Strategy Archives - Steam Deck HQ

Tempest Rising review code was provided by Slipgate Ironworks. Thank You!

Tempest Rising is a modern RTS inspired in a good way by Command and Conquer with fast-paced action, building, and combat. I’m confident it will bring the modern audience closer to the RTS genre, which is a classic in many ways.

Developed by Slipgate Ironworks and 2B Games, Tempest Rising is like many other RTS games, including titles like Stormgate and Command and Conquer. You focus on a main headquarters, build a base, gather resources by investing money in Harvester vehicles, then follow up by recruiting an army to dominate the map. Tempest Rising offers cool army types, from your basic infantry and Special Operators that can control drones, to Engineers that can help hijack enemy buildings, and some recruits that can help you out with lookout towers.

Story with Two Campaigns

The game features two campaign story modes for the two different factions. Global Defense Forces (GDF) is a highly mobile and advanced peacekeeping corps, while Tempest Dynasty (DYN) is a hard-hitting and desperate faction that controls the Tempest vines. If you’re brand new to the RTS genre, you should jump in and play the campaign on the Easy difficulty. This will help you with tutorials as you play the storyline missions and during your battles against GDF or DYN, depending on which faction you chose, and they do a good job teaching.

As for the story, an alternate history Earth faces the Cuban Missile Crisis that expands in all directions, creating World War 3 and leaving never-ending chaos. A new energy source known as Tempest has emerged, and warring factions are intoxicated by the potential of Tempest, locking them in a dispute to control it.

Unfortunately, the missions in the two campaigns aren't quite varied, with a lot of repetition that leaves a bland taste, but some are a good homage to the Command and Conquer games. You can play as a Specialist unit, with special abilities, good passives, and perks. Each passive ability is connected to a specific damage type the unit can inflict while fighting multiple adversaries. Perks are passive traits that become active or inactive depending on the unit's mode.

However, that’s not all with this two-story campaign, which features different play styles. This includes highlighting the different building styles for DYN and GDF. As an example, GDF has a more linear approach where you buy a building and place it, but it takes time to build. But that’s not the case with the Dynasty faction; you have different build menus to select your build, and it will take your resources. Then you can just drag and drop it, building it instantly.

Gameplay Features, Multiplayer, and Combat

Combat styles are very different between the two factions, with the GDF having units such as the AT Infantry and Drone Operator, while DYN offers Flamethrowers, Cluster Missiles, and more vehicle-based options, which benefit players in different ways when they are deciding how to tackle the match.

For beginner players in PvP, I think GDF has a slower build system and upgrade system that is easy to comprehend. Multiplayer is close-quarter and fast-paced, so going with GDF gives new players a chance to get acquainted with the mechanics and efficiently gather all the resources they need to build what they have to. However, this can also change if you’re in a 2v2 scenario, and if you have great communication, this can play out pretty well because you can use units called Sentinels to rush on enemies, and Engineers are also a great way to capture some enemy buildings.

When it comes to DYN, they offer really good vehicles and tanks. You can play more aggressively, and they can have a really good impact in mid to endgame. That’s why I think DYN is a slightly better playstyle for me, as multiplayer sessions are shorter and you need to make money quickly and rush the enemies to stop them in their tracks. With some of their units, it can be a lot of fun.

I also want to check how having different support powers for Factions makes the game fun. Factions in Tempest Rising have their own support powers similar to the super weapons in Command and Conquer games. The GDF’s support powers can release air strikes that deploy troop carriers loaded with forces, while DYN's support powers will let you fire extremely volatile Tempest missiles. I kid you not, the airstrike command for the DYN is so fun if you've got extra money for some big booms. The game has many abilities to help define your playstyle, making combat fun for both Factions.

Tempest Rising - Steam Deck Performance

Tempest Rising does support 1280x800 as a resolution, eliminating black bars on the Steam Deck. It does not, however, have controller support. You must use the Keyboard (WASD) & Mouse controller template to play the game. Fortunately, this puts most controls in place for you; the main thing you're missing is hotkeys for certain actions, so you might want to edit your layout to add in some of your favorite hotkeys, such as repairing units.

Weirdly, there is a UI scaling option, but it cannot go beyond 1.00, which means some text (mostly your resources) is on the smaller side and might be hard to see at a glance.

As far as performance goes, Tempest Rising is quite hungry for resources, taxing both the CPU and GPU. Running the game at 1280x800, Lowest Settings, and then putting FSR3 onto "Quality" gives us a pretty good result. I've put our recommended settings in the images below, which you can click to enlarge and look at.

