Dune Awakening was provided by Funcom for review. Thank you!
With so many survival games out there and it being one of my favorite genres, I’ve played a lot of Rust, Minecraft, Enshrouded, and recently V Rising. With Dune Awakening, I got to playtest through the start of this year, and I quickly realized how it throws you into a complex world built on decades of sci-fi history, and it's an incredible experience.
When the game begins, you're hit with names, events, and terminology that won't make much sense unless you've dipped into the books or movies of the Dune franchise, but don't let it discourage you. However, you may feel a little overwhelmed. There is an in-game archive to help, and it is quite in-depth, but don't expect it to hold your hand.
Originally pitched as a survival MMO, the developers have now clarified it's a multiplayer survival game on a massive scale. The game is broken up into servers, so there aren't hundreds/thousands of players on one server, and it relies more on the survival and crafting experience alongside the storyline. In fact, outside of trade posts and social hubs, it's rare to bump into another player. The game also has global chat channels and close proximity chat to interact with other players. You can interact with other players and join them or invite them to your guild, but it isn't a requirement. I think that's not bad, especially for solo players, and you're not punished for playing alone, at least not until the end-game content.
The story turns away from the established Dune lore by featuring a world where Paul Atreides is never born. You are thrust into the role of a Bene Gesserit, an agent tasked with unveiling the Fremen's fate and "awakening the Sleeper." You'll navigate the planet Arrakis, where conflict between House Atreides and House Harkonnen rages, locked in civil war for control of the planet. You’re a prisoner who’s just been dropped into this hostile environment.
The first 10 to 20 hours are spent gathering research resources while tackling the challenges the continued day and night cycle brings. In the Sun, heat is your enemy; spending too much time in the sun rapidly drains your hydration level, which is your main concern regarding survival. At night, you get convoys that hunt life in their drones, and you need to move tactically. However, there are challenges regardless of the time of day, like Sandworms coming out of nowhere to eat you up. So, you must be sure about traversal when moving across longer patches in the desert, sticking to rocky ground when you can.
There is no hunger system in the game; instead, you have to keep your water supply filled. This can be done by gathering dew from certain plants, extracting and purifying the blood of fallen foes, and later by certain structures. Water is used to keep both you alive and extensively for crafting, so you'll always need to keep large amounts of water on hand.
The beginning part of the game is structured into chapters or sections of the map, which are open areas you're meant to explore between these story elements. You use the accumulated knowledge you've gained through exploring these open PvE sections to cross a vast, expansive desert where your understanding of the mechanics is tested. It's always meant to be this heart-pounding experience, and will consistently offer exciting challenges.
Another clever thing is how they introduce PvP. PvP can't just happen anywhere. PvP zones are present in the Deep Desert and mainly offer high-tier rewards, as well as Spice, the most important resource in the world. Dying in PvP can result in losing all your inventory; it's high-risk, high-reward. However, you’re always on the verge of getting raided for Guilds and Bases. Dune Awakening doesn’t go hardcore on this, protects you from griefing, and only allows player damage to your base if you build it in a PvP Zone.
The vast majority of the map in the Basin area is only PvE, but there are sections that you'll find that are enabled for PvP. These are typically things like shipwrecks that you'll find lodged in mountainsides or crashed in open deserts. However, those in the open desert are a bit more dangerous and temporary than the ones on mountains, as they're 100% guaranteed to eventually be swallowed by a worm. So, you're not only fighting against players but against the eventuality of it being completely consumed.
These PvP areas always contain more challenging NPCs to face off against. But at the end of these mini-dungeons, you'll find rarer items like better blueprints for weapons or armor and even materials you can use to craft some of the more complex items in the game. If you aren't prepared for this PvP, you can buy most of the items you can loot in these zones in some of the merchant NPC stores you'll find located throughout the map.
Character creation in Dune Awakening is crucial for shaping your experience on Arrakis. The character creator is extensive, allowing many customization options, including choosing your home planet, caste, and mentor. These selections affect your abilities, dialogue, potential perks, and access, giving you a chance to express yourself and build out the character you want. You can also express yourself in your base design choices and vehicles, which can have minor cosmetic changes, such as their paint scheme.
The crafting and progressing through material tiers aim to progress you towards the final part of the story, the Deep Desert. Essentially, all of the zones you've played through in the Basin (the majority of the map) are in preparation for entering the Deep Desert.
Eventually, along the way, you'll be asked to align with one of two major houses, Harkonnen and House Atreides, which impact your perks, alliances, and unlock the political part of the endgame experience. It also ties into the lore of the alternative timeline, and the houses remain locked in open competition each week. Then player activity across the game feeds into a global score system, determining which faction has control.
Joining a faction is completely optional, but it also means you’re missing out on unique building sets and skins for your gear and vehicles.
The game doesn't rush you. Whether chopping stone, refining metal, or dodging sandworms, the pacing is relaxed enough to go all-in on one area. The combat mechanics have flexibility, and you're not stuck in one class. You begin with a single skill tree, but as you level and explore, you can mix and match abilities from others. That allows you to tailor your play style and try different builds from ranged, melee, swordmaster, poison arrows, and more. Maybe you want a stealthy poison setup with some crowd control thrown in.
Melee is a big focus in Dune Awakening, but the melee combat feels clunky. Parrying feels delayed, animations are stiff, and enemies often behave oddly during close combat encounters. I tried to give melee more time, but for some enemies with shields where you’re forced to kill them with your knife or sword by deep bleeding, most of the time, it doesn’t seem to work. With the game highlighting duel battles, melee combat feels more like a chore rather than exciting.
Ranged combat, on the other hand, is smoother by comparison and feels more reliable. Sometimes, you are forced into melee because enemies have shields that can only be broken with melee attacks, which brings down some of the excitement of combat. There is a ranged weapon to bypass those barriers you can get, but that's a few hours into the game.
This is a survival game at its core, but it's not one of those punishing, brutal experiences where dying means you lose everything. If you go down, the game gives you a second wind, a chance to revive yourself. You can do it multiple times as long as a certain meter doesn't run out. It takes the edge off the harshness.
Resources are also fairly generous and divided into six tiers, with the rarity improving as you move towards the Deep Desert. Materials respawn quickly; you'll find enough essentials if you keep moving. That helps make building and crafting feel less grindy, at least in the early game. Just remember that, like many survival games, the gameplay loop can feel repetitive after a while.
If you enjoy structured routines and the satisfaction of upgrading and progressing, that might not bother you, but it could start to wear thin if you're looking for non-stop variety. Arrakis is massive, along with the sand, rocks, ruins, and the occasional scavenger camp. It nails the Dune aesthetic, but that comes with a price. The world can feel empty; most buildings you see will be player bases, which won't be enterable.
In the early hours, expect to walk a lot. Eventually, you can research and unlock a Sandbike, and that's when exploration opens up more. Until then, trekking across the desert to turn in quests or grab resources can feel like a chore. I had a lot of fun building my base. I like how you can preview what you will be doing before you lay out your structure, giving an idea of what is happening before you commit the resources. The game offers the chance to go ahead and cancel certain builds right in the middle of the preview.
Base building in Dune Awakening is great, and I had a lot of fun building a more open base to store vehicles and putting in tons of mining tech, storage, and crafting devices, such as fabricators. These allow you to craft new equipment and build bigger and better vehicles, such as Ornithopters and Buggys.
Dune Awakening does have good controller support, no doubt in anticipation of its console release in 2026. It also has a huge amount of flexibility in its graphical settings, even a "laptop" mode that massively lowers visual quality to improve performance. I recommend using it if you want to play on the Steam Deck.
Sadly, even with this mode, the Steam Deck struggles to play Dune Awakening. Despite Valve awarding this game a "Playable" rating, I strongly disagree; the game is not playable on the Steam Deck.
As you reach later into the game, with huge player bases containing massive pentashielded hangers for storing their vehicles, expect drops in FPS well below 20, resulting in a poor playing experience.
If you're wanting to hop on and do a little base management and organizing, or if you're playing in the early game, you can get by on the Steam Deck, but if you're in a guild base in late-game or just have a large solo base, and especially if you're doing any form of PvP, you will want to stay away on the Steam Deck.
Dune Awakening has some accessibility options, such as disabling camera shaking and allowing buttons such as sprinting to be either held or toggled. You can also adjust the font size to be slightly larger or smaller. Motion blur and gamma can be changed.
