Rogue Waters was provided by Tripwire Interactive for review. Thank you!
I'm always in the mood for some pirating adventures. While Rogue Waters might not give you the freedom of games like Sid Meier's Pirates or Sea of Thieves, it does offer a great nautical-themed adventure that should delight tactical combat and pirate fans alike!
The story of Rogue Waters is one of classic betrayal, with your former captain turning against you in exchange for personal gain. Now, years later, it's up to you to form your crew and embark on a journey of revenge. Of course, when you were betrayed, you naturally gained immortality, as did the rest of your crew, so no matter how many times you fail, you can get up and go again.
This forms the basis for the "rogue" part of "Rogue Waters." In traditional Roguelite form, dying ends your run, but you'll carry over any currency you managed to loot to upgrade your ship and your crew and come back even stronger than before.
These upgrades take a variety of forms. Your ship always starts with some equipment, but using the currency you collect, you can open up additional cannon slots to begin with an advantage. You can also get more module slots to fit on your ship, which typically enhances your crew's abilities, such as giving them more HP or movement in the tactical combat section of the game.
On top of just equipment, your captain and the officers you recruit can also gain experience after each run, allowing them to level up and earn skill points. You can then spend those skill points to give your officers extra abilities and improve their stats.
Once you've got your crew and ship kitted out, it's time to take to the seas, and the game neatly offers you three choices of "raid" to embark on. These vary in length, slightly affecting the type of loot you might find and the ships' fittings you will encounter.
The raids take the form of branching paths, allowing you to choose what you'd like your next encounter to be, although often, there isn't too much choice going on here. It's quite common to be given 2 or 3 choices, which are all ship battles. Very occasionally, you will encounter an event, which is dialogue, where there's a chance to get some free loot or heal a crew member, but 90% of encounters are ship battles. Sometimes it feels like the choice is a bit of an illusion, with the only difference between the ship battles being the lootable item at the end of it.
When you do enter a battle, however, things get interesting. The first stage of any battle is turn-based naval combat, where you will command your cannons to direct shots at the enemy ship or fort, damaging their cannons, modules, or crew, depending on what makes the most tactical sense to you. Certain cannons can only shoot certain parts of a ship, with Cannonbreakers specifically targeting cannons, Decksweepers targeting crew, and Shipwreckers targeting modules. You can, of course, get general cannons that can fire at anything, but these often cost more command points to fire, and you have a limited amount each turn.
In the end, I found that Swivel cannons are invaluable. These cannons can only target crew, but they cost no command points to fire, meaning you can fire them every turn for no penalty, whittling down the enemy's crew, ready for when the next phase of battle commences, the boarding battle.
The boarding battle is where most of Rogue Waters' action takes place. This is turn-based combat, although it plays more typically like a tactical RPG at this point, with a grid-based field containing both your and the opponent's crew.
Positioning is everything in Rogue Waters. When you attack an enemy, most of your attacks will cause you to "advance," which pushes the enemy back a tile and allows you to take their place. But if the enemy gets pushed back against a wall, they take additional damage, and if they get pushed back against one of their allies, both them and their ally will take some damage. This requires you to assess where you want your crew positioned to deal the maximum damage to your opponents while considering where you'll be pushed if the enemy attacks you.
All of this, combined with the ship modules at play, ropes that allow you to swing extra distances across the battlefield, and a mixture of enemy types that you'll be facing, work together to create a great tactical experience. When you've got your crew in the perfect position and start to execute your turn, taking out enemy after enemy, it's a really satisfying moment.
Rogue Waters is also pretty nice to look at. The ocean/water effects are well done, and there are some good visual effects when ships are firing at each other with their cannons. While most of the game is played from a zoomed-out perspective, occasionally, when pulling off a melee attack, the camera will zoom in to show a rather gruesome execution of the move, which often involves a sword running through someone and plenty of blood being sprayed.
So, Rogue Waters does what it sets out to do. It's a linear-feeling game, as games of this genre often are, and the game is nearly entirely based around combat, which is saved by the fact that Rogue Water's combat is a strong foundation for the game to be built on.