Using these settings, I had drops down to the high 20s in intense combat, large armies put a strain on the Steam Deck's CPU, and the Red Crystals (Tempest) you collect as resources put a strain on the GPU, so depending on the location of a large battle, your performance may vary. Use the in-game frame limiter to limit to 30 FPS, and most of the game should run at that.

The power draw varies, from around 15-16W when little action is taking place to up to 21W in intense scenes. So you can expect around 2.5-3 hours of battery life from a Steam Deck OLED and 1.5-2 hours from a Steam Deck LCD. Temperatures were around 65- 70 °C.

Conclusion

Tempest Rising is great for new players trying to jump into a modern-style RTS. The game plays great, sound design is good with destruction effects and soundtrack, and I like the Jukebox where you can select your favorite songs from the list to play. At the same time, you build your economy and destroy GDF (I don’t have any personal grudge, it's just that the Fire Infantry is cool on DYN). Campaign missions are repetitive, as you might play several of the same type/style of mission, but it’s still a great and fun way to learn new techniques, such as what passives are good to use, which can eventually help in multiplayer battles.

Steam Deck performance is okay. It's playable, but you will need to adjust the controls to your liking, and do expect slight dips from 30 FPS in intense combat. You may not want to play serious, ranked multiplayer on your Steam Deck, but it's decent enough for a casual game with friends.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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Monaco 2 was provided by Humble Games for review. Thank you!

Monaco 2 is the latest entry in Pocketwatch Games’ stealth-action series, published by Humble Games. It follows up on 2013’s Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine with some striking visual upgrades, opting for a 3D isometric view instead of the prior 2D visuals. There are also plenty of gameplay upgrades, most notably, introducing procedural generation within its levels. At its core, though, this is still a game about heists, sneaking, and fast-paced getaways. Let’s see how it fares on the Steam Deck and how it elevates a well-respected and loved formula!

Like its predecessor, Monaco 2 is all about executing high-stakes heists with a colorful cast of characters, each offering unique abilities. This time around, the codename characters now have actual names, and interesting designs too. On top of this, each character is well-voiced and has some nice depth.

In Monaco 2, you navigate through 3D isometric environments, such as hotels, museums, and high-security buildings, to avoid guards, pick locks, and gather as much loot as possible before making your escape. However, unlike most traditional stealth games where the goal is to remain unseen, Monaco 2 seems more focused on speed and coin collecting. The game doesn’t seem to concern itself with how you do it, but essentially, get in, grab everything in sight, and get out.

With that in mind, the difficulty leans heavily toward the easier side, allowing you to pace from room to room, mostly passing guards quickly enough to prevent the guards in said room from being alerted, at least in the main story mode, it plays like that. Even when you do get spotted, you rarely feel overwhelmed and in danger, especially in the first half of the main story.

Most levels allow for quick getaways, and while obstacles like locked doors or complex layouts occasionally slow you down, as long as you keep moving (even just circling the same room until you make a choice on where to go next), you never truly feel at risk of failing. That said, if you’re the kind of player who thrives on leaderboard competition, the real challenge comes from optimizing your runs to be as fast and lucrative as possible, getting every coin, diamond, and item possible.

If you are defeated, life will be lost, and you will return to the character selection screen, requiring you to select someone new to take over and “rescue” yourself as well as complete the task at hand.

Adding unique abilities to each character on top of their default quirks is a great addition to add more reason to jump back into past levels and collect those diamonds! These abilities drastically change the way you approach each level. For example, Sake’s dash ability will help you get from A to B super fast, especially in guard-heavy areas, whereas using Uma completely flips the script and now allows you to beat up any enemies in your way and stun them.

During each level in Monaco 2, you can also pick up items such as lockpicks to help unlock doors and cases quicker, crossbows to stun enemies from afar, or smoke bombs to help you get out of a sticky situation. Adding these and deciding which to equip and when to use can help you slide by trickier portions of levels with ease. Smoke bombs especially feel really overpowered. Even if you have multiple guards on top of you, dropping a smoke bomb leaves them clueless, and you can just slip away with ease.

While there are plenty of levels, all with varying floors, layouts, and sizes, the environments don’t evolve much. This is even more prevalent on repeat playthroughs in the other game modes. The levels can be procedurally generated, but each run feels largely the same, even with minor layout shifts and different character choices. I found myself asking: beyond leaderboard climbing and grinding for diamonds to unlock cosmetics and abilities, what’s the real incentive to replay old missions? The procedural generation is a fun mechanic, but its impact on overall replayability is questionable.

Once you finish the main campaign, you unlock Daily Heists, a mode that reintroduces story levels but with a higher base difficulty and randomized enemy/item placements. It’s a great way to shake things up, but locking this mode behind full story completion feels like a misstep. It would’ve made more sense to unlock the Daily Heists for each level as you progress rather than all at once at the end. It adds much more challenge, but unless this type of game is your jam, you may be a bit burnt out by the time you reach the best mode of Monaco 2.

