tanks, Damage, and Support. My favorite is damage, but it's up to you how you want to play the game. This is a fast-paced and competitive first-person shooter, so having good reflexes and stable performance is essential. We're also treated to cross-play and cross-progression, so if you've been used to playing the game on consoles or over on Battle.net, you can carry on your progress on Steam.
Given that Overwatch 2 is widely known as an eSports title, you'd imagine it's pretty optimized, right? Well, let's see how it performs on the Deck.
Things get off to a decent start. The default controller layout works well, and menus can be controlled with the D-Pad or Analog stick. There is native support for 16:10 resolutions, including the Steam Deck's native 1280x800, and text is also reasonably sized and perfectly readable on the Deck's display.
But how well does the game run? Ideally, we want a 60 FPS experience, and that's exactly what we can get with the Deck.
60 FPS is fairly easy to achieve on the Steam Deck. For this, we simply set the game to its "High" preset to get a good baseline. Then we change "Dynamic Render Scale" to Off, change "Render Scale" to Custom, and set it to 100%. Then set the Frame Rate to Custom, and set that to 60. In the Graphics Quality tab, we're also lowering AA to use FXAA and not SMAA. Here are the settings in screenshot form if you want to see them for yourself. You can click to enlarge the images.
At these settings, I noticed basically no drops from 60 during 3 test matches. The downside, however, is that the battery life is very poor. You should expect no more than 90 minutes of battery life. The Deck can also feel pretty hot in your hands, reaching 90C often.
If you want settings that make the Steam Deck run slightly cooler, select the "Medium" preset, and then do the same as above: Dynamic Render Scale Off, Render Scale to Custom, 100%. Frame Rate to Custom, 60. FXAA is already used on the Medium preset, so we don't need to change this. The advantage of using Medium over High is that we can lower our TDP limit from 15W to 12W in the SteamOS settings. This buys us up to 30 minutes extra battery life, meaning you can possibly squeeze out 2 hours of gameplay. It also keeps the Deck cooler and more comfortable to hold, with temperatures usually holding around 80C and not 90C.
As this is a competitive game, we don't really want to drop the framerate too much. However, a drop to 50 FPS isn't too bad, and we can get some extra battery life out of the Steam Deck with these settings. In a similar fashion to the recommended build, select the "Low" preset, then set "Dynamic Render Scale" to Off, "Render Scale" to Custom, and set it to 100%. Then set the Frame Rate to Custom, and set that to 50. You'll also want to set your SteamOS Frame Rate lock and display to 50 FPS. Here are the settings again so you can copy them exactly. You can click to enlarge the images.
To get the extra life from our battery, we'll also be lowering our SteamOS TDP Limit to 9W. With these changes, the game may look a little worse, but we're increasing our battery life from about 90 minutes to almost 3 hours, close to doubling our battery life.
These aren't the absolute lowest graphics settings. We could lower the resolution or remove the FXAA. However, at this TDP, the Deck becomes CPU-limited rather than GPU-limited, so lowering our graphics wouldn't make the game smoother or improve battery life. Overwatch 2 seems to occasionally put a lot of stress onto a single CPU thread, so we still need a somewhat high TDP to keep the CPU happy.
Our framerate isn't quite as stable as it was with the 60 FPS build, but I struggled to notice it during gameplay. We're also a lot cooler here, running at about 70C instead of 90C.
Overwatch 2 has some nice accessibility options; these include the ability to disable Camera and HUD Shaking, which can give players headaches. You can increase the size of the game's cursor and subtitles. There is also a customizable color blind filter and the ability for the game to read out text chat to you, as well as type into chat using your own voice.
Despite the "Overwhelmingly Negative" reviews that Overwatch 2 was subjected to upon its Steam launch, I think there's quite a bit of fun with the game, especially if you have friends who want to play. It's free, the base mechanics of the game are simple and fun, and it's well-optimized so that a variety of devices, including the Steam Deck, can run it at a competitive level. If you're after a team-based first-person shooter, you should give Overwatch 2 a try!
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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Trapped in a dark Victorian city that has been consumed by an ancient curse, you must survive and plan your daring escape using stealth, weapons, and of course, your wit in this unique survival horror game inspired by the great survival horror games of the 90s and 2000s. You will come across a unique arsenal and utilize in-depth interactivity with the environment to stay alive like eavesdropping, peeking through door cracks, checking bullets, and more. Can you make it out of this town alive?