The game does have voiced dialogue, all of which is subtitled. It also features in-game voice chat, but there is no speech-to-text feature for those hard of hearing.
Dune Awakening is a highly inspirational Survival MMO. It does great with its building and crafting mechanics. Even for Solo Players, the game offers trading mechanics to help them choose to buy their resources and continue their quest or explore the Deep Desert. And I like this a lot for players who aren’t in it for a hardcore survival experience but like a challenge for high-tier resources.
Quest progress isn't always shared across the party. For example, if you need to grab an item from a research facility, each member must collect it themselves. However, only interaction is required for tasks like building and using a fabricator. So, one person can build it, and everyone else can interact with it to complete the quest. This system is designed to encourage teamwork while keeping some objectives individual. Even with some let downs with melee combat, the good heavily outweighs the bad in almost every other aspect.
As for performance, I ran into a fair few technical issues, including some bugs that required a game restart. I’d get these seriously annoying stutters in some parts of the map. There were also some weird visual artifacts at times, but generally, the visuals are fantastic, and the Dune universe has been smartly integrated into all aspects of the gameplay.
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Spirit of the North 2 was provided by Silver Lining Interactive for review. Thank you!
Spirit of the North sets the stage almost perfectly for its sequel. The first game relies hugely on exploration and somewhat decent puzzles, with quite a short length of about 4-5 hours. Spirit of the North 2, on the other hand, features huge open-world exploration, with one of the biggest maps I have experienced. And while some complained about the world of the first game feeling bland and having weak puzzles, Spirit of the North 2 impressed me with its resemblance to some of my favorite games, with exploration reminding me of Elden Ring.
When starting the game, you have numerous options to customize your fox. Many choices are available, from Fur and Eyes to how bulky or cute you want to let your fox be. The game doesn’t block you from further customization either, and you can change your fox’s fur and eyes at any time from the menu.
The story of Spirit of the North 2 relies on its beautiful music and imagery to paint pictures. It starts at the Fox Village, your fox’s home, with beautiful landscapes, and where other foxes live peacefully. You solve a puzzle about the Obelisk, a unique tomb that helps you learn about your surroundings. However, things take a dark turn when ancient soldiers are awakened, causing Fox Village to be lost. Now you're on a journey to fix your village while learning about the Guardians and their memories.
Open-world exploration for Spirit of the North 2 can surely feel overwhelming at the start. You will be confused about your objective, or where to go, and how to access a certain area, as puzzles are the main gameplay mechanic. But the longer you play, the more exploration will make sense, and it ends up fitting perfectly.
Spirit of the North 2 offers six different regions, and each region is gigantic in size, with Portals to fast travel between the regions. This is one of the best features in this game and can be very useful, as travelling on your tiny feet will cost a ton of time. The game also features your cozy Raven Companion, which ended up being way more helpful than I initially thought.
Spirit of the North 2's reliance on exploration is greater than the first game, which was more linear. Wisps are one of the main items you find during your exploration, and these help you unlock different areas. It can be confusing to find these Wisps, but they are usually close to where you will require them or need to explore.
Exploration and Puzzles in the Spirit of the North 2 world are the main highlights as you come across some caves, vaults, glaciers, and small puzzles like opening locked doors. These areas allow you to gather Runes and Skill Points, which you can then use to customize your fox as well as make it more powerful. On top of that, the Skill Tree is perfectly balanced with companion skills and Fox skills like Extra Health, Less Fall Damage, and Extra Wisps. These come in handy when you’re required to dive into a hidden cave or solve a puzzle that requires Wisps and some traversal skill.
The other main part of progression is Runes, which grant different effects to augment how you play, and you can find them while exploring. Some Runes can grant you special effects, like the Glide Rune, which can help you glide, and some special Runes can help you unlock exclusive fox skins for customization.
Spirit of the North 2 heavily relies on music and small cutscenes to highlight the story, but there are also other ways you can learn about the world. Scrolls are scattered throughout its different regions, covering stories about what has happened in the different areas, padding out the lore. This is another reason I compared exploration to Elden Ring, and it’s a good way to learn about the past.
Guardians and memories are new encounters in Spirit of the North 2, which requires you to solve a decent number of puzzles and explore to figure out. Once you’re done with them, you'll face that Guardian. The game doesn’t feature traditional combat, but instead, you help the bosses, or sometimes, escape from them, and learn their memories. I enjoyed these encounters, and I would say they are the highlight of my playthrough.
The game can sometimes feel repetitive, but as the regions offer different terrain types and various puzzles, it switches it up enough to keep things interesting. One comparison I can make of this is with the recent release South of Midnight, where you constantly go through different memories and learn them by going through a similar task. But in Spirit of the North 2, it’s quite open-world, and you can choose to do what puzzle you would like to solve first and then move to the next one to get to the Guardian encounters.
With Spirit of the North 2 being a massive open world with forest and foliage, it struggles on the Steam Deck. It does support the 1280x800 resolution as well as having controller support, but struggles heavily to keep up to 30 FPS, and mainly is in the low 20s with FSR 3.1 enabled and set to Quality.
However, the upscaler performance is similar in Balanced and Performance, with FPS reaching 25 FPS. It can reach 30 FPS on Ultra Performance, but still dip below. The visuals are blurry because there are so many trees and foliage, making it look more pixelated. The TDP was also between 23 W to 30 W, which consumed the battery quickly. It should leave you about 2 hours of battery if you play on the Steam Deck. But I wouldn’t recommend it as it wasn’t a great experience and strained my eyes.
Spirit of the North 2 is a perfect sequel with a massive open world to explore and solve puzzles to find your way. However, the game has poor optimization, which could be due to the big open world. Some tasks, like solving puzzles for the Guardians and their memories, can feel repetitive. Otherwise, the game is great and a huge upgrade from the first one.
Steam Deck performance is terrible. The game runs mainly below the 20s while on 1280x800 resolution on Low settings without enabling an upscaler. Moreover, it still doesn’t reach 30 FPS or above while using FSR 3.1.
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Revenge of the Savage Planet was provided by Raccoon Logic Studios Inc. for review. Thank you!
The Savage Planet is back, but this time, the formula is getting switched up. Unlike the previous title, Journey to the Savage Planet, which was a first-person shooter, Revenge of the Savage Planet opts for a third-person approach and has a bit more of a focus on the crafting and research mechanics of the game.
After waking up on a planet after a long cryosleep, you find out that your former employer, who sent you on a mission to find a habitable planet, has fired you during your stasis. Now it's up to you to build up the colony that never was and explore nearby planets to find the resources to get yourself back home!
Some mechanics have carried over from Journey to the Savage Planet, such as the somewhat zany humor, whether or not that's to your taste. It also keeps the element of scanning and researching the flora and fauna on the planet(s), to unlock further upgrades for your equipment. I found this to be both a positive and a negative.
The movement is really solid in Revenge of the Savage Planet. You can double jump, sprint, slide, vault up ledges, and eventually unlock additional moves like dodging, which help you get around. It feels nice and fluid, and there are no feelings of frustration in how the game controls, which is good, because Revenge of the Savage Planet has you moving around a lot. The maps aren't huge, but there are 5 planets in total, and each of them will take a few minutes to traverse from one side to the other, unless you use the teleporters scattered around each planet as you unlock them.
The combat is perhaps more on the basic side of things; you're pretty much going to be using your blaster for the vast majority of combat, which can be given upgrades, but is largely going to feel the same throughout the game, with the additions of a faster firing rate and secondary shots.
There is a melee "whip," which also doubles as your lasso, with which you can capture and research species. However, it's generally not nearly as useful in combat as it puts you in close proximity to enemies and is pretty cumbersome to use. I mostly just used the lasso part of it and forgot the whip as a weapon.
You also have to hit enemy "weak points" on their bodies to stun them so you can capture them. Generally, it works okay, but sometimes it's frustratingly difficult. Shooting an enemy while it's stunned will pull it out of its stunned state (from what I could tell), so I kept accidentally unstunning enemies after shooting their weak point too many times. When your objective is to capture a rare animal, it can be a huge pain, as if you accidentally kill it, it can take several minutes to respawn.
Now, onto the upgrades of the game, and to focus on the positives, Revenge of the Savage Planet has plenty of upgrades, some of which are pretty cool. You can upgrade your jetpack, your blaster, your whip, you can even upgrade the drone that follows you to give yourself some extra abilities like gliding.