Rogue Waters runs at 1280x800 and fully supports controllers, so we're off to a good start. The game has no black bars or controls, and it's just fine with the Steam Deck's controller.
Performance-wise, we have a bit of a mixed bag. The game can't hold a stable 60 FPS no matter what you do. While the game's map and naval combat tend to run fairly well, the tactical boarding combat is much harder to run, and therefore, both the options I'm giving you today are targeting 30 FPS.
I did encounter an issue where every time I rebooted the game, it would default to the "High" graphics preset, undoing the settings I had previously put in place. Hopefully, this will be fixed for the game's launch.
I debated whether to make these my recommended or the quality settings below the recommended ones. Still, I'm not keen on running my Steam Deck at high temperatures, so I've made these my recommended settings.
We have a 30 FPS Limit in SteamOS and no TDP Limit for this one. Then, in the in-game settings, we'll have VSync On, turn Anti-Aliasing Off, the Texture Quality to High, the Ocean Quality to Medium, and the World Details to Low. We set the shadow distances at 0 to disable shadows.
We could lower Ocean Quality to "Off" to save more battery life, but it genuinely looks awful. It turns the water into a flat blue plane with no visual effects or movement.
Visually, the game still looks okay. The omission of shadows is the most noticeable difference, but it doesn't make a huge impact. I think the game looks good enough, even without Anti-Aliasing or shadows.
The power draw is generally around 18-21W here, but it can rise as high as 25W in intensive combat. Steam Deck LCD owners should expect around 2 hours of battery life, with Steam Deck OLED users getting around 2.5 hours. The power draw drops dramatically outside of combat, around 12W on the world map.
Temperatures were about 70-80C, with the CPU running hotter. The fan noise ramps up during the boarding combat and will quieten during the rest of the game.
For this one, I'm prioritizing visual niceties over battery life. Regardless of what you do, your battery life won't last too long in Rogue Waters, but this probably isn't the kind of game you'll play for hours on end. With a 20-30 minutes long run, this preset should give you enough battery for 3 or so runs per charge.
Apply a 30 FPS Limit in SteamOS, along with no TDP Limit. You'll want VSync enabled in the game, too, as it gets rid of the input lag introduced by the SteamOS Frame Limiter. Then, you'll want to set the Anti-Aliasing to MSAA, the AA Quality to High, the Texture Quality to High, the Ocean Quality to Medium, and the World Details to High. Then, have all the Shadow Distances at half—that's 250, 100, and 100 for those.
With these settings, you get good-looking water, shadows throughout the game, and a clear and sharp image. I did try running at the absolute highest, but running at those settings, especially having the Ocean Quality on High, can occasionally cause performance to dip to the mid-20s. With these settings, I did, on odd occasions, see dips to 28 or 29 FPS, but generally, we can keep 30 FPS.
We pay the price of visual niceties with a killer power draw. However, with the game often taking around 20W-26W from the battery, don't expect more than 1.5 Hours of battery life from a Steam Deck LCD, and you might be able to squeeze 2 hours from a Steam Deck OLED.
Temperatures are very high, at around 80-90C during boarding combat. The fan will be loud during these sections, although temperatures and fan noise drop outside of combat. This is the main reason I'm not recommending these, as the CPU often creeps around the high 80s in combat, and I'd rather not stress my Steam Deck out that much.
Rogue Waters has some accessibility options. You can disable blood if that's not your thing. You can also disable camera shake and sway if prone to motion sickness. There is also HUD Scaling and Font Size, which I had set to 105 and 22, respectively.
Rogue Waters is a fun pick-up-and-play pirating adventure. It's not the open sandbox that most pirate games aim for, but it's a fun time nonetheless. If tactical gameplay is your guilty pleasure, then there's plenty to enjoy about Rogue Waters' deep and satisfying combat mechanics, and I'd recommend giving it a try.