Gloomwood is an early access game produced by the people who made DUSK, AMID EVIL, ULTRAKILL, and FAITH, all of which are awesome games. New Blood Interactive publishes some seriously incredible games and they are all worth a look and Gloomwood is no exception. The atmosphere and gameplay is fantastic with a great stealth mechanic that really make this game feel tense at times. If you enjoy retro-ish FPS or stealth-focused games, this is one for you!
Picking up Gloomwood since it came out, I noticed a couple things. While performance is better, much better, it still has some pitfalls in performance. Without any caps, the game maxes around 17W drain and hits around 56 FPS with a very erratic frame graph. In certain areas, the framerate would even go down to 48! After that, we tested our settings we made when we first reviewed Gloomwood and they hold up very well today!
With a 960x600 resolution and a mixture of medium and low settings, we can get an image that looks amazing, thanks to the visual style, and runs significantly better. I did notice having Vsync on helps a bit with stabilization too, so turning off the SteamOS FPS cap, but leaving the refresh rate to 40, does wonders. Below is an old comparison, but due to the settings still being the same, the visual differences hold up. Performance of max settings now is significantly better, so below is purely a visual comparison.
Now we have the controls! While we did make our own controller template, it seems there is one, called "Gloomwood On Deck", that is defaulted but unofficial, and it works quite well! The game still doesn't have full controller support, but this is a good alternative and the scheme has details where you can exactly see what does what!
Gloomwood is an awesome game and I really love playing it in my free time. I highly recommend it and definitely say checking out New Blood's catalogue is definitely something you should do. While it doesn't have gamepad/controller support just yet, the scheme it does have plays very well on the Steam Deck and I got used to it very quick. I do wish running the game higher than 40 FPS was easier and had less drops, but it isn't the end of the world and 40 still feels fantastic. This is definitely a safe and great game to get and we can't say that enough!
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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Shadow Warrior 3 was provided to us by Devolver Digital and Tinsley PR for review. Thank you!
Shadow Warrior 3 is a fast-paced first-person gory bloodbath. As Lo-Wang, you will team up with your former nemesis, Orochi Zilla to embark on a seemingly impossible mission across a gorgeous neo-feudal Japan to capture an ancient dragon that was freed. You will utilize a combination of your sword and guns to demolish your enemies, slicing them in half or using finisher moves to smash heads in with hammers or just rip out their hearts. Will you be able to restore balance that you unleashed?
The definitive edition of Shadow Warrior 3 was released last week too. It adds in New Game Plus, which comes with additional challenges and skins, Survival Mode, a new Hero modifier to make things even more difficult, chapter select to replay certain levels at your convenience, and hardcore difficulty. To celebrate, the game is 50% off for the next 2 days (2/23) .
If you're a fan of DOOM and games like that, you will love what Shadow Warrior 3 has to offer. The game is gorgeous to look at and has vibrant landscapes, which I personally love. The gameplay is quite addicting too, swapping from slicing enemies up for ammo and then mowing the rest down with dual wielding SMGs or a revolver. It also features simultaneous/mixed input, which means gyro controls work wonders here! The story is alright and the one-liners tend to get old (not the biggest fan of the voice acting), but as a fan of shooters like this, I would prioritize how the game plays above all. So how does it run on the Steam Deck you ask? Let me tell you.
The game seems to run okay right off the bat, but the starting area in the game is especially hard on the system and shows the flaws on max settings. Overall, you can expect a 20-30 FPS with 25W+ battery if you try to play on max. Though, as usual, we can adjust this to make the game not only playable, but a fantastic experience!
I wanted to start off with aiming for 60 FPS, but I found this hard to stabilize as there are some stuttering issues that really show on higher framerates. I went down as far as I could feasibly without ruining the smooth experience and landed around 45. From there, I played with the settings and turned FSR 1.0 on to see how that looks compared to the original. While it is a little more pixelated, I felt "Ultra Quality" was passible and saved a lot of battery.
Then, keeping everything on medium and turning Shadows to low, I was able to keep a stable framerate under a TDP Limit of 8. It felt smooth, stable, and saved way more battery than I was expecting.
Next, I decided to prioritize framerate and see how far I can push without ruining the visuals. For this, I kept options on low with FSR on Quality kept the game looking pretty decent with FPS at 55 for a smooth feeling that was very close, if not identical, to 60.