But my goodness, the upgrades are also the most tedious part of the gameplay loop, as story progression is largely locked behind finding a new "gadget". The game's structure invariably follows this same pattern:
This happens over and over again, and it's very tiresome. The worst part is that you know it's coming. As soon as you get an objective telling you to go to an area to find a resource you need, you know that once you get there, it's going to say the resource is inaccessible, so go to the other side of the map to get another resource so you can get this resource.
It feels like a thinly veiled way to slow progression down and either artificially lengthen the game, or the developers weren't sure how to introduce all the abilities you can have in the game, and decided to introduce them all similarly.
Visually, the game is nice, but it is running on Unreal Engine 5, so we pay the price for that with the game's performance, as we'll get into in the Steam Deck Performance section of the review. The voice acting in the game is also fine; whether you enjoy the game's humor will be hit or miss.
You can also play through the entire game with a friend in split-screen or online co-op (cross-platform supported). We played multiplayer for a bit, and it worked pretty well, although you had to stay on the same planet. Difficulty didn't seem to increase with another player either, so you'll probably find the game easier with a friend.
Revenge of the Savage Planet isn't a bad game, but its structure highlights its faults rather than its strengths. This is a shame, as the upgrades are good in their design, and the storyline is quite interesting; it's just that the methods of progressing both are a little arduous.
Revenge of the Savage Planet starts off with good controller support for gameplay and the menus and 1280x800 resolution support.
By default, the game's graphical settings are locked, so you will need to put SteamDeck=0 %command% as a launch option in the game's Steam Properties.
I'm unsure why the settings are locked. The settings the game gets locked to are completely unplayable on the Steam Deck, so this isn't some sort of developer-recommended preset for the Steam Deck.
Unfortunately, the game is taxing on the Steam Deck's GPU, and I found that the only way to run the game at a playable frame rate and with somewhat "OK" image quality was to reduce all settings to low and then run with Intel XeSS on Ultra Performance. The game does have FSR support, but it felt like XeSS gave superior image quality when both were set to Ultra Performance. We're also locking the game to 30 FPS with the SteamOS Frame Limiter.
Using these settings nets us a mostly stable 30 FPS, although we will get occasional stutters. Some areas can drop the frame rates as low as the mid-20s. But I still found the experience to be a playable one.
The power draw varies, around 15W-20W, and temperatures also vary between 60 °C and 70 °C. Expect to get around 2.5-3 hours of battery life from a Steam Deck OLED and 1.5-2 hours from a Steam Deck LCD.
Revenge of the Savage Planet doesn't have many accessibility options; it has a couple of options to assist with aiming, and you can enable/disable vibration and motion blur, which are classed as accessibility features. It also has subtitles for voiced dialogue available in various languages.
Revenge of the Savage Planet does some things well. I like the movement, the combat is fine, if a bit basic, and the upgrades themselves are interesting and affect how you play the game as you progress. But from a game design perspective, I feel the game needed a lot more variety in how you progress the game, and every objective is just heading to a new location to find a new resource. It doesn't ruin the game, but it hampered my enjoyment.
Steam Deck performance is alson't the best; we have to run on the absolute lowest settings possible, and even then, we only maintain a playable framerate. Fortunately, we do have good controller support, and I would say that the game can be played fully on the Steam Deck; you just might enjoy the experience more elsewhere.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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Avowed was provided by Xbox Game Studios for review. Thank you!
Avowed is the latest first-person RPG from the minds at Obsidian Entertainment. Famed in the past for making games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and more recently, The Outer Worlds, Avowed takes a more "traditional" approach with a fantasy setting and a world full of magic and mystery, and for the most part, they pulled it off nicely.
The storyline is your fairly typical fantasy RPG affair. The game takes place in the wider Pillars of Eternity universe, but the events of either Pillars of Eternity game don't have a bearing on Avowed, so it's unnecessary to have played them. The basis of the storyline is that you are a "Godlike", someone who has been chosen by a god and receives special attributes from birth. Under the employ of the Aedyrian Emperor, you venture into "The Living Lands" to find the source of the "Dreamscourge", a plague threatening the land.
As you meet different characters and factions within The Living Land, you'll encounter many opposing viewpoints on how they think you should handle the situation. It'll be up to the player to decide the fate of The Living Lands. While the game doesn't delve quite as deeply into characters as a title like Baldur's Gate 3, you get some intrigue as you meet characters with differing opinions and political beliefs. For the most part, the characters are all pretty well voiced, too, with some interesting banter between the companions you encounter in the game.
One point I will bring up is that the game likes to give you lots of choices in dialogue, and while NPCs may react differently to your different options, a fair number of these choices appear inconsequential. There's no real difference between the choices that you pick for 90% of the decisions you make in the game. There are key points where the decision you make does matter, but the game does not indicate that being rude or kind to an NPC has any bearing on anything other than the next line of dialogue.
Combat is the main focus of Avowed, and it's a pretty great experience for the most part. You have various weapons to choose from, such as daggers, spears, hammers, bows, and wands, allowing you to play how you want to. If you want to be quick and maneuverable with a melee weapon, you can use a dagger, or want to hit like a truck? Choose a 2-handed melee like a Warhammer. Keep your distance with a bow or a wand and pick off foes while your party members take the hits.
You can specialize your character how you like with the skill tree, which lets you decide your "class" while you play, depending on which skill trees you invest your points into. You can also decide your party members' abilities, allowing you to mold them to benefit your playing style. Adding taunting abilities to a party member, for example, can be useful if you can't take many hits.
This is exactly the path I chose for my character build, opting for one of my loadouts to be a bow (later a gun), and the other to be a wand and spellbook (you can swap between your 2 loadouts with the press of a button), and then speccing my party members into being tanks or at least crowd control, allowing me to keep my distance and deal as much damage as possible from afar.
It worked well, although allies sometimes struggle to defend themselves. There's no way to equip them with armor or equipment, and it feels like they are quite a bit weaker than you in both attack and defensive capabilities.
I did find myself getting annoyed with spellcaster enemies, particularly healers and summoners, as the game seems to give them infinite "Essence" (mana), which means they can indefinitely heal their allies and summon an impossible amount of minions (5+), making it almost impossible to kill any other enemies before them.
I also found that the difficulty spikes in the game are pretty intense. You can go from feeling rather powerful with 1 or 2-shotting many enemies, to the next group of enemies requiring 15 shots to kill, it's pretty bizarre and frustrating. Thankfully, there are several difficulty options to choose from, which can reduce this issue if you're facing it. Although even on story mode, my party member got 1 shot by a spell against some fairly average enemies.
There's also plenty to do in the world of Avowed. There isn't a lot of space that can plague games like this; it doesn't take long heading in any direction before you stumble on a point of interest, and plenty of side quests keep you busy.
While this lack of empty space is a good thing, it can make the game feel a tad busy in the cities. Trying to find your way around the map to reach certain objectives or even find a merchant to buy some goods can be a hassle. There is no way to place a waypoint and no "breadcrumb" system in the game, so you'll just have to keep pausing and bringing up the map to figure out where you are in relation to a store or a quest giver and try to plot a route there yourself.
But again, I could see arguments from players as to whether that's a good or a bad thing. I found it frustrating trying to reach an objective behind a wall by walking one way around the wall and then the other until I found an opening to get inside. Others may appreciate the lack of hand-holding in this regard.
Things can get a little repetitive later, as enemies and items merely become better versions of their former selves. But if you focus on the game's story, it's not that long of a game, beatable in under 15 hours, and by the time you realize the items and weapons are the same, just with higher tiers, you're probably halfway through the game. Regardless, having some slight variations for items would have been cool, as if you find an item that you already have, it will always be identical (unless you have upgraded your item).
Avowed is a very pretty game. The sun-drenched streets, forests, and deserts play to the strengths of the Unreal Engine's lighting, and although it is quite a difficult game to run, it looks good enough to forgive that.
Ultimately, Avowed is a solid first-person RPG. It doesn't quite go as in-depth lore/story-wise as a game such as Baldur's Gate 3, nor is it quite as adventure and exploration-driven as a game like Skyrim, but it does form a neat little space in between those 2 games, with a fairly fleshed-out story and characters, as well as a good amount of action-packed combat and an interesting world.
Avowed has great controller support and supports 1280x800 resolution. It also has a UI Size slider, which I recommend you put on the largest or one below the largest, as it greatly helps with readability on the Steam Deck's screen.