The solo experience here is fine, but I think games like this thrive in co-op. I managed to get a decent amount of time in couch co-op with my wife, which elevated the game tenfold. We picked our characters to complement each other and communicated constantly, splitting up when available and supporting each other in trickier situations. During one level, I had run out of smoke bombs and tripped a security camera. Thankfully, my wife had a smoke bomb on hand to save the day, and we both escaped smoothly. The chaos of coordinating break-ins and getaways adds an extra layer of fun, even if the overall experience remains fairly straightforward.

Monaco 2 - Steam Deck Performance

While Monaco 2 is playable on the Steam Deck, it is not the most optimized experience. The frame rate fluctuates heavily, jumping between 25-55 FPS depending on the action on screen. The best solution I found is to lock the frame rate to 30 FPS for a smoother experience, keep the Textures on Medium, and disable MSAA. You can get away with High Textures early on, but it does seem to cause issues on later stages, so you might want to stick with Medium throughout.

Each level is a complete roll of the dice on whether the Steam Deck will be able to provide a smooth performance, but with these settings, most levels were able to hold at 30 FPS, with a few dips here and there.

Alongside this, Monaco 2's gameplay just isn’t suited for the Steam Deck’s smaller screen. The game’s isometric perspective works well in theory, for the objective of the game, but in practice, smaller details like guards, items, and some interactable objects are tough to spot in its structure. This is partly by design; many elements are meant to remain hidden until within your character’s line of sight, but the small screen size amplifies the issue. Zooming in is possible, but it then restricts your view and ability to plan ahead. I think this is where the switch to a 3D isometric look has harmed the overall experience compared to its predecessor.

If the Steam Deck is your only device and you are desperate to play Monaco 2, my recommendation is to play docked or on a larger display and pray the next level you enter isn’t going to fry your frame rate.

Load times are another weak spot. They’re surprisingly long, and where the temperature tends to spike the highest (around 65-70C), especially when starting new levels. This is pretty frustrating and negatively impacts your enjoyment when you’re eager to jump back into a heist.

Battery life lasts up to and around 2.5 hours on a full charge, which is plenty of time to jump into a handful of heists, whether solo or with a friend.

Despite the screen size issues and frame rate inconsistency, everything else seems to work nicely on the Steam Deck. Controls are mapped nicely, and battery life, again, is fine. It’s just a shame that its biggest drawbacks are the biggest factors when considering if something is suitable for the Steam Deck.

Accessibility

Currently, there are no real accessibility features available in the settings. Given the game’s high-speed nature, clearer UI scaling options and customizable text sizes would be welcome additions. If you struggle with small on-screen details, playing in docked mode is suggested.

Conclusion

Monaco 2 sticks to its heist-based roots while adding procedural generation and a fresh coat of paint, but doesn’t do enough to capture my attention for more than a level or two at a time. The main story feels too easy, with little sense of danger, and while randomized modes add variety, levels quickly start to feel repetitive. Daily Heists offer a tougher challenge, but locking them behind full completion limits their impact.

On the Steam Deck, performance is mixed. Frame rates swing drastically unless locked, small details are hard to see on the screen, and long load times break the flow. It’s playable, but not very well optimized for handheld gaming. If you’re set on playing, docking to a larger screen is likely the better option.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

Grit and Valor - 1949 was provided by Megabit Publishing for review. Thank you!

Grit and Valor - 1949, a game I’ve eagerly anticipated, is now available! My time with the closed beta earlier this year was quite enjoyable, and this tactical roguelike by Milky Tea Studios is a compelling choice for fans of the genre. Despite issues like mech control, the game's engaging tactical gameplay makes it a worthwhile experience.

Grit and Valor 1949 is set in an alternate history of Europe after Nazi Germany pioneered powerful mechs to change the course of the war. Despite the Allies being able to salvage their mech technology in time, it was too late to stop the Axis powers, and they had overtaken all of Europe and Britain. With the allies on the brink of defeat, this is where you come in. Joining a small resistance, you must take back Europe from the Axis powers across a gigantic map, starting with the UK off the coast of Scotland.

It is not the most original plot, and I found the fightback concept a little nonsensical. However, some actions made sense, like how the Allies planned to smuggle an EMP into the heart of Axis territory to crush their technological edge over outright military dominance. The enemies are all cartoony evil, as one can expect from Nazis. Still, I will never complain about having more chances to blow them up. Regardless, I wish the enemies had more personality than mustache-twirling Voldemort clones.