After that, I wanted to see if we could push the quality up while keeping 40 FPS. While going to 30 would allow pushing for higher quality settings, 40 feels significantly better for first-person shooters. With this, mostly medium settings with no FSR at all is possible!
Shadow Warrior 3 has some good and bad aspects to it, but I personally feel the good outweigh the bad. First, the game supports mixed/simultaneous input. This means setting gyro to "As Mouse" works wonders! When using it, it can change button inputs in-game to show the KB+M ones (usually finishers will show up as "Q" instead of "LB+RB", but being able to have gyro like this is way more important.
On the other hand, there are some stutters. These don't happen often thankfully, but are prevalent enough to make note of it. This happens most when going across levels and loading in new areas. Framerate also tends to drop when cornered in certain fights, but in general when you are moving around, you won't find drops.
Shadow Warrior 3 is a high-octane, vibrant game that wows me at how good it looks and feels to play. I will never get over the joy of slicing enemies up and then shooting another one behind them with akimbo SMGs. Some of the finishers feel a little slow, but as someone who loves boomer shooters, especially on the Deck, it is wonderful. And with these tweaks, the experience has been a blast and I can't wait to go back and try to beat it on hardcore mode!
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Prodeus was provided to us by Humble Games to review. Thank you!
Are you a fan of Boomer Shooters like DUSK and Doom Eternal? Then this is the game for you. Prodeus is a modernized first-person shooter with a gorgeous retro feel to it. Plow through a campaign hand-crafted by industry veterans alone or in co-op, or compete against your friends in deathmatch modes. You can also partake in campaigns and maps made by the community using the fully integrated level editor in-game. Now, make it through the chaos and take down the Prodeans and all the forces of chaos against you.
As someone who adores boomer shooters on the Steam Deck, I was super excited to check out Prodeus. After my time with it, I can easily say it's one of my favorites. The visual style is fantastic, the gunplay feels tight, the guns themselves are varied and I can feel the weight to them, and the inclusion of the level editor and community map browser brings endless content to the game. I also love the inclusion of co-op campaigns and maps, as well as the dismemberment system that highlights the gory bloodbath you create. And on the Steam Deck, some tweaking is involved to really enjoy it, but it is definitely playable.
Before I go into Prodeus's performance, I want to explain my testing here. While I did play the campaign, I decided to test and optimize settings using a community map and test the settings from there on the campaign. This map is heavier than a lot of the areas featured in-game, so optimizing for the more intensive map would mean all less and more heavy would be covered, including other community maps (theoretically). The map I used to optimize initially is called "Bruteforce" by PALPUS.
Prodeus is a weird game to run and had some oddities when it came to optimizing. Before I get into that though, I did test the game at max settings. In some smaller campaign areas, the game was able to run at 60 FPS with a high battery drain of 20W+, but other areas and the community map would churn out sub 37 FPS at a 24W battery drain. I knew this wouldn't be feasible to play like this, so I got started in my optimization process.
The first thing I looked at was shadows, which were definitely the biggest cause of framerate drops. But oddly enough, most areas didn't show any visual difference. The shadow quality focuses more on non-static shadows as it doesn't effect ones that are created by the environment. The one part that I found a big difference was in the community map where the visual quality did change, but it was so minuscule on the overall effect on the quality.
Other than the shadows, I noticed SSAO and SSR did make a difference, but didn't impact the game visually much. This meant keeping those turned off kept the quality of the game looking similar while saving on battery and performance. I also noticed turning resolution down helped with stabilizing framerate, but didn't really impact visual quality either.
After testing all the settings, I came up with 3 builds that I felt all worked quite well. I prioritized framerate with each one, so each will feel as smooth as possible. My recommended build focuses on battery life, but pushes framerate to a good compromise of 45 FPS while still looking great! It gets around 3 hours of battery and feels a nice step up from 40,
From there, I decided to push framerate as much as possible while keeping things stable. Since there was still some drops when moving through levels at 60, I decided to stick to 55 FPS to keep things smooth and make any possible drops feel non-existent. The battery life tends to stick around 2.5 hours for this one.
Then, I wanted to find the best way to play the game at max quality, including shadows turned on. I noticed that with most framerates, there would still be some drops and spikes in battery. The lowest I could get without drops or crazy spikes in battery is 40 FPS, which still feels fantastic.
Each of these ways to play work extremely well, can't go wrong with any, but 45 with a battery focus felt like a good compromise between good quality and a smoother framerate.