Avowed sets itself to some low settings by default, but we need to adjust it lower. Make sure Ray-Tracing is turned off, as it was on for me, lower FSR3 to Balanced, and make sure all your Quality settings are on "Low". Once you're on these settings, the game switches between CPU and GPU bound, which means we're getting as good as we can get from the Steam Deck.
Your settings should look like the ones below, which I found to be the best for a close-to-30 FPS experience.
The game may appear to be holding 30 FPS, maybe even 40 FPS early on, but once you reach built-up, larger areas, the FPS falls, even on these lower settings, you can occasionally dip below 30 FPS. There are also frequent stutters.
Whether this represents a "playable" experience is a matter of opinion. Can you technically play the game all the way through, albeit at a disadvantage? Yes. But I'm not sure I would have been as generous as Valve was to grant the game a "Playable" badge. I've seen games perform better than those ranked as Unsupported on Steam Deck.
The power draw tends to be high, around 21W-23W, meaning you can only expect about 2 hours of battery life from a Steam Deck OLED and around 1.5 hours from a Steam Deck LCD. The temperature tends to stick around 70C.
Avowed has a UI size adjustment slider, as mentioned above, it also allows you to embolden certain text to make it easier to read, add subtitles to conversations, and make interactable objects more visible. You may also disable head bobbing, camera shake, and aim assist.
Avowed feels like a first-person CRPG-lite. Set in a universe with plenty of lore and depth, the story paddles near the surface, going deep enough to be interesting, but not too deep to require you to be well-versed in the lore to enjoy the game. The first-person perspective offers the chance for some action-packed combat, with plenty of variety in weaponry and how players can spec their characters, albeit with some balancing issues.
Steam Deck performance is, simply put, disappointing. The game looks great, even on the lowest settings, but the performance isn't there. Frequent drops below 30 FPS and constant traversal stutter make the game dubiously "playable". You can finish Avowed on the Steam Deck, but you would be forgiven for putting some of the blame for your deaths on an unfortunately timed stutter or frame drop.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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Hello Kitty Island Adventure was provided by Sunblink for review. Thank you!
After countless decades of game developers trying to cash in by producing a low-quality game tied to a popular franchise, you could be forgiven for rolling your eyes when you first heard about Hello Kitty Island Adventure. It may even fill you with dread if you aren't a fan of Sanrio's iconic characters. But I'm very pleased to say that this is definitely not a game just trying to cash in on the Hello Kitty name. It's a fully functional, well-made product, and if you've got kids, it might just be one of the best games to play with them.
Hello Kitty Island Adventure places the Hello Kitty gang on a (mostly) uninhabited tropical island. While at first, all your favorite characters are scattered around the island, you will soon be reunited with them, and the team discovers that there are places that seem to have been built just for them on the island.
You'll get to create a character with some basic choices, namely, what species of character you want, such as making a character that's more cat-like, dog-like, bird-like, etc. Along with some choice of patterns, colors, body shapes, and clothing. You'll also be able to unlock new character customization options as you play through the game.
The core gameplay mechanics sort of fall into a blend of Animal Crossing and Disney Dreamlight Valley vibes. On the Animal Crossing side, we can fish and catch bugs with a net, and there's even a Nature Preserve where we can donate our bugs, much like Animal Crossing's Museum. Then, much like Disney Dreamlight Valley, a major part of the game is building friendships with all the other Hello Kitty characters by gifting them the items they like or helping them with things they need to do in the form of quests.
This all adds to the very cutesy feel of the game, with an emphasis on helping out your fellow residents with basic tasks such as baking a cake and more complex ones like restoring power to various parts of the island.
Although you're on a tropical island that largely has the sun shining, there is still plenty of variety in the environment, with a swamp biome, volcano biome, desert biome, and more, as well as a large portion of the map that contains water, in which you're able to freely swim and dive, once you've crafted some flippers for swimming and a snorkel for diving.
Invisible walls are employed around the map boundaries, but not so much in the playing area itself, so you do have pretty much free reign of the decent-sized island. It isn't overwhelmingly large, so younger players shouldn't have any trouble finding their way around and should still find the game world engaging and filled with activities to keep them busy.
The movement in the game is kept pretty simple, allowing players to walk, jump, and hold the jump button to glide. You can also climb mountains with a stamina bar ala Breath of the Wild, and as you progress through the game, you'll unlock flippers, which let you swim, and snorkels, which let you dive and explore more of the island's underwater sections.
While Hello Kitty Island Adventure's progression is largely tied to you finding "Power Crystals" around the island and restoring the island to its former glory with them, there are plenty of unlocks and rewards you can get through other means, such as the aforementioned Nature Preserve donations.
Friendships are one of the key ways to get unlocks. As you give your fellow island residents gifts they like and help them with their quests, they'll gain friendship levels that can unlock new cosmetics for your character, additional quests for that resident, or even other surprises. It forms the basis for a lot of the progression in the game.
And if you were wondering if Gudetama, the lovable egg character that seemed to be all over the internet a few years ago, makes an appearance in the game, it does! There are Gudetama all over the island (over 100 in total), with the player tasked to photograph all of them to unlock rewards. It's a fun side quest, and they're in all sorts of locations, so you always have to watch for that cheeky egg!
Visually, Hello Kitty Island Adventure won't be winning any awards, but it keeps things simple and cute. The world and objects are presented, and the vibrant and playful presentation makes even the "Spooky Swamp" not scary, which is good for me!
Plus, new events happen throughout the year, much like Animal Crossing. During my time playing for this review, events were running for the Lunar New Year and Valentine's Day, offering themed items you could unlock by completing in-game tasks.
Aside from a couple of issues with the camera not positioning itself well (you can't manually control it), there isn't much for me to dislike about Hello Kitty Island Adventure. Perhaps a couple of areas of the map feel a little empty and serve little purpose, but it's not always a bad thing to have some areas purely for aesthetics.
Hello Kitty Island Adventure is a great game for young children and isn't a bad shout for some adults too. The game is easy to play, has plenty of activities to keep you busy, and is just a good bit of innocent fun, and you can't say anything bad about that. The price of $39.99 is perfectly reasonable for this game, and it has online multiplayer, although we didn't have an opportunity to test this ourselves.
Hello Kitty Island Adventure was originally a mobile title, and that's evident in its ease of use. That's not to say that some enhancements haven't been made for the PC audience, though.
The game supports 1280x800 resolution, so there are no black borders, and it also has great gamepad support, meaning it controls perfectly on the Steam Deck. I'd recommend applying a 60 FPS Frame Limit in SteamOS and a 9W TDP Limit, along with higher graphical settings that I recommend:
At these settings, the game holds 60 FPS the entire time. The one exception in the game world I found was at the bottom of a waterfall near the Swamp, where my FPS would drop into the mid-40s at specifically that point. Also, when opening a UI window, there appears to be a brief moment of slowdown, but it doesn't affect the gameplay at all.
The power draw for this one was steady, around 9W-11W, with temperatures around 55-60C. So expect around 4.5 hours of battery life from a Steam Deck OLED and 3.5 hours from a Steam Deck LCD.
Hello Kitty Island Adventure has rebindable controls, although there are no other accessibility settings. All dialogue in the game is text, and for some puzzles, the game can complete them for you if you find them difficult.
Hello Kitty Island Adventure isn't just a quick cash-in on the popular IP. The game feels like it was made by a team that knew how beloved the IP was and has been careful to retain its charm while also offering a complete and competent game that's perfect for kids and that adults will likely enjoy, too.
It also runs great on the Steam Deck, with fully working controls and easy-going system requirements that mean you get plenty of battery life to explore your tropical island. It's a great way to relax at the end of the day.
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.
Star Wars Outlaws was provided by Ubisoft for review. Thank you!
It's no secret that Star Wars Outlaws got off to a rocky start when it first launched back in August 2024, but now we're a few months down the line and plenty of updates have come in, how is Star Wars Outlaws faring now? Well, I'm pleased to say that a lot of the problems that people had with the game seem to have been improved. That being said, there are still a few things that I got frustrated with during my playthrough.
In Star Wars Outlaws, you play as Kay Vess, a down-on-her-luck thief who is always looking for her next big score but instead just gets herself into more trouble. After a job goes wrong, you're thrown into the criminal underworld, where you'll need to balance your reputation with various criminal factions and build your crew to pull off that final big job.
