Wanted: Dead was provided to us by 110 Industries and Plan of Attack for review. Thank you!
From the minds behind Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive comes Wanted: Dead, a hybrid slasher/shooter that's all about kicking ass. Following a week in the life of an elite Hong Kong police squad, you will be put on a mission to uncover a major conspiracy happening. From a third person perspective, you will brutalize your enemies, riddle them with bullets, and utilize flashy finishing moves in a cyberpunk world. As a love letter to sixth gen consoles, this is going to be a game to remember.
Wanted: Dead is a game that I did enjoy, but had some glaring issues I wasn't the biggest fan of. Starting with the good, the game looks great and melee combat is flashy. I love the finishers and chopping people in half was always really cool to see. I also really like that they went for a mixture of swordplay and third-person shooting, some moments where I switched between the two felt great.
On the bad side, the combat overall felt a bit lacking. The fighting was fun, but I would have loved to see more of an expansion to the melee with more combos when swapping between the X and Y buttons. I am also not the biggest fan of games where enemies can be bullet sponges and can eat up half a clip to kill. The story was iffy, but I didn't mind it much since I prioritized the gameplay more. Overall, it's a decent game that I am happy I played, but $60 feels a little much for what is being offered. The good news is, if you decide to get the game, you will be able to enjoy it on the Steam Deck!
At max performance, Wanted: Dead can actually hit 30 FPS in a some areas, but it doesn't stick to this for long. The game can easily drop into the 20s with a drain of 24W - 25W which is way too much. But, with a couple of setting tweaks and FSR in-game, this can be easily remedied!
Through my testing, I decided to start off with a battery saving 30 FPS build. I found 40 to feel very smooth, but there were a lot of times the game would drop or stutter when in certain combat situations or moving around too fast. With the recommended build, I used a combination of Medium and Low settings to get a stable 30 FPS with an average drain of 12W - 15W, which I felt was pretty good. The game still looked quite nice and held up in every scenario...except for one where I was cornered by 6 guys with explosions going around!
The biggest performance drain was shadows, which pushed the device much harder than any other quality setting. So for our quality build, I prioritized using no upscaler and keeping shadows at Medium. Anything higher than medium didn't change the visuals enough to justify the increased draw. So with a mix of medium and high settings and no TDP limit, the game was able to push through and look great while doing it.
The last build I worked towards was 40 FPS. This one was a bit harder to do than quality and the battery build due to the stutters the game has from time to time. At 30 FPS, this wasn't as noticeable and very much reduced at the lower framerates, but even when the game is on the lowest possible quality settings, 40 FPS still has more noticeable moments. I did try forcing resolution down through Steam, which significantly helped the performance in-game, but it blew up the pause menu, which you need to access skills and modify weapons.
Because of that, I kept the game at 1280x800. If you can withstand the blown up menu, I highly recommend forcing the resolution to 1024x600 and using SteamOS FSR to upscale. The game will still look decent and performance will be more stable, but again, it will be harder to actually use the menu.
I didn't encounter any controller issues, though I felt the third-person shooting camera movement was a bit too fast and I had to change the sensitivity. There were no visual bugs either, so other than the performance issues, the game performed as intended!
Wanted: Dead is a mixed bag for me that I ended up enjoying more than disliking. The game itself is quite fun and I loved slicing people up while looking around the gorgeous world. The shooting and basic combat mechanics were a bit of a let down though and I was hoping for more variety. I also didn't care for the minigames, but it is a nice change of pace from the combat. I would say wait for a sale on this one as I did still enjoy it and find it worthwhile to buy, but it wasn't as memorable as I had hoped. Luckily, if you do decide to get it, this is one you will be able to enjoy on the Steam Deck!
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Prodeus was provided to us by Humble Games to review. Thank you!
Are you a fan of Boomer Shooters like DUSK and Doom Eternal? Then this is the game for you. Prodeus is a modernized first-person shooter with a gorgeous retro feel to it. Plow through a campaign hand-crafted by industry veterans alone or in co-op, or compete against your friends in deathmatch modes. You can also partake in campaigns and maps made by the community using the fully integrated level editor in-game. Now, make it through the chaos and take down the Prodeans and all the forces of chaos against you.