The atmosphere is just as fantastic as in the beta, and the visual design is one of the game’s biggest strengths. While the maps are tiny, they are highly detailed and full of character. The battlefields vary depending on where you are, with a good range of terrains and chokepoints. Yet you don’t get much time to bask in the scenery, and the frantic combat will keep you on your toes. You have to use your units, abilities, and whatever terrain advantages you can get because this game is no pushover.

The gameplay is reminiscent of Into the Breach, with small fields and high stakes, but Grit and Valor favors real-time combat over the slower turn-based approach. You start with your command vehicle and a couple of mechs and must hold off waves of Nazi soldiers with your limited resources. If you lose your escort mechs or your commander's vehicle, you lose the run. The game is meant to be hard and replayed constantly, and the depth of the unlocks is extensive. This constant replayability ensures that the game never gets boring, as each run presents new challenges and opportunities for improvement.

A pause function was added for this full release, which is one of the improvements I loved. While I liked relying on my reflexes to position my units in response to the growing waves of Axis forces, having a pause option is a relief. The game is pretty stressful already, so I appreciate this change.

While the mission goals are usually simple, the game throws a few optional curveballs your way. Sometimes, there are enemy towers to destroy, or the Axis will bring in more powerful foes. The resistance will also support your units through airdrops with randomized upgrades. Health carries over between missions, and while you occasionally get the chance to do some repairs, these opportunities are few and far between.

The campaign map will be familiar to those who play Slay the Spire, with branching paths and events sprinkled between combat missions. Some allow you to hire another mech, while others can bring extra salvage opportunities from markets and underground operatives. As is the case in roguelikes, death is not the end. The resistance has a hub area you return to with permanent upgrades and facilities to develop. I won’t be the only one surprised at Grit and Valor’s depth, and there’s enough content to keep players invested.

While some things have improved since I played the beta, some problems with control hamper the experience. Ordering your units around feels slippery. It is easy to misclick and order the wrong unit to a different location. To make matters worse, you cannot change a unit action until it has completed the last one. I lost a couple of runs through these accidental commands, then watched with horror as my command unit trundled into an upcoming wave of Nazi mechs and got blown up.

While this is a major issue, it does not make Grit and Valor a bad game. The gameplay and atmosphere are excellent, with enough depth to keep roguelike fans invested. The game's technical performance, while stable for the most part, could use some improvement. However, these issues do not detract significantly from the overall experience, and as long as Milky Tea Studios fixes the control gremlins, tactical game fans are in safe hands.

Grit and Valor 1949 - Steam Deck Performance

Grit and Valor - 1949 is rated as Verified by Valve, and despite the control problems I mentioned, this is a solid overall experience on the Steam Deck.

Full controller support is available out of the box. Despite the current issues, you can easily navigate all the essential controls. Grit and Valor lack custom graphical options and the ability to change controller key binds. Hence, it is fortunate that the game plays reasonably well. Unfortunately, the game cannot hit 90FPS on the Steam Deck OLED even with a full TDP, but it’s easy to lock the frames to 60FPS and go from there. At 60FPS on stock settings, Grit and Valor play smoothly and look good.

Recommended Settings

The only settings you can tweak in graphics options are screen resolution and a simple texture preset between Low, Medium, and High. There’s no way to know what these presets change because the game does not tell you. Still, I found Medium settings to be the best balance between visual quality and performance. High saw very little in the way of visuals from what I saw and bumped up the power drain significantly, so for my recommended settings, Medium is the way to go.

While the game is a smooth experience, the stock TDP preset will cause a high power drain, especially during combat sections. A lot happens on screen, with waves of Axis soldiers bearing down upon your outnumbered resistance and all the death and fire effects. Without tinkering with TDP, you’ll see an average power draw of 15 watts. While this is pretty high, you will still see around three and a half hours of battery life on the Steam Deck OLED.

Battery Saver Settings

Grit and Valor - 1949 scales reasonably well with a low TDP, and I was pleasantly surprised at how much battery life it can squeeze out of it. If you are like me and want to get as much juice out of the Steam Deck as possible, you can work wonders with our limited tools.

I found that a 30FPS/60hz lock, low graphics preset, and a 4-watt TDP saw the best results, finding that perfect balance between battery life and performance without sacrificing too much on visuals. The graphics are a little blurrier on Low settings, but the game still looks decent. I saw a couple of dips in framerate during some combat animations, but otherwise, the performance is decent.

Of course, the main draw of this setting is the battery life gains. The average power draw dropped significantly to around 9 watts, even during combat scenes. I frequently saw it drop below that. That is an impressive gain of over 90 minutes on the OLED Steam Deck.

Accessibility

Grit and Valor - 1949 is available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish - Spain, Japanese, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Polish, Russian, Korean, and Ukrainian.