Steam Deck performance is a little worse than I would have hoped for such a game. Graphics settings seem to have a minimal impact on performance, with the CPU seemingly the bottleneck here, so don't expect more than 30 FPS out of this game. Still, given its nature and the game's good controller support, it can play fine on the Steam Deck. The game also autosaves after every battle, so don't worry about exiting if your battery life is low.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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Dead Cells is a 2D rogue-lite that is heavily inspired by the metroidvania genre. You will treck through gorgeous, unique environments fighting enemies with an array of weapons and items. The game will require precision and thinking on your feet as you'll have to roll, jump, and climb your way through obstacles and weigh the choices of everything you pick up to become a deadly force to be reckoned with. After each death, you will be able to come back and buy permanent upgrades, and then head right back into the non-linear world where you will find even more secrets, hidden passages, and much more.
Dead Cells is quite possibly one of the greatest rogue-like games I have ever played. The incredible visuals, detailed landscapes, and addicting gameplay loop all come together seemlessly in an amazing combat system that feels fluid with its varied weapons and dodging. This is only made better with the free updates it has gotten, as well as the DLC that have been released for it, which add in new locations, weapons, bosses, and much more. Speaking of which...
The Castlevania DLC for Dead Cells was provided to us by Motion Twin and TinsleyPR for review. Thank you!
The Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania DLC released 3 days ago and I have to say, whoever came up with this idea deserves a large raise. I don't recall one time I felt a crossover fit so well into a game. 2 new biomes, 14 new weapons, 3 bosses, 20 outfits, new enemies, over 60 added music tracks, and a new storyline featuring Richter and Alucard are all part of this $10 package and it is incredible.
After you die a couple times, you will be able to start accessing the Castlevania content, which will be confirmed when you see red bats fly across your screen. From there, just find Richter in the prison and he will start you on your journey into the new storyline.
There is so much I can really say about this expansion, but I can't stress enough how incredible it is. The new weapons, like the Cross, Morning Star, Bible, Vampire Killer, and Holy Water, fit in perfectly, the outfits are great, the music tracks are fantastic, the biomes are gorgeous, and the boss fights...oh the boss fights are epic. I had just made it through Dracula's castle and I thought I was heading to fight him, but no, I was pulled down by a purple chain to be killed by Death, which was an insane battle.
On top of that, being able to put on outfits of Castlevania characters and make yourself look like Richter, Simon, Alucard, Maria, Trevor, and even Dracula while fighting classic enemies of the franchise like Medusa, Werewolves, Buer, Armor Knights, Throw Masters, and more! Overall, for $10, this feels like a steal. And for those who don't have it, there is a bundle for $25 for both the base game and this expansion. I highly recommend it if you haven't taken the dive yet.
With how amazing Dead Cells is, it's only made better by how perfect it runs on the Steam Deck without any changes! The game will drain around 6W - 8W for a battery life of 6.5 - 7 hours at a solid 60 FPS. There are some small stutters here and there, but I only noticed because I had the overlay on, otherwise, I wouldn't have at all!
I had no issues with controls or visual bugs that appeared. In cutscenes, the screen would turn into letterbox format, but it went right back to the 1280x800 resolution it supports. To make things even more appealing, Dead Cells is being played through a native Linux build, and it runs fantastically.
Dead Cells is one of my personal favorite games. I am a huge fan of roguelike and metroidvania games, and this game does a wonderful job blending the two and refining it to a tee. And with the release of the incredible Return to Castlevania expansion, there is even more reason to jump in now if you haven't. If you don't have this expansion, I highly encourage checking it out, it is $10 well spent! Thankfully, you will also be able to fully enjoy it on the Steam Deck with no compromises needed, making it one of our Best on Deck games! Dead Cells and the Castlevania DLC are essentials to your Deck's library.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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Dust & Neon was provided to us by Rogue Games and Keymailer for review. Thank you!
Dust & Neon is a roguelike twin-stick shooter set in a futuristic wild west filled with robots! As a robot yourself, you will go on an epic quest to fight armies and partake in insane boss fights, all while unlocking abilities and finding the right weapons amongst thousands of different ones. Dying and coming back stronger with passive ability upgrades to beat the missions in front of you will be imperative as well. Now pick up your guns and get ready for a challenging top-down shooter that will keep you on your toes.