As someone who adores boomer shooters on the Steam Deck, I was super excited to check out Prodeus. After my time with it, I can easily say it's one of my favorites. The visual style is fantastic, the gunplay feels tight, the guns themselves are varied and I can feel the weight to them, and the inclusion of the level editor and community map browser brings endless content to the game. I also love the inclusion of co-op campaigns and maps, as well as the dismemberment system that highlights the gory bloodbath you create. And on the Steam Deck, some tweaking is involved to really enjoy it, but it is definitely playable.
Before I go into Prodeus's performance, I want to explain my testing here. While I did play the campaign, I decided to test and optimize settings using a community map and test the settings from there on the campaign. This map is heavier than a lot of the areas featured in-game, so optimizing for the more intensive map would mean all less and more heavy would be covered, including other community maps (theoretically). The map I used to optimize initially is called "Bruteforce" by PALPUS.
Prodeus is a weird game to run and had some oddities when it came to optimizing. Before I get into that though, I did test the game at max settings. In some smaller campaign areas, the game was able to run at 60 FPS with a high battery drain of 20W+, but other areas and the community map would churn out sub 37 FPS at a 24W battery drain. I knew this wouldn't be feasible to play like this, so I got started in my optimization process.
The first thing I looked at was shadows, which were definitely the biggest cause of framerate drops. But oddly enough, most areas didn't show any visual difference. The shadow quality focuses more on non-static shadows as it doesn't effect ones that are created by the environment. The one part that I found a big difference was in the community map where the visual quality did change, but it was so minuscule on the overall effect on the quality.
Other than the shadows, I noticed SSAO and SSR did make a difference, but didn't impact the game visually much. This meant keeping those turned off kept the quality of the game looking similar while saving on battery and performance. I also noticed turning resolution down helped with stabilizing framerate, but didn't really impact visual quality either.
After testing all the settings, I came up with 3 builds that I felt all worked quite well. I prioritized framerate with each one, so each will feel as smooth as possible. My recommended build focuses on battery life, but pushes framerate to a good compromise of 45 FPS while still looking great! It gets around 3 hours of battery and feels a nice step up from 40,
From there, I decided to push framerate as much as possible while keeping things stable. Since there was still some drops when moving through levels at 60, I decided to stick to 55 FPS to keep things smooth and make any possible drops feel non-existent. The battery life tends to stick around 2.5 hours for this one.
Then, I wanted to find the best way to play the game at max quality, including shadows turned on. I noticed that with most framerates, there would still be some drops and spikes in battery. The lowest I could get without drops or crazy spikes in battery is 40 FPS, which still feels fantastic.
Each of these ways to play work extremely well, can't go wrong with any, but 45 with a battery focus felt like a good compromise between good quality and a smoother framerate.
With boomer-shooters like Prodeus, gyro aiming can be a godsend. This helps with some finite adjustments to make sure you can hit those headshots. Unfortunately, Prodeus doesn't have mixed input support. Gyro can be enabled to emulate a joystick, but it doesn't feel as fast/responsive as it could. So while it is possible to have gyro, it doesn't feel like it should.
Even with the oddities and the lack of mixed input support, Prodeus is an incredible shooter that shines on the Steam Deck. The graphical style is gorgeous, the gameplay is fast-paced and tight, and the community maps/campaigns keep the content coming! And all of this can be thoroughly enjoyed on the Deck.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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Doom Eternal is the latest evolution of the grand-daddy of first-person shooters. Its "push forward combat" approach to gameplay throws a barrage of enemies, explosions, and pixels on the screen all at once which the Steam Deck handles with aplomb! Thanks to some impressive hardware packed into the (relatively) tiny Steam Deck, as well as amazing optimization on the part of ID Software, the Deck handles this intense shooter with ease.
Right out of the box, Doom Eternal fires on all cylinders at a solid 60fps but at the expense of some higher temps (up to 89*C in my initial testing) and higher power consumption (23-24W, giving about 1.5 hours of battery life). A little fine tuning of settings and limiting TDP gives you options for either high quality graphics with 60fps 95% of the time (Quality Build) or lower graphical settings but at a rock solid 60fps (Performance Build). I personally preferred the performance build as a consistent 60fps helped the feel of the action in Doom Eternal and lowering the graphics as noted in the performance build did not make the game visibly unpleasant at all.