Kay is a fairly likable protagonist, and Humberly González does a great job of making her quite relatable with a streak of arrogance. She often feels out of her depth in the situation, which is refreshingly realistic for a protagonist.
As you're assembling your crew, you'll visit various planets and inevitably, all potential members of your crew are in some sort of trouble on each of the planets, requiring you to fix their situation so you can recruit them. It does get pretty tiresome by the third crew member, but what can you do? It'd be a bit boring if you just showed up and recruited them immediately!
These planets are fairly large once you land on them, several kilometers across for each, although a fair amount of them are empty spaces with places of interest being highlighted on your map. The planets you visit represent various biomes, such as desert, forest, urban, and snowy. The planets are based on more obscure Star Wars planets, with the exception of Tatooine, usually only shown briefly in the newer films or in some cases, created just for Star Wars Outlaws.
You can also fly around in space above the planets, although this part of the game seems to be more of an afterthought, and while there are some minor quests to do here, almost nothing storyline-related happens in space.
Then we have the stealth mechanics, which have been the constant victim of criticism levied against the title.
As of Update 1.50, I had no issues with the stealth mechanics. Sometimes, the enemies seemed to patrol somewhat unfairly, giving you little choice but to fight, but this was rare. Although stealth is heavily encouraged in the game, fighting is often an option. Enemy line of sight seems to be as you would expect for a Ubisoft title, and the mechanics still share a lot in common with other Ubisoft open-world games such as Far Cry, giving you a limited time to eliminate enemies in the area before an alarm is raised and reinforcements arrive.
The shooting feels pretty solid, with your main weapon being a customizable blaster pistol. As you progress through the game, you'll get additional modules that fit and add more firing modes and ammo types to the gun, making it highly versatile. The feedback from the gunplay is pretty good and enemies don't tend to be bullet sponges very often, so you do get some sense of power from your weapons.
When in free-roam, the game plays out like any other Ubisoft open-world game, but it feels far more focused when doing the main quests, often playing like an action-adventure title where there is one linear path through the mission you're on. This usually takes place in an interior of significant size and is not part of the open world map. I much prefer this way of handling key missions.
However, there are some irritations I found with the game, with some that feel like bugs and others that just feel like poor design. The chatter between guards sounds disjointed as if the game chooses random voice lines for them to say and another random line to reply with, which can become irritating and feel cheap. Climbable surfaces in the game aren't marked and it isn't always obvious what you can climb, leading to some confusion. Yellow paint would have been much appreciated in these spots..
Then there's AI, which has pathfinding issues. Particularly when AI uses speeders, it seems to struggle greatly. If you're being chased while on your speeder, sometimes other speeders hunting you down will just ram you and bring you to a stop or randomly stop in front of you, and it feels like the AI is just getting confused. In one side mission, I was tasked with eliminating incoming enemies who were arriving on speeders, but when the mission didn't end, I was confused until I realized two enemies were stuck on their speeders 200 meters away because their speeders had collided with each other.
There are also some instances where objective markers are unhelpfully placed. Some quests will guide you to one objective marker and then another before leading you to the final destination, but others will just waypoint the final destination and leave you trying to figure out how to reach it. The game really could have done with a "breadcrumb" system where a trail or arrows were put on the ground for you to follow, as sometimes it gets very confusing on where you have to go.
Visually, Star Wars Outlaws looks quite good, with some excellent reflections and lighting. But this also has a drawback. The game forces ray-tracing upon the player, meaning if you have a non-Nvidia GPU, you might experience some severe performance issues. On my AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT, I played the game on the lowest settings at 1080p with FSR3 on Balanced, and I still got dips below 30FPS on one of the planets and, very rarely, below 20FPS. So, the performance is far below what I expected, almost certainly caused by the game's forced ray-traced reflections and lighting.
So, is Star Wars Outlaws the travesty everyone made it out to be? In my opinion, no, at least not now a few updates have been released. It's a solid action-adventure title that takes it a bit easier on the open-world elements compared to other Ubisoft games, and I mean that in a positive way. With decent gunplay, some interesting if under-used faction relationship mechanics, and a serviceable story to push it all along, I recommend picking up Star Wars Outlaws if you find it on a good sale.
Unfortunately, Star Wars Outlaws runs poorly on the Steam Deck, likely due to enforced Ray-Tracing. Although you can get the game to boot and "play", the performance is just unacceptable, often in the mid-20s and occasionally dropping below 20 FPS even with no action on the screen. Star Wars Outlaws is a game you'll have to skip playing on the Steam Deck.
Star Wars Outlaws has a ton of accessibility options, including Presets that allow you to quickly change several options at once, including the difficulty of the game, assistance with Quick Time Events, whether you need to hold a button or whether it toggles, and disabling of camera shaking effects. You can also adjust the size of the HUD, high contrast modes, subtitles/closed captions, and colorblind filters.
Star Wars Outlaws might have had a rough launch, but many updates have been applied which make it a decent and enjoyable experience. There are a few rough edges here and there, but if you can get past those frustrations which you're hopefully now aware of if you've read this review, then you'll be able to enjoy a brand-new and shiny Star Wars adventure.
Sadly, the forced ray-tracing means the game cannot run at an acceptable level on the Steam Deck, so you'll need a more powerful device to play this one.
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.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 was provided by Xbox Game Studios for review. Thank you!
After having such a long hiatus between 2006 and 2020, the Microsoft Flight Simulator series is back on track to become a regular release. At first glance, it might appear that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 doesn't have much more to offer over Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020), now called the 40th Anniversary Edition. Still, there's quite a lot of new content to sink your teeth into, especially if you are into more than just the planes themselves.
First, let's detail the differences between Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. I think Xbox did a fairly bad job of detailing the changes, and the two games really sort of blurred together for me.
The biggest change in this iteration is the career mode. There is some surprising depth to this part of the game, requiring players to learn some piloting basics, such as take-off and landing, taxiing, and following instructions from Air Traffic Control, before taking an exam to earn their private pilot's license. From here on, it's largely doing missions related to your current license level to earn money so you can afford to take the exam for the next license and upgrade to bigger and better aircraft.
It also feels quite personalized, as you can start from any airport or airfield worldwide. With subsequent missions being based in your area. It adds far more purpose to the game, and you aren't flying just for the sake of flying like in MSFS2020.
As you might expect, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 takes advantage of the same technology from the 2020 version, with satellite data providing information on the entire world, which is then read by the game and converted into buildings, trees, and sometimes hand-made landmarks and cities based on photogrammetry data. This impressive technology creates the best depiction of our earth in a video game I know. There aren't many games where you can fly over your house and pick it out.
The visuals also live up to match, provided you have a PC that can manage higher-quality settings. You can also walk outside your plane, do pre-flight checks, and admire whichever plane you are flying, all brilliantly detailed.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 does what it sets out to do. And for those who want it to be, it fulfills the criteria of being a simulator. If you turn off the assists, the game expects a lot from you. You will be expected to manage ATC communications, follow procedures when taking off and landing, deal with real-time weather events affecting your aircraft, and navigate with other planes in the sky. But if you want a more relaxing time, you can always go in the free flight mode with assists turned on, allowing you to fly around without restrictions or expectations.
There are also scenarios, which are short missions that challenge you to complete a specific task well, ranking you on the leaderboards against others. These can involve pulling off a tricky landing or simply racing in planes to see who can set the best time.
It's not all sunshine and rainbows, though. I'm not talking about the real-time weather here. I'm talking about the game's use of AI voices.
Regardless of your stance on the use of AI, in this manner, I think there's justification for it, as the game has to manage ATC communications everywhere across the globe. AI means that the voices can say the name of a tiny airfield in Australia without the developers recording tens of thousands of voice lines for each airfield, town, and city worldwide. The downside is that some of the AI voices are just bad.
I accept that the ATC needs to be AI. But does my trainer have to be voiced by AI? Does Chris, who I took on a tour flight around the city of Leeds, have to be voiced by AI? No, not really. The ATC and radio communications sound good for the most part, but every time someone speaks without the radio filter, it just doesn't sound great. And for a simulator where a lot of effort has been put into recreating the literal world, it's a shame that a single voice line can make you frown and bring you out of the game for a while.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is a solid improvement on the 2020 edition. It adds more aircraft, double the amount, for the standard edition, with 70 aircraft being available. As well as 150 hand-crafted airports. You get the additional career mode and scenarios, which adds a lot more "purpose" to the game, rather than just flying around and crashing into your house for a laugh. Visually, some slight improvements, like dirt, will kick onto your plane, and there is more variety in scenery elements like the trees.