Grit and Valor - 1949 has many accessibility features. There is a colorblind mode, a high contrast mode with strength and brightness sliders, and the ability to customize allied and enemy unit colors.

You can also change v-sync, display subtitles, invert camera rotation, adjust the camera sensitivity, toggle helpful tooltips, and auto-skip loading screens. The only accessibility issue is the lack of gamepad customization; otherwise, this is an impressive showing.

Conclusion

Grit and Valor - 1949 is an interesting tactics roguelike that packs much more depth than it seems on the surface. The alternate history setting, while nothing new, is interesting enough with the cool mechs you get to wield in combat, and the standard gameplay loop is solid. It looks great with a solid sound design, which is another thing in its favor.

However, some things need a lot of improvement. The odd control issues make things much more frustrating than they should be. It should be a simple enough fix, although the cartoon evil of the Axis in the campaign is not. The latter problem is my nitpick over genuine gripes with the controls. Overall, Grit and Valor - 1949 needs some fine-tuning, but the tactical gameplay with a staggering amount of content is on point. For its base 20$ price tag, you are getting a lot of bang for your buck.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

Sid Meier's Civilization 7 was provided by 2K for review. Thank you!

After what seemed like the longest wait in history, Sid Meier's Civilization 7 has finally launched. While everyone knew that this new entry to the series would bring many changes, it's quite hard to overstate just how much Civilization 7 shakes up the formula for Civilization games. While some core elements, such as the way units function in the game, remain largely unchanged, the rest of the game has seen a pretty dramatic overhaul in how things are done.

Civilization 7 is based around 3 ages: Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern. In a standard game, players will progress through all 3 ages, and gameplay will shift dramatically as you advance between them. The Antiquity Age is all about founding your core cities, making initial contact with your neighbors, and perhaps even conquering them to lessen the competition later on. The Exploration Age opens up the full world map by having ships that can navigate the oceans, and the Modern Age encourages players to confront each other by having little land left to seize while giving players a high city limit.

When the current age ends, which is determined by a set number of turns that can be decreased if a civilization is very technologically advanced, everyone's cities (besides their capitals) will revert to towns, meaning you can only purchase units/buildings there, not produce, becoming more reliant on your capital. Civilizations may also lose a large amount of their army if they don't have enough Army Commanders available to support them between ages, and all units are transported back to their cities. Thus, the ages function like phases in the game, sort of a soft reset where Civilizations will somewhat start afresh. Still, with the territory and bonuses they accumulated in the previous age.

Wars also won't carry on between ages, although if you were previously at war, you'll start the age with a relationship penalty with any AI states you were at war with.

Does this system work well? It depends on your approach. In my initial games, I didn't understand the Age system, nor was it very well explained in the game, which became a bit of a theme with Civilization 7. Therefore, I found the age system a little frustrating at first. Once you understand that you need Army Commanders to keep your army between ages and that the Legacy Points system counts towards your final victory and carries over between ages, it makes much more sense.

Therein lies the issue I have with Civilization 7. I think the actual mechanics of the game are pretty interesting and, for the most part, work well. The problem is that the game just isn't explained or presented in an understandable fashion. I've spoken to a couple of others who have played, and they also didn't understand the Legacy Points system on their first game or even knew how to view what points they had. In a Civilization 7 Livestream hosted on the Firaxis Twitch channel, a player pointed out that there is no way to check what bonuses you have previously selected for your civilization in some cases.

Once you've played a few games and understand how it all works and how you need to play the game to win, I quite like this new direction that Civilization 7 goes in. It just needs to explain itself to the player better. Right now, it's treating players like they should know how all these mechanics work, but even if you are a Civilization veteran, these mechanics are brand new, and you won't understand them. This can be exacerbated by tutorials seeming to be disabled in multiplayer matches.

In a game like Civilization 7, players need to be given data clearly and understandably, and the UI isn't the best at providing the info needed. Right now, you go in assuming it will be like the other Civilization games, and the game doesn't tell you that it's any different at first, it's something you don't realize until later on when you realize you've fallen behind the competition.

The greatest pleasure I had from Civilization 7 was expanding and growing my empire. As cities grow, each population gained lets you claim another tile around the city, both giving that tile's resource yield and visually constructing buildings on that tile. It makes the game take on an almost city-builder aspect at points. Roads are now automatically constructed between cities, and "worker/builder" units are a thing of the past, with the city growth mechanic instead being how you improve tiles and their yield, and I like that change.

Presentation-wise, Civilization 7 feels like a step up. The game board is presented well, with varied biomes, with cliffs and coastlines looking nice. The expansion of cities across the world map makes the cities feel much more realistic and grand compared to the single-tile cities of the past. The music is also a plus point, as in classic Civilization games, it changes depending on your civilization, so it's always nice to hear a mix of cultural music.