The really good news is that you can achieve both of these with greatly reduced temps and significantly more battery life. The quality build played at 50fps most of the time with minor dips to 48-49 fps for a split second. Without the Steam overlay, I don't think I would have noticed these moments, but they were most present when the screen got extremely hectic (mostly during glory kills which don't require player control in the moment). The performance build gave a rock solid 60fps, but with noticeable aliasing on some elements, like the targeting reticle, that took a while to get used to. This required lowering the resolution, turning on FSR, and adjusting the graphics settings as noted in the performance build. The builds kept the GPU temps down to 73*C on quality and 68 for performance, while CPU temps were 75c for quality and 70c for performance.
The battery build, while does save some battery and temps, makes the game’s text very hard to read. It gets around 65c for GPU while CPU hovers around 68c-70c. FSR saves the day at the resolution used for this build, but the quality downgrade doesn’t really justify the battery that can be saved from this setup.
When using the quality build I played with motion blur on. Yes, motion blur - wait, put down your pitchforks, let me explain. Yes, I know motion blur is regarded as horrible, but with the help of DRS, it becomes much less horrible and adds to the quality of the game in the performance build. Basically, Dynamic Resolution Scaling (DRS) will adjust the game’s resolution as needed, often lowering it temporarily, in order to try and maintain a higher framerate at the expense of blurring the image some. Since motion blur seemed to be implemented on a per object basis. This made the DRS’s downscaling much less noticeable while still keeping the frame rate and temperature gains.. Turning off motion blur didn't dramatically increase stability or allow for major graphical setting changes, and even in the quality build, it added to the experience. This could be a Doom only setting, and I understand why motion blur is hated, but I feel it really helps this game shine.
Interestingly enough, one of the greatest pleasures running Doom Eternal on the Steam Deck was the ability to fully remap the buttons (an option available in the Doom Eternal setting as well, but greatly expanded with Steam). I used the back buttons for jumping, dashing, grenade switching, and flame belch which let me keep my fingers on the joysticks at all times and I enjoyed some fine-tuned gyro aiming with the capacitive right joystick. I also set up the right track pad as a radial dial, giving each one of Doom Eternal's weapons its own spot for quick switching with a rapid light tap that just isn't possible with other console controllers. You can go even deeper down the customization rabbit hole by adding double tap weapon switching and action sets with controller chords to switch weapons even faster. It can take a little while to wrap your head (and hands) around it, but there is a very deep level of controller customization possible. I would definitely say weapon hot swapping and animation cancels are mandatory at higher difficulty levels. The controller scheme can be found in the Community Layouts and is called "Doc Jones SDHQ".
As a friend said to me when I talked about playing Doom Eternal on the Steam Deck: "That thing is so well optimized it could run on a toaster." He may be right, but it doesn't short-change the Deck's impressive hardware. The ability to customize the button layout even more via Steam allowed me to create a layout that was much closer to keyboard and mouse precision. There were also no game breaking or distracting graphical bugs/glitches that I noticed as I played through the main campaign and horde mode (which includes enemies from The Old Gods expansion). I ran a few multiplayer deathmatches and they ran very well with these settings. From all of my testing, I can easily say Doom Eternal is amazing and playing on Deck will be well worth your time.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 is the sequel of Black Ops and the predecessor of Black Ops 3 from the popular First Person Shooter franchise and is full of nostalgia for those of us raised on all the earlier COD titles. BO2 comes with a somewhat lengthy campaign that goes back and forth between modern and futuristic combat, a gratifying multiplayer experience filled with iconic maps, and the evolution of the well-received zombie gamemode introduced from World at War, Black Ops 2 gives players an incredible experience.
The 45 FPS build for me was the smoothest of them all, which is why it is my recommended build. I used native resolution since lower resolution with FSR was causing micro-stutters for me (1-2 fps drops consistently), but I had it tested with another person who didn’t get the micro-stutters so take it with a grain of salt.
The reasoning behind not capping the wattage is mainly due to the game not using a high wattage 90% of the time anyways, except for certain cinematics that require the wattage to not stutter throughout. For the setting used in this build the game would reach up to 68fps at times if not capped which does give the player wiggle room if you prefer better shadows or something of that nature.
Fair warning though, there will be select heavy parts of the game where you might get around 40 instead of 45 fps due to this. If shadows are necessary for you, I would lower the 8x MSAA to 4x MSAA. But for me, the 8 times was easily worth the shadow loss. I felt the scopes on turrets or snipers would look blocky, but in 8x that was not the case. With this build, the battery length is 4.5 hours depending on the mission at hand.