If you are into your flight simulators and want the latest and best thing, then Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 should tick that box. There are some teething troubles here and there, especially as the game is online-only and a lot of data is streamed from the cloud as you play, so any hiccup in the internet connection can just kick you out of the session. I only had this happen to me once in my playing time, but I could see it being very frustrating at the end of a long mission.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 had a bit of a rocky launch on Steam Deck and Linux in general, with the game being unplayable at launch on any Linux machine. Gradually, Proton updates have helped out with compatibility. As of writing this review (November 29th, 2024), you can play the game using the Proton Experimental [Bleeding Edge] version, with some caveats.
Also, if you are playing on a Steam Deck OLED, you may need to use DXVK_HDR=0 %command% as a launch command to get past the loading screen.
In SteamOS, apply a 30 FPS frame limit, and we don't want a TDP Limit for this one.
The game defaults to a "low-end" preset, but we can lower graphics even further, which we need to do. If you scroll down to the Advanced Graphics Settings, you can lower everything, such as plants, rocks, terrain shadows, etc. You'll also want to set the Upscaling Method to FSR 2 and then set that to Performance. Check out the images below to see the exact settings I used.
Playing with these settings, we get around 26-30 FPS flying around Central Park in New York City, one of the more intensive areas in the game. You can see the game get above 30 FPS in more rural areas and smaller towns. This, however, is in a small prop plane. The type of plane you're in heavily affects performance, and larger aircraft won't reach 30 FPS.
Flying larger aircraft in busy urban areas (Such as Kennedy International in New York) could cause the game to crash consistently. So, right now, I would say that the game is unplayable unless you just want to fly around in smaller planes.
The power draw is very consistently high, always above 20W and usually in the 21-22W region. So Steam Deck LCD users should expect no more than 1.5 hours of battery life, with Steam Deck OLED users getting just over 2 hours.
The temperature of both the CPU and GPU held at around 70C.
As you would expect with a 1st party Microsoft title, there are plenty of accessibility options in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. There is speech-to-text and text-to-speech for communication with other players, allowing voice and text chat players to communicate. There is also the option to automatically translate text chat from players speaking another language.
You can also disable camera shaking, rebind controls, adjust the font size for all text (I set it to 22) as well as make HUD windows more opaque to aid with reading text. There is a screen narrator to read out menus audibly and subtitles for things like in-game transmissions between aircraft and Air Traffic Control.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is a solid improvement on the previous title. Whether or not the addition of the career mode, some new aircraft, and some new scenarios are worth the price tag of an entirely new game or not likely depends on how into this kind of game you are. If you are just into the free flight modes and seeing the world, the 2020 game edition does that almost as well.
When playing on the Steam Deck, it might initially seem fine. If you're flying a single prop plane, a fighter jet, or even a small private jet, the performance can be fine, often staying above 25 FPS. But if you try to fly a jetliner, you'll often be playing at around 15-20 FPS, with frequent crashes making the game unplayable. Hopefully, this is just an issue with Proton right now and can be fixed, as well as Asobo optimizing the game, but I wouldn't purchase Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 to play on a Steam Deck.
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 Rising Deluxe Remaster was provided by CAPCOM for review. Thank you!
Eighteen years since the release of the original Dead Rising, CAPCOM has brought the classic back with Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster. So, how does this remaster stand up? Does it stick faithfully to the original? Is it perhaps too close to the original? Let's find out!
The storyline of Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster is identical to the original. Zombies have overrun a small town in Colorado, and photojournalist Frank West has infiltrated the town to get his next big scoop. After getting into the town's shopping mall, where survivors are making their last stand, he now has 72 hours to gather evidence, rescue as many survivors as possible, and find out just what's going on in Willamette, Colorado.
This remaster sticks very closely to the original game in general. The cutscenes are all pretty much identical, except for the improved visuals. The survivors are in the same places, and item pickups/drops are in the same place. The achievements list is very similar, albeit a bit less gritty, and even the voice lines are the same, aside from being re-recorded with new voice actors.
That's not to say all the game is the same, however. As I mentioned, the visuals are greatly improved from the original, adding better shading, extra visual effects, and things such as hair physics on characters. The hair does have a habit of clipping through their bodies/clothes sometimes, which is a little odd. Overall, the visual improvement is nice, and while the game isn't up to par with the latest games around it, it certainly is leaps ahead of the 2006 original.
It's not just the visuals that are improved, either. The gunplay is better, allowing players to move while aiming and shooting firearms. The game retains a fairly "clunky" feel to movement and combat, which fans of the original might appreciate, but this makes the game feel a lot more modern.
The movement retains the stilted feeling from the CAPCOM games of old, and it's not always as responsive as I'd like. In this regard, the game feels very late 90s, but with slow-moving zombies and the game's somewhat unrealistic portrayal of, well, almost everything, the clunky movement feels acceptable. It's almost as if the original game was planned to follow the vein of the Resident Evil games.
The gameplay has its fun approach to the zombie apocalypse, just as the original did. With weapons ranging from the usual pistols and submachine guns to the zany, with mannequins, coat hangers, katanas, and more! You can even hop into a car in certain areas and rack up some serious zombie kills. Sure, the game isn't as fluid as it could be, but in terms of fairly laid-back fun (considering the apocalyptic situation), Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster is up there.
The photo mechanic is back, and yes, you can just spam photos near the beginning of the game to rack up ludicrous amounts of PP and level up to unfathomable levels before the game truly begins. This mechanic is essentially unchanged from the original game.
Hit detection with melee weapons isn't the best, often resulting in Frank swinging through enemies, and the game likes to make bosses invincible at certain points, making the fights needlessly difficult. One fight halfway through the game was much more difficult than needed as the boss is often invincible, and there's only a short window where attacks will damage them. It's frustrating, but CAPCOM also decided to stay true to the original. The saving grace is that the remaster has an auto-save feature that saves before encounters like this, so you can simply retry them if you fail.
Another area that was a bit of a bugbear in the original release, and while improved here, is still not as good as I would have hoped, is AI pathfinding. The zombie AI is fine, but they do not do much pathfinding. But your fellow survivor AI still leaves much to be desired. A couple of things were redesigned to help the AI navigate better. Still, I found that the AI gets stuck on walls occasionally, and this is quite frustrating on what is essentially an escort mission each time you find a survivor. It's such a big part of the game that I would have liked to see more work done to fix this.
Some quality-of-life improvements are brought in with the remaster, such as the ability to advance time at save points. Various objectives and storyline progression become available at different times during the 72-hour game, so if you just want to experience the story or you've completed objectives ahead of time due to being an absolute gamer, then you now have the handy ability to fast-forward until the next objective becomes available, instead of aimlessly wandering like in the original game.
Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster doesn't fix all of the original game's issues, and a couple of them, such as AI Pathfinding, really needed fixing. However, the game retains the charm and silliness of the original title while improving various aspects of its gameplay and adding nicer visuals. As far as remasters go, this is one of the more worthy ones worth checking out.
Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster has full controller support, which would be my preferred way to play the game. It also supports 1280x800 resolutions, so there are no black borders for Steam Deck users.
While there are plenty of graphical options to choose from, the game is limited by the Steam Deck's CPU rather than its GPU, so we can't get above 30 FPS no matter what we do, but this does mean we can upgrade some of the visuals without losing any smoothness. Therefore, I'm only offering 1 preset today.
Set the SteamOS frame rate limit to 30. We don't want a TDP limit for this one.
In the in-game settings, I went with the "Prioritize Performance" preset, which you can select near the top of the graphics options menu. Then, I scrolled down and adjusted FSR 3 to "Quality," as I found that that smoothed out the frame times a little, especially when making a quick turn of the camera. Here are the exact settings I used for reference.
These settings hold 30 FPS the whole time, although you may experience slight dips here and there for a second or two when quickly rotating the camera, as the game can struggle to load objects that have been out of sight. If there's a huge number of zombies on the screen, it can dip into the mid-20s in parts, and very, very rare cases, I had dipped into the teens for a few seconds. There's not much we can do about that, but fortunately, it's not all that common, and the game remains playable. Thinning the numbers will increase the FPS fairly quickly.
Power draw held around 16W-21W mostly, with temperatures around 60-70C, depending on the area you're in, and largely based on how many zombies are about.