There are some bugs right now in Civilization 7, and unfortunately, they mostly seem to plague the already-troubled UI system. Occasionally, tool-tips won't display, windows are sometimes displayed in the wrong order, and a couple of times, the controls on my gamepad entirely stopped functioning for a few seconds. We also had some issues with certain icons and in-game assets taking a long time to load, such as a city not visually appearing for several seconds or technology icons not being present for a while. I razed a city, and the name stayed on the map for the rest of the game.

Diplomacy with the AI has always been an issue in the Civilization games, and while I feel like the AI in Civilization 7 is a bit more measured in their approach, and you can understand why they take certain actions now, there are still some issues. When I was fighting the Romans for example, they offered me a city in exchange for peace, I accidentally took the city off the table, but when I re-added the city to the table, the game said the AI would reject the offer. Sure enough, when I attempted to propose the offer, it was rejected, even though it was the offer the AI had made me.

We also had several issues with multiplayer matches, where players were getting desynced and crashing to the desktop. While it was generally fine with two or three-player matches, once we added a fourth, someone always had an issue at some point.

Is Civilization 7 a bad game? By no means. It's fun, and some aspects feel improved by the game's slightly faster-paced, streamlined nature. But I can't help but feel that if the game had been given 2 or 3 more months in the oven, it would have launched to a much better reception. There are things that are straight-up missing from the UI that would be good to know. The new mechanics are not explained properly to newcomers or veterans of the series, and the bugs that crop up from time to time just exacerbate the situation.

Sid Meier's Civilization 7 - Steam Deck Performance

Civilization 7 feels like it was designed with the Steam Deck in mind, and that might not be so much of a surprise if you remember that the game is also on the Nintendo Switch. It supports 1280x800 as a resolution, so there are no black bars. It has the best controller support of any game in the series, and the text and UI are legible throughout.

Although I do have some problems with the UI, as I mentioned above, its layout is perfect for a handheld experience.

In SteamOS, I limited the frame rate to 30 FPS and the TDP to 8W.

When it comes to the graphical settings, the game defaults you to pretty decent settings, it seems as though Firaxis fine-tuned the settings for the Steam Deck themselves, which I decided to stick with for this one. Pushing the visuals higher makes it stutter when trying to zoom in and out, and going lower is possible with higher frame rates but drains the battery unnecessarily. The default settings are already low for battery drain, and moving to 40 FPS isn't as beneficial for this kind of game.

CivilizationVIISettings1 — *Click images to enlarge*

CivilizationVIISettings2 — *Click images to enlarge*

At these settings, the game pretty much runs at 30 FPS the vast majority of the time. Zooming into the cities will cause stuttering and slowdown, which can't be avoided. But as long as you play at a standard zoom level, you shouldn't see performance problems.

The power draw on my Steam Deck OLED was steady at around 9W- 11W, and temperatures were around 55C- 60C. So you can expect around 4.5 hours of battery life from a Steam Deck OLED and around 3.5 hours from a Steam Deck LCD.

Accessibility:

Sid Meier's Civilization 7 has a few accessibility options, such as rebindable controls, colorblind assistance, adjusting the font size, and displaying subtitles in cinematic scenes.

Conclusion:

Sid Meier's Civilization 7 is a good game at its core. When you're deep into playing the game and you understand the concepts and mechanics of it, it all works quite well together. Still, while you're learning the game, it can be a pretty unpleasant experience, plagued with unexplained game mechanics and UI issues that make the whole thing more confusing than it needs to be.

One thing you can't deny about Civilization 7 is that it runs beautifully on the Steam Deck. The graphics look good, the battery life is long, the performance is mostly smooth, and the controls are surprisingly well-adapted to a controller. You can play just as well on the Steam Deck as you would on a desktop PC.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

Knights in Tight Spaces was provided by Raw Fury for review. Thank you!

I never played Fights in Tight Spaces when it first came out, but after playing a bunch of Knights in Tight Spaces, I really wish I had. The game is a thoroughly enjoyable experience with great gameplay mechanics, an interesting art style, and a good amount of content to keep you busy. There are a couple of issues here and there, but there are way more pros than cons.

The basic premise of Knights in Tight Spaces is essentially a tactical battler, where your party is placed on a grid on a small map, and the actions you can take are dictated by the cards you hold in your hand. Each map might have specific objectives, but generally, you aim to defeat all enemies on the map or survive a certain number of turns. The entire gameplay is based on this battling system, so it has to work well, and it surely does.