I didn’t encounter any big issues in Black Ops 2 except on some cinematics where the game will not have a stable fps, likely due to the game’s cinematics not optimized for Linux. If you are looking to play multiplayer and zombies, you are going to need Proton GE 7-22 or above installed. For zombies and multiplayer, all the settings will need to be on low all, while leaving the TDP Limit at 15W to try to help against the lag/stuttering. With that, it is currently possible to get a stable framerate if you change the refresh rate and cap to 40 FPS. Playing solo works well, but I experienced a lot of lag during any connection to a server in multiplayer and zombies, so I can't recommend playing them at this current state.
In the end, Black Ops 2's game’s campaign worked perfectly and it was great to re-experience it, but any multiplayer modes left something to be desired. While I could play Zombies alone without issues at 40 FPS, it was not enjoyable to play online, which I believe will deter a lot of players. If you are wanting to play through the Bo2 campaign, the deck would be a great way to do so. Otherwise, I would put more hope on the other CoD games for a better multiplayer and zombies experience. While I could play Zombies alone without any issues whatsoever at 40 FPS, it was not enjoyable to play online due to overwhelming connection issues.
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Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is the newest entry in the Borderlands series, but with a unique DND twist. The game retains its looter shooter DNA and rolls in some stat building and a full overworld with random encounters and secrets to explore. This kind of one-off encounters and dungeons are a perfect fit for the Steam Deck’s pick-up and put-down style. Coupled with the Borderlands charm, this is one of the best Borderlands yet!
Gameplay aside, I was astounded by the ease of configuring the game. Due to the graphical style, upscaling through SteamOS FSR brought the 1024x640 resolution looking close to native, while saving a significant chunk on performance and battery.
To change resolution, go to the cog wheel for the game and under the general tab, change the resolution to 1024x640. With my test of FSR 2.0 though, I felt it didn't make a significant enough difference for the recommended build, but helped stabilize the 40 FPS build.
The text is a little blurrier at 1024x640, but the sharpness is noticeably better with a fantastic saving to battery and temps.
30 FPS lock was very stable on Tiny Tina's Wonderlands. I did test 40 FPS a couple times, but my Deck shut itself down from overheating while trying to test it, do not have TDP limit off for 40 FPS.
I also ended up turning the in-game settings to medium, anti-aliasing off, and draw distance to low. I didn’t feel these inhibited the look of the game and ended up saving even more battery while keeping temps to around 65c - 70c.
Proton GE is also required simply due to the videos in the game being broken trying to use regular proton. I also checked DX11 vs DX12 and felt there was minimal difference, so either or can be chosen. Multiplayer did end up increasing battery by 1W, but temps largely remained the same and it still felt stable.
Throughout gameplay, I didn’t really feel any huge bugs or glitches that inhibited my playthrough. I did encounter one bug where when I paused the game and tried to scroll down on the menu, my first button press downwards would bring me back up. I did also have 1 crash trying to go into a mirror in a town, but so far that has been an isolated incident. This is a UE4 game as well, so expect some temp and battery spikes when loading environments in.
Tiny Tina's Wonderlands runs significantly better than I could have expected. For a game that really just came out not long ago, it runs cold and stable most of the time. Other than the spikes from loading the environment in, fights are stable and looking gorgeous. With multiplayer being so easy on the system, this is a perfect fit for a portable device.
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Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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Hitman 3 is the newest game in the rebooted hitman franchise. Taking the role of Agent 47, a man with a barcode slapped on the back of his bald head, you head to exotic places to assassinate elusive targets however you can. Feel like shooting them? Go ahead. Poison them? Be my guest. Throw a can of spaghetti? Oh you’ll be making Chef Boyardee proud. Using their new engine, each location is beaming with beautiful vistas and creative gameplay. And if you own Hitman 1 and 2, you can import the missions and campaigns into Hitman 3 for no extra charge! With all 3 games in 1 package, this is an incredibly fun game to screw around in.
Reviewing Hitman 3 was tough. This game actually runs really well on the deck out of the box, but there are a few caveats like high temps and battery usage. Through my testing, I found two efficient ways to play the game, a focus on temp/battery and one on quality. The main difference for these ways is the in-game FSR settings. Turning FSR on ultra quality blurs the resolution a little, but saves on battery a LOT while turning it off keeps everything sharp at the cost of battery.