I first played Dust & Neon during the Steam Next Fest last week and it quickly became one of my favorite demos. The visual aesthetic of the game is right up my alley, vibrant and simple, while the gameplay loop is engaging and addicting. I do love randomized items/weapons and roguelike systems in games and I feel this one does it really well too. The randomized weapons keeps me trying to crawl up the power while managing if I will need a certain capacity or accuracy, while the passive upgrades I get after dying influence some of my choices in terms of spending money to get certain weapons initially.
You do have to reload your gun manually by pressing the X button, which some might not like, but I feel it adds to the challenge and charm of the game (also the gun showing on the right side when reloading is awesome). Combine the aiming, shooting, rolling, sliding to cover, and swapping between equipped weapons, Dust & Neon is such a fun game to play. And what makes it even better is how well it runs on the Steam Deck!
Booting up Dust & Neon, I noticed it was automatically set to the highest graphical quality. Luckily, the game runs fairly well at max! 60 FPS with the max settings brings in around 13W - 17W battery drain depending on the location and amount of enemies on the screen. While this is fantastic, there is a change or 2 that we can make to really get the maximum battery life out with the game still looking wonderful.
In this case, I wanted to retain the pleasing visuals and their crispness while bringing battery drain down. Luckily, I was able to do this just by turning the graphics down to medium. This primarily got rid of some detailed shadows, but overall kept battery drain around 11W - 12W. I did see once or twice where drain went a little above 13W, but this was far and few and overall added an extra hour or so of battery life. This is easily the recommended build I would say others should use.
For a battery build, I elected to keep the graphics settings the same to keep the better shadows, but use Steam to force a 1024x600 resolution. This keeps the game looking quite nice still, with a slight bit of bluriness, but ends up saving around 2W drain with a stable 60 FPS. It looks a little worse, but if you're saving as much battery as possible without compromising visuals, this will be the way to do it!
Other than that, I had no controller issues or visual bugs. The game also displays at a full 1280x800 resolution and has cloud saves!
Dust & Neon is an incredible top-down shooter that shines with its gorgeous visuals and addicting gameplay. The game can get really intense in fights and feels quite rewarding when getting a new weapon that starts killing enemies in 3 hits instead of 4 or an overpowered shotgun that one-taps some enemies. Switching from actively shooting robots to rolling for cover to reload, then rushing around the corner and emptying the revolver's ammo into a group of bots feels fantastic. And while our recommended settings change the graphics quality, the game can be fully enjoyed and played without changing anything, making this our newest Best on Deck game! As one of my favorite Next Fest games, this is one I highly recommend adding to your Steam Deck library.
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Update 9/13/22: After speaking with the developer behind the Hephaistos mod, and after reading, they have clarified and rewrote the instructions on how to get the mod working. We included a small guide on how to get it working so you can utilize a full 1280x800 resolution.
Hades is...well for lack of any other term...an incredible game. As the son of Hades himself, you have decided to defy your destiny and escape hell. Using an assortment of powers and weapons, you will hack and slash your way across gorgeous landscapes while upgrading your skills and powers. As this is a roguelike game, each death makes you more powerful with new weapons to unlock and permanent upgrades that carry with you throughout your deaths. Paired with an immersive fully voice-acted story, this roguelike game is an essential to everyone's library. And it just so happens that Hades is also an essential game for your Steam Deck.
Due to the art style, Hades is nowhere near intensive in the slightest. When opening the game for the first time, it will boot up at a solid 60 FPS with only 12W battery drain and sub 70c temps. If you ask me, this is pretty fantastic, though we can make it better! The game tends to drain a bit extra power than it really needs, so by just setting a TDP limit to 4 and GPU Clock Speed Frequency to 1100, we can dramatically lower the drain to 8.5W - 9W with sub 60c temps.
With no visual or stability difference, you can clearly see the temps and battery drain go down significantly with slight TDP changes.