The cards you can get are varied and allow you to set up some great combos that feel satisfying to pull off. All movement and attacks have to be done by playing a card, so you have to strategize which party member should use which cards to maximize the effectiveness of your turn. For example, one card might let you advance a space and attack, while another could make your character attack and retreat a space. Using these 2 cards in succession could allow you to make an attack on an enemy and then a further attack and pull your party member back to safety for the end of your turn.

You are also alerted to what attacks your opponents plan to take on the next turn, allowing you to try and position your party in a way that protects them from damage by playing your cards right, similar to games like Into the Breach.

Whether or not you can use a card depends on either your "momentum" or "combo" points. Momentum is granted at the start of each turn, and the combo is built by performing successive actions. If you've planned your moves well, you could play every card in your hand for a truly devastating turn. Your hand gets wiped after each turn, and new cards are drawn, so it's best to plan to use as many as you can.

Yes, there is a degree of RNG to all this gameplay, and on one specific occasion, I found the card system frustrating. Namely, it kept giving me attack moves when I was against a boss that could teleport my character around the map, meaning I needed a lot of movement cards to get close to the enemy. This resulted in about 7-8 turns in a row where I couldn't attack my opponent. My character also had enough "block" stat that the boss couldn't deal enough damage to hurt me, resulting in an endless stalemate if the enemy AI had chosen to keep teleporting me.

But generally, the game does a good job of rewarding your strategic skill, and if you lose a battle, you'll probably realize the turning point or action you took that put you in the losing position. There are also many difficulty settings to choose from, so you should be able to find the setting that suits your skill level and is enjoyable for you.

The overworld is where you'll decide what path to take. Most paths result in a battle, but some might result in a tavern where you can heal and recruit additional party members or a blacksmith where you can upgrade or buy new equipment.

Knights in Tight Spaces does have a storyline, which takes place in the form of written dialogue in the overworld as you navigate between certain battles. It's fairly generic as storylines go. Essentially, an unlikely hero is drawn into the action by forces beyond their control, and you now have to protect the kingdom from various threats that are posed to it. It's nothing special, but it serves as a purpose for the battles to take place.

Visually, the game prefers to make clear distinctions for characters rather than flesh them out with detail. The members of the player's party will be in green, neutral parties will be in yellow, and various factions you fight against will be colored red or purple. I much prefer this way of handling it, as it helps you as a player to see the situation and who your targets are immediately, making mistaken identities very unlikely. The environments are fairly detailed but stylized and kept on the more basic side.

Knights in Tight Spaces is an excellent tactical deck-builder. The story mode isn't too long, and if you beat it on your first attempt, it'll likely only take you about 4-5 hours, but there are other modes to try out as well, such as the Endless mode to test how far you can go, and the "Daily Play" mode to compare yourself against others. The balance of the card system and the feeling of satisfaction as you pull off a combo of moves to devastate your enemies or beat a battle without taking any damage is hard to beat.

Knights in Tight Spaces - Steam Deck Performance

Knights in Tight Spaces has excellent controller support and supports 1280x800 as a resolution, so there are no black bars around the screen.

There is, unfortunately, some very small text in the game that is hard to read, but it's generally not crucial text, so you can play just fine without it.

There isn't really much in the way of graphics settings. Aside from the resolution, there's just a tickbox for "High-End Graphics," which seems to improve some lighting. However, it also impacts performance quite a bit, so we have to keep it off on the Steam Deck. With those settings, we must limit the game to 30 FPS with the SteamOS Frame Limiter and run a TDP Limit of 11W.

Knights in Tight Spaces holds a steady 30 FPS at this point. While earlier maps and battles can run at 40 FPS, I found that once you reach "Quest 2", the game gets more intense and struggles to hold 40 FPS in battles.

The power draw was around the 10W-13W range, although some maps towards the end of the game can hit 15W, and temperatures were around 55C. So expect around 4 hours of battery life from a Steam Deck OLED and 3 hours from a Steam Deck LCD.

Accessibility:

Knights in Tight Spaces isn't very accessible, besides disabling blood and making certain environmental hazards stand out more.

Conclusion:

Knights in Tight Spaces does pretty much everything right for a tactical deck-builder. It has many cards, presents information clearly to the player, and has various difficulty options to make the game balanced for everyone. The RNG of drawing cards can be a little frustrating, but it's all part of the game and is a small issue compared to the fun that can be had here.

Performance on Steam Deck isn't the best considering how the game is presented, but it's still perfectly playable, and if you can overlook some small text, you can have a great time playing Knights in Tight Spaces on your Steam Deck.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

Two Point Museum was provided by SEGA for review. Thank you!