The game can run 40 FPS pretty consistently at medium settings, 30 FPS lock actually kept temps and battery life down a chunk. This was most apparent when there are crowds of people. At 40, crowds could bring temps up to 80c and battery to 22W, while 30 would spike it to 70c and 17W generally. Medium in-game settings felt like a good balance of quality while still keeping temps and battery in check. I also found limiting TDP can mitigate some spikes, but it comes in most handy when shooting for higher framerates.
I didn’t experience any audio issues, but there were a few glitches I encountered. The mildest one would be some random black boxes appear when turning the camera too quickly, but they also disappear near immediately. When the in-game FSR is turned on, there is sometimes a visible halo around Agent 47 and there’s some ghost trails when walking.
I also have been noticing some framerate lag, but it isn’t picked up in the system so I believe it is the game’s engine and not the frames it brings out. I see this much more when FSR is turned off as well. I also noticed that, even though the game is verified, some steam deck button icons don’t show up in game.
There is a launcher for this game as well. You have to either use the touchscreen or set one of the trackpads to control the mouse. Though all of the settings from the launcher can be changed in-game, so I would just hit play and change settings after the game is launched.
Overall, the game runs surprisingly well. This is a new-ish release that still takes a lot to run, but the Steam Deck handles it like a champ. Being able to play Hitman 3 in a stable environment on the go, albeit with some compromises, still astounds me. This was a game I never imagined I could play on a portable device, yet here we are.
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Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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Horizon Zero Dawn is an open-world action game taking place on an Earth recovering from a terminator-like event. Developed by Guerilla Games, you play as Aloy, the girl wonder with no parents, who has been tasked to save the world from a corruption taking over the rampant machines roaming the wildlands.
Throughout the journey, you will have to fight, craft, and explore your way to saving this world and figuring out who you are. With a beautiful setting, enjoyable combat, and a unique story, this game is definitely worth your time. I am a sucker for post-apocalyptic settings and open-world games in general, so this already checked so many of my boxes before playing. Just based on the game’s content, I would say it is a worthwhile purchase, but what about the performance on deck?
After my initial testing, I ended up feeling that 30 FPS was the way to go. While it’s possible to increase it, I felt a much more stable 30 still plays really well and keeps temps and battery further down than I expected. There were some drops still, but they were few and didn’t impact gameplay. Game settings wise, I ended up feeling a slightly lower than native resolution with low settings, shadows at medium, and FSR turned on in-game to Ultra Quality, was the best medium for stable performance and quality visuals. This also kept battery life around 2.5-3 hours with around 14W - 16W usage.
I did see some performance and battery spikes under certain situations though. The biggest one that spiked both was when traveling around the world fast. When running, the world would render more and this would cause spikes in battery, usually up to 17.5W, and some performance hiccups. The only other one I really noticed was when walking around crowded cities, but leaving the immediate area remedied that.
There thankfully wasn’t too many game-breaking bugs that I encountered, though there were two that stick with me. First, when loading into the game, I opened my quick access menu, the button with the ellipses, and it froze on that screen. The game kept playing in the background and I had to power cycle the device since no buttons worked to close it. Second, there was one time I was running around and fighting robots, but my right analog stick randomly stopped working.
I could still press down on it and it responded in game, but I could not move it around. I had to close and re-open the game to fix that one, and luckily, I had just saved the game. Both of these only happened once though and I don’t expect it to be a huge issue. There was some minor audio stuttering at a few points, but that could have been the speakers and wasn’t anything of significance.
Overall, Horizon Zero Dawn ended up running better than I anticipated. Getting around 2.5 - 3 hours of battery life while temps staying around 70c. Framerate was stable 95% of the time at 30 FPS and still looked wonderful with FSR on and resolution slightly under native. It was a blast to play this game as much as I did on the Steam Deck and I cannot wait to see how Horizon Forbidden West and even Marvel’s Spider-Man will fare!
Side Note: For those who have Power Tools installed through the plugin manager, make sure CPU Boost is turned off. When it is turned on, temps and W usage jump a lot due to the CPU overclocking. This is not necessary for the game though and just adds unnecessary temp and battery usage.
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Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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