Steam Deck LCD owners should expect no more than 2 hours of battery life, and Steam Deck OLED users should expect around 2.5 hours.
Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster has many accessibility features, including a new "Casual" difficulty mode to make things easier. You can enable/disable subtitles and closed captions for different parts of the game, disable camera wobble, and allow holding a button to have the same effect as mashing it in case of quick-time events.
You can also adjust the size of subtitles. However, this only alters the subtitle size for cutscenes and "proper" dialogue. The flavor text of NPC survivors who randomly give hints and chit-chat with Frank can't be made bigger or smaller, which is a shame, as it is by far the smallest text in the game and quite difficult to read on the Steam Deck.
Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster mostly stays true to the original, for better or worse. While some improvements have been made to AI pathfinding, visuals, and quality of life, a couple of 20-year-old relics remain. For old players, this might fuel their nostalgia; for newer players to the series, it might just prove a little frustrating.
Regardless, Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster is not a game to be taken seriously, and if you can sit back and laugh with it, you'll have a good time.
Performance on the Steam Deck isn't the best, but it's to be expected when you're dealing with large amounts of AI, given the Steam Deck's weaker CPU. Although we can occasionally see dips into the 20s, most of the game runs at 30 FPS, and you can play from start to finish on the Steam Deck and still have a good time. Controller support is also excellent.
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.
Farming Simulator 25 was provided by Giants Software for review. Thank you!
It's time for a brand new Farming Simulator! But is brand new the right word for it? Or is Farming Simulator 25 merely a small upgrade over Farming Simulator 22? It's actually a story of two halves, so let's get into it and see what this iteration of the series is all about.
As you've come to expect from the series, Farming Simulator 25 brings a collection of new vehicles for you to own. Gone are the days of Farming Simulator 15 where you only had access to a paltry collection of 140 vehicles from over 40 manufacturers. Farming Simulator 25 boasts over 400 vehicles from over 150 manufacturers. I'm not quite sure why you need this amount of selection, but maybe that's because I'm not super into the whole farming ecosystem. If you're a farmer or are at least familiar with farming equipment, you can likely find your model in Farming Simulator 25.
One of the major new additions to the Farming Simulator franchise that was touted for Farming Simulator 25 was the addition of "Asian-style" farming. Farming Simulator has historically been focused on Europe and North America for its locations, but now the franchise has expanded to include an Asian map. So is this new map worth all the fuss?
I could take or leave the new map itself. The maps and world of Farming Simulator have always been a bit of a letdown for me, and the new Asian map is no exception. Largely, the map looks like any other map when you're out in the rural areas. Only once you enter the town does the game give an "Asian" vibe, mostly due to the neon signs outside the buildings. Unfortunately, the Asian map still uses many assets from the Western maps, meaning all signs are in English, and the neon-lit streets look dead due to a lack of pedestrians and traffic.
The exact location of where Hutan Pantai (the Asian map) is based isn't made clear either. The name is Indonesian, but the traffic drives on the right, which wouldn't be the case in a place like Indonesia or Japan, which drives on the left. So, instead of focusing on a specific country, the developers just focused on a large region with many cultures and designed the map around that. This design philosophy likely made the map feel generic and not very immersive. The majority of the map could easily be set in America or Europe.
Another set of improvements touted by the developers is the visual ones. While my ability to test these on the Steam Deck is somewhat limited, as we can't run at full graphical settings, the game does look pretty nice, and there are plenty of rendering techniques on display here, such as bloom, depth of field, good quality shading and lighting, as well as ambient occlusion. This combines to create a nice-looking image where metal reflects the sun, trees provide nice shading, and dirt adorns your vehicles as they work.
Ground deformation was also mentioned as an improvement to visuals and gameplay, although I didn't particularly notice this when I played. My trucks/tractors made slight grooves in the soil, but nothing that would actually affect the gameplay in any meaningful way, and it looked more like a tire track visual effect than actual deformation of the terrain.
Farming Simulator 25 also brings in new weather effects, including disasters such as twisters and hail, which can damage your crops. I found these to be rare, however. After playing an in-game year, which is several hours of playtime, I only experienced 1 bout of snow and hail in an entire crop cycle, with probably <5% of playtime having a weather effect active. Even though the game is supposed to have settling snow and snow physics, the snow never truly settled on the ground, and the vehicles drive the same in wintry conditions as they do in summer. Overall, it's pretty disappointing.
New crops have been added, but they function the same as the other crops in the game, so getting too excited about them is hard. Likewise, baby animals have finally been added to the game, which has some impact on gameplay, but I found myself buying animals rather than trying to breed them. The time saved probably outweighs the money saved.
Aside from these aspects, it's largely "business as usual" for Farming Simulator 25. All of the features you enjoyed in Farming Simulator 22 have carried over, and it follows the same love-it-or-hate-it gameplay of... well, farming. You'll be planting and harvesting, all with that thrill of loading up your trucks with grain from your fields, then you'll be getting confused about where to sell your wheat, and then finally stumbling upon the place that's buying wheat and making 25 cents, only to rinse and repeat. You can also do all of this with up to 16 players in multiplayer.
The vehicles perform identically to Farming Simulator 22, with the same control scheme and physics. It's still a joy to manually adjust your harvesting head and switch it on/off to begin harvesting, and swing the pipe out of the side to load up a trailer truck driving beside you as you harvest. There are no changes here, but it was always a highlight, so no changes are good.
So, is Farming Simulator 25 a revolutionary improvement for the series? No, but I wasn't expecting it to be either. I will say that they don't seem to have made anything worse, which isn't always a given these days. The visuals are nicer, the game seems pretty well optimized aside from some stuttering, and you have more variety in what you can do, such as more crops to grow and additional ways to earn money, like construction projects.
You also have access to a wider variety of vehicles and tools, and they are laying the groundwork for interesting features in the next Farming Simulator, even if they aren't there yet, such as natural disasters and terrain deformation.
Would I recommend you buy Farming Simulator 25 if you already own Farming Simulator 22? Probably not, the upgrades are marginal and unless you are a hardcore Farming Simulator fan, it's probably not worth the price right now. Running Farming Simulator 22 with mods can give you a nicer experience right now, but in a year, when Farming Simulator 25 mods catch up, some patches have been introduced, and the game is on sale, it might well be worth the upgrade.
Farming Simulator 25 covers the Steam Deck basics of having good controller support while supporting 1280x800 resolution, meaning no black borders around your screen. We also have some nice extra technologies like Intel's XeSS and AMD's FSR3.
There are many graphical options in Farming Simulator 25, but I've kept it fairly simple by choosing a preset and then modifying a couple of settings to make for a more stable experience. It should be easy for you to copy the settings yourself.
Set the SteamOS frame rate limit to 60, and there's no TDP Limit for this one.
I'm using a modified version of the Medium preset, so go ahead and set your game to the Medium settings, turn VSync to Off, set your Framerate Limit to 30, set your in-game HUD Scale to 125% for easier-to-read text, then press the "X" button to open the advanced graphics menu, and adjust the following settings:
Switch SSAO down to Medium, Terrain Quality down to Low, Light Quality to Medium, Max Mirrors to 0, Post-Process Anti-Aliasing to Off, and FSR 3 to Quality. The game does have frame generation, but as our FPS is on the lower side, it introduces too much input lag to be nice to play.
These settings smooth out the Medium preset a lot, especially disabling Mirrors, as with them on, you'll get severe stutters when switching to a cockpit view.
With these settings, I got a pretty constant 30 FPS during play. Very occasionally, the FPS dropped to 28 or 29 when in one of the cities, but the game remained perfectly playable.
The power draw tends to stay around 12W-14W, but it can go as high as 16W in the towns. You can likely expect about 2.5 hours of battery life from a Steam Deck LCD and around 3.5 hours from the OLED.
Temperatures stay lower in the 60C-65C range, with slight fan noise.
Performance in multiplayer games seems considerably worse than single-player, with a much heavier load on a single CPU thread, seemingly caused by player activity when multiple players are driving. This means that you'll struggle to stay above 25 FPS in larger multiplayer games, although if you are just playing with 2-4 players, you might get away with it.
Farming Simulator 25 has a few accessibility options, such as adjusting the game's economic difficulty, simplifying the crop cycle, colorblind mode, disabling what is akin to camera shake/sway, and various assists/simplifications for controlling vehicles.