Two Point Museum joins other Two Point games, such as Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus, in the strategy management genre. As the name would suggest, in this one, you're taking charge of Museums, aiming to provide your visitors with the ultimate curated experience. That inherently comes with a problem, though, as museums are stereotypically dull. So, how do you make a game about running a museum have some excitement? Two Point Museum tries to answer that question.

Two Point Museum follows in the footsteps of its predecessors like Two Point Hospital, whose objective is to build up a successful museum by presenting exhibits and designing your museum efficiently. During the campaign, you'll be running several museums, and the game will ask you to jump between them at various points to advance them further and obtain higher star ratings.

Just like Two Point Hospital (and Theme Hospital before it), Two Point Museum brings back the "room" system, but it's a bit different here. "Rooms" aren't the focus anymore. You're running a museum, so you focus on organizing spaces that flow naturally and provide enough space for some rather huge exhibits. The room system here is pretty much reserved for souvenir shops, private staff areas, and toilets.

This change does, however, work in this game's favor. You aren't always organizing your available space into squares or rectangles anymore, so you can be much more creative when presenting your exhibits. You could even remove most walls and have a large open exhibition center if that's your style, or simply use some basic rope partitions to guide your visitors.

The strategy element of the game comes from placing "Info Boards" and other decorations that can create "Buzz" around your exhibits, effectively leveling them up and making them more appealing to visitors. This means that you'll have to plan where your exhibits are placed and where you can place info boards to get the most effective placements. It's not the end of the world if you aren't "optimal", as the Info Boards and decorations are cheap, but it's cool that the mechanic is there to promote some form of organized building.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of Two Point Museum is the expedition system. New exhibits to display don't just show up at your doorstep. Instead, you'll need to hire experts in various fields, as well as other staff, to go out in search of the next big thing to show off in your museum. Random events can happen during expeditions that can affect the outcome, and you can use items to enhance the outcome or protect your crew from any unexpected surprises.

At the end of the expedition, your crew will return with a crate containing an exhibit. It could be an extra part of an existing exhibit, such as another part of a skeleton, or a smaller, stand-alone exhibit. Either way, the game enters a "lootbox-esque" opening cutscene when you reveal what's in the crate, which aims to build some excitement, and it does a decent job of doing it, although it can sometimes be hard to muster up excitement about finding a tail.

The game has a decent number of exhibits, and it can be interesting to see what you get each time. You can send your experts off to different areas, which will yield different results. Some will give you prehistoric exhibits, others botanical and marine life. Unfortunately, many of the exhibits are "joke" exhibits, such as the "Disk Fossil," which is just a floppy disk embedded in some dirt. Clownfish have actual red clown noses on them, and Starfish wear sunglasses.

While I get that the Two Point games lean into being humorous, the whole thing just feels like they're trying too hard, and it feels out of place in a museum environment to have all these comical but silly designs mixed in with real ones.

Unfortunately, the "humor" of the game let me down. While games like Theme Hospital kicked it all off by having tannoy announcers make humorous quips about situations in the hospital, Two Point Museum attempts to carry this forward into the museum environment, and it just falls a bit flat.

The announcer and radio DJ make fairly constant jokes that quickly get repetitive and just aren't very funny anyway. They might appeal to some, but I found myself disabling the voices in the game pretty quickly. Thankfully, the voice volume is separate from all other volume sliders in the game, so you can disable them without affecting the rest of the game.

The game also seems to be incredibly easy. There are no difficulty options, and I never encountered a point where I was actually losing money. I found myself pretty much not paying attention to the money I had while I built my museums, as cost never really became an issue for me.

I also ran into a couple of bugs while I was playing. For example, at one point, another staff member came to take over a ticket stand, and the staff member they took over from got trapped in the ticket stand and couldn't leave because the other staff member was in the way. This led to them being unable to fulfill their needs and threatening to resign. It could be resolved by simply picking up and moving the staff member manually, but I shouldn't have needed to do that.

Two Point Museum is an interesting concept. It's a brave move to take something stereotypically dull and make a game out of it. Do I find it as interesting as a hospital simulator? No, I don't. But the museum angle does open up some new gameplay mechanics, and for those who have been yearning for a museum simulator, you finally have one.

Two Point Museum - Steam Deck Performance

Two Point Museum works really well on the Steam Deck, with full controller support and support for 1280x800 resolution, removing any black borders. It's also pretty easy-going with requirements, with the CPU being the main issue rather than the GPU here.

As we have some flexibility in the settings for this one, I'm offering two presets: one focused on battery life and the other on visual fidelity.

Prioritize Quality Settings - 40 FPS

If you want your floors to look extra shiny and your displays to be gleaming, then you might want to take a look at these settings. They're more demanding on battery life, but do give you a nicer presentation.

In SteamOS, you'll want to set a 40 FPS Frame