This tends to bring the battery life up to 5.5 - 6 hours from 3.5 - 4 hours with no sacrifices to performance at all. This is especially helpful if you are going to be traveling, but even just playing at home, this can help significantly. Keeping temps down will increase the longevity of your Deck's hardware as it won't be getting so hot. And honestly, with a small tweak like that and no reduction in quality or performance, there really is no reason NOT to.
Now if I had to point out one thing, it is the resolution options. In-game, it says it supports 1280x800, but it actually only displays 1280x720 as you can see from the black bars at the top and bottom in the screenshots. While there is a way to patch this using the Hephaistos patch, it doesn't really feel necessary. The game runs and looks beautiful and I felt no reason to change the resolution. I did try to use the mod itself, but the file wouldn't execute so I couldn't patch the game. I will continue trying though and update this review if necessary.
After speaking with the developers behind the Hephaistos mod, we got it up and running. To do this, you will have to download the hephaistos-linux.zip from the release page. Then, extract the file and put it in the directory of where Hades is installed (you can access it by going to properties > local files > "Browse Local Files". Once the file is placed in the directory, right click it and select "Run in Konsole". Then, press "1" 3 times, which will patch the game to the 1280x800 native resolution on the Deck! We noticed no performance difference with the native res.
There really isn't much more I can say about Hades other than it is one of the best games I have ever played. The artwork, gameplay loop, the fine-tuning, they all work together in such harmony that it is hard to look back and not love it. Supergiant Games outdid themselves and it makes me incredibly happy to know how amazing this game works on Deck. If you haven't yet, buy this game.
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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!
This game was provided to us by free from the developer/publisher. Thank you!
2D platformers have been one of the staples of video games. Revolutionized by Super Mario, this genre has boomed and expanded into a plethora of different subgenres. By adding in some more advanced combat and downplaying some of the platforming, games like Mega Man came about and took the world by storm. It found a fantastic blend of just enough platforming and addicting action gameplay to keep you coming back for more.
Chenso Club is a new take on the 2D action-platformer, while adding in some unique elements to help it stand out. Aliens have invaded and it's up to a group of heroines to save the world. As one of 5 characters with varied moves and stats, you will traverse across diverse areas while destroying the enemies to replenish your life force and make it through the level. Chenso does incorporate some roguelike features as well, allowing you to not only buy upgrades, but partake in challenges to get them. You can also unlock more upgrades being available to you in-game by gaining followers on the in-game social media site, Chirp. Overall, I think the game itself is really fun and I had a good time playing. For the price, it can be quite worthwhile. But how will it hold up on Deck?
Looking at the game, I am sure you can guess. The game runs fantastic on the Steam Deck. I didn't hit below 60 FPS once during my time playing. The game looks vibrant and gorgeous on the screen and fits perfectly there.
You could set the TDP limit to 4, but it really doesn't matter as the battery will not be eaten up. I did get some weird spikes to 58, but it was a single frame and didn't impact gameplay nor would I have noticed it if I didn't have the graph.
There isn't much more I need to go into performance though, it runs like a charm!
Steam defaults to a KB+M controller layout for the game, which makes no sense as this game actually DOES have controller support. To fix this, you will need to go into your controller settings for Chenso Club and set the layout to "Gamepad With Joystick Trackpad". The game will then automatically swap it over to its controller scheme and there you go. After that, you will be able to play like normal without any issues.
As for bugs, I did encounter 2 that I felt are notable. The first was an issue with dashing. There were a couple times that dashing just didn't want to work. This was especially bad in the bonus levels where you have to keep moving. I had to go upwards and I couldn't dash up. This is the only bug I found that affected my actual gameplay.
The other one was just weird. When I dropped into a new area, my character stopped being able to jump or dash, but was able to walk in the air. I was able to fix this by randomly attacking and it dropped me down, but it still took me a moment to figure out what was going on.
Chenso Club likes letting me walk on air. How kind of them.
Overall, I really did enjoy my time with the game. It doesn't take a lot to run, it is vibrant and beautiful, and the gameplay loop is a good time. The 6.5 hour battery life is always a nice touch and sub 60c temps make me extremely happy, but the bugs can get a little annoying. Regardless of this, you will have no trouble running this game at all on the 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 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!