Farming Simulator 25 talks a big game about the new features it has over previous iterations of the series. But those changes aren't quite big enough for me to recommend that you dive in right now. Give mods some time to catch up to the level they are in Farming Simulator 22, fix a couple of collision bugs I encountered, and maybe go on a sale, and then it's worth the upgrade.
Farming Simulator 25 runs well on the Steam Deck for the most part. The controls are great, and while performance in larger multiplayer games borders on unplayable, if you play solo or with a small group, it should run just fine.
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.
Fruitbus was provided by Krillbite Studio for review. Thank you!
Fruitbus is an interesting one. Borne from the plethora of "cozy" games that have flooded the market recently, Fruitbus is worthy of this moniker. It's an unapologetically laid-back and relaxing experience, with almost no pressure to do anything. So it's right up my street, and it's the kind of game I like to play, especially on the colder nights as we approach winter.
Fruitbus is basically about, well, running a Fruitbus. Although it's more of a Fruitvan...Regardless of semantics, this is the premise of the entire game. You've arrived on the Banamas islands after your grandma (the previous owner of the Fruitbus) passed away, so you're carrying on her legacy in the Fruitbus, delivering salads and joy to the island's residents in preparation for Grandma's farewell party.
The main gameplay loop of the game is collecting fruit from the trees and bushes around the island, storing them in containers on your Fruitbus, and then preparing them and delivering them to the island's residents based on what dish they request. These can range from simple Apple and Banana salads to more complex Smoothies containing other ingredients like Mango, Chilis, and Carrots.
Even if you can't fulfill a resident's request, you can always ask for a simpler recipe to make or just reject their request with no consequence, which plays into the relaxing nature of the game. Sure, rejecting a request might mean you can't advance the plot immediately, but there's no penalty for delaying progress. You can return later with the right ingredients and/or equipment and make their desired dish.
But let's talk about the actual Fruitbus! This little machine gets you around the island and stores all your delicious fruit and vegetables. As you progress through the game, you can purchase upgrades and furniture through the profits you make selling your dishes. These include functional items like extra containers for fruit, a blender for making smoothies, an oven for cooking, or even a fruit grabber for getting that hard-to-reach fruit on tall trees. You can also buy countertops to fit in your Fruitbus for additional work surface area, which is useful when storing all the bowls and glasses for your delicious dishes.
You can also get more decorative furniture, like stools or painting your bus, which serves little purpose other than to make your Fruitbus look more homely and cozy. You'll also need to fuel your little workhorse but don't worry, fuel is dead cheap, and you don't need to fill it that often. Eventually, you'll be able to upgrade the engine and wheels of your Fruitbus so it can take you places faster and traverse different terrain better.
As you explore the villages on the islands, you'll meet new residents. Some are just tourists who exist to give you money, and permanent residents of the islands who often have specific quests for you to fulfill, such as finding something that's been lost or preparing a specific (often hard to make) dish for them to advance their quest line.
While the quests to make specific dishes are fairly straightforward (as long as you have or know where to find the ingredients), some of the quests do seem to be a bit vague and slightly frustrating. For example, one of the residents wants you to find their lucky coin. I was told by the game that feeding them their desired recipe would give me a hint, but all I was told was that my grandma hid the coin from them, there is a "show on map" button in the menu for the quest, but I went to that location there was nothing there from what I could tell, stopping me from progressing.
Once you earn enough money, you can pay for a ferry to progress to the next map, which unlocks additional fruit/vegetables for you to make recipes with and new methods of creating dishes, such as using an oven. There are three maps in total for you to explore.
Visually, the game is OK. The developer has adopted a low-poly style with basic shading. Unfortunately, the shadows seem to struggle in this game, and there are frequent flickering and low-quality shadows, even on higher-quality settings. The visuals could use some work, especially to fix the odd shading and a couple of other visual glitches I encountered, such as the volcano lava/smoke not appearing if you save and reload a game at the volcano. Still, overall, the game's graphics are serviceable.
The music in the game is also quite pleasant and fits in with the relaxing atmosphere that the game is going for. While in your Fruitbus, there are various radio stations that you can choose from, which mostly have laidback tunes playing on them. You don't even have to be driving to have the tunes playing, so you nearly always have a background accompaniment of some island tunes. The footstep sounds incredibly irritating, though; they play too frequently, especially when sprinting.
Another downside I found is that some fruits and vegetables are quite rare, and they can take a long time to respawn, so if you get some rarer fruits/vegetables like Chili Peppers, ensure you don't waste them on unnecessary recipes. I did so and waited over 30 minutes in real time, hoping they would respawn, but they didn't. They respawn after several in-game days, and there's no way to speed up time. This is by far the most frustrating part of the game, and I can't tell if my game was bugged or if the respawn timer is that long.
As it is, I think any respawn timers should be minimal. It seems like there is meant to be a solid 15-20-minute respawn on a lot of the resources, and that just seems to go against the spirit of the rest of the game. There should be no need to sit and do nothing while you wait for the necessary ingredients to spawn.
Sadly, the bugs I've mentioned seem to be a bit of a theme with Fruitbus. I encountered visual glitches like shadows flickering, lava and smoke not appearing, and characters sitting in mid-air. There were also gameplay glitches, such as the jerry can I owned seemingly filling up with extra fuel each time I reloaded the game, resulting in a jerry can with 6 bars of fuel when it's supposed to only be able to hold 3, and it had been empty previously.
There is a day 1 update that may fix some of these issues, but since they were present in my playthrough, I am leaving them in. You will most likely not experience these bugs when you play.
The world design can also feel a bit unpolished, with certain objects floating above the ground, given that the worlds aren't overly large, you would kind of expect there to be more attention to detail, but the game in general seems to lack that.
Fruitbus supports 16:10 aspect ratios and runs at 1280x800 on the Steam Deck, meaning there are no black bars around the screen. The game also has great controller support.
However, Fruitbus is quite difficult to run thanks to a strangely intensive CPU demand, so I'm just offering my recommended preset, which is a good mix of quality and battery life.
We're setting the SteamOS frame rate limit to 40, and we'll have no TDP Limit here.
If you want the best quality out of Fruitbus at a 40 FPS frame rate, you can set the in-game graphics settings as follows: Post FX Enabled: On, Fog Enabled: On, V-Sync: On, Anti-Aliasing: FXAA, Graphics Quality: Medium, Resolution 1280x800 60Hz.
I checked the difference against a leaf on having the Anti-Aliasing on FXAA or the more intensive SMAA, but there was zero difference due to Fruitbus' art style, so we might as well use the easier-to-run FXAA for this game. The main strain on the Steam Deck comes from the bizarrely high CPU usage in Fruitbus, so we need to free up as much CPU power as possible.
With these settings, you can mostly hold 40 FPS, but at certain times of day, the performance seems to struggle more. In villages at those times of day, expect the FPS to drop to the low 30s. There will also be the occasional stutter, especially when driving around the island in the Fruitbus. Generally, Driving seems quite intensive, so don't expect to hold 40 while driving.
The power draw varies quite a bit depending on whether you're in a village or the countryside. For the most part, expect it to be around 13-15W in the countryside and around 16-20W in a village. I would estimate 2-2.5 Hours of battery life for a Steam Deck LCD and 2.5-3 hours for an OLED.
Temperatures can get pretty high in the villages, up to 85C on the CPU, with the fan kicking in quite hard at that point. Outside of villages in rural areas, though, temperatures tend to be around 70C, a bit higher if you're driving.
Unfortunately, even on the absolute lowest settings, the game still runs in the low-40s to mid-50s due to the high CPU usage, so there's no hope of a stable 60 FPS experience.
Fruitbus has no accessibility options, although all dialogue, whether voiced or not, is subtitled.
Fruitbus embodies the "cozy" game experience. Aside from the not-so-real worry of running out of fuel, there's no pressure to do anything here. Nothing can go wrong with Fruitbus, so if you're after a relaxing time to just chill out at the end of the day, Fruitbus is just for you.
There are some visual oddities here and there, a couple of vague quest lines, the issue with rare resources taking an age to respawn, and a few more bugs than I'd like there to be. There's also the fact that the performance is quite poor, considering how the game looks. I expect to play this game at 60 FPS on the Steam Deck, but that's impossible even with low settings. The game does control nicely, though, and remains perfectly playable on the Steam Deck.
If the bugs are fixed and some more polish and optimizations are made, Fruitbus could be a fantastic title for relaxing on the go. Right now, it's just a decent title for me.
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.