With boomer-shooters like Prodeus, gyro aiming can be a godsend. This helps with some finite adjustments to make sure you can hit those headshots. Unfortunately, Prodeus doesn't have mixed input support. Gyro can be enabled to emulate a joystick, but it doesn't feel as fast/responsive as it could. So while it is possible to have gyro, it doesn't feel like it should.
Even with the oddities and the lack of mixed input support, Prodeus is an incredible shooter that shines on the Steam Deck. The graphical style is gorgeous, the gameplay is fast-paced and tight, and the community maps/campaigns keep the content coming! And all of this can be thoroughly enjoyed on the Deck.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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The true sequel to the infamously known "Worst Game Ever", Postal 4 brings you to the scorching deserts of Arizona, hoping to find a new place to call home. Complete all your errands in however way you can think of in this open-world sandbox with a unique arsenal, power ups, bunches of weapon combos, and pissing on people. You can even pick the voice of POSTAL dude and feed dog treats to stray dogs...to gather your own canine army. What more could you ask for??
On Steam Deck, the game does chug a little bit, but with enough tweaking, it is playable. On max settings though, Postal 4 tends to be able to average above 30 slightly, but does drain the battery at 25W with 80c+ temps. It also does experience some massive spikes when moving around, so I wouldn't call this playable at max. With adjustments to the settings though, the game becomes significantly more playable and a really damn good time! A TDP limit, resolution change, and lower settings will have this game still looking wonderful, but drain going down to 12W - 14W with temps below 70c. There are still some dips when moving, but with a 30 FPS lock, it doesn't bother nearly as much.
I did encounter a couple issues with controls which, with a couple changes, can be easily remedied. The sensitivity for the camera movement is all off and I did notice that it was too slow for me and the in-game sensitivity settings didn't change anything. To remedy this, I changed the right joystick to be a "Joystick Mouse". I changed the mouse sensitivity to 12 for my taste. I did also notice that some control settings, like aiming sensitivity, didn't change no matter what value I adjusted to, so that is a little bummer, but it didn't affect any graphical changes.
Even with all of this, I am heavily optimistic for the future of Postal 4. As we covered, the developers are going to be supporting Linux, which will significantly help the game. On top of that, they are also looking into FSR support which will help even more! Overall, not only is the game playable, I would consider it a safe investment for the future too!
While the differences are more obvious, the game still looks wonderful on the smaller screen and runs so much better!
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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From the developer behind Devil Daggers comes one of the most psychedelic and chaotic-looking games I have ever played. Hyper Demon is a first person shooter that drops you in a unique arena where you battle disjointed blobs that resemble enemies. Even with the minimal controls, there is a lot to master with the abilities and weapons it offers to create insane combos and cataclysmic super moves. And with spherical projection, you can essentially have a 360 degree sensory awareness of threats. It is also super easy to challenge friends from Steam and Discord, as well as easily create clips to be uploaded easily.
While I can keep going, this game is seriously a treat. I played and got massively confused, but loved every second of it. And on Steam Deck, Hyper Demon fits in like a charm...with the right settings of course! When it first released, it didn't work with Proton, but thankfully, an update fixed that and it now works fantastic! The game doesn't have many graphical options either, so default settings were our goal, but it wasn't great to start out this way.
When running Hyper Demon, it immediately hit dips of 40 FPS and the graph was very unstable. I set a GPU Clock Speed Frequency to 900 to combat this and it ended up working like a charm! Set this with a TDP of 7 and you will get around 3.5 - 4 hours of battery life with sub 65c temps. This stayed pretty consistent and didn't experience many drops afterwards, though there was a slight fluctuation from time to time.
I didn't experience any game breaking bugs, but I will make a special note of the controls. Hyper Demon doesn't have controller support, so the default Steam Input scheme is keyboard + mouse. For the most part, it does work, but you will need to use the right trackpad or analog stick to move the mouse cursor to navigate menus and such.
I also had one bug where my audio wouldn't turn down when I used the volume up/down on my Deck. A game restart fixed this, but it is something to note!
This game is a trip. I can't say that enough. The visuals and style is so unique and defined that I keep coming back just to push my score higher in the leaderboards. This is a small game, but it is so impactful with its stylized art, audio, and overall gameplay. Now that it is working on the Deck, it is one I will definitely keep coming back to!
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back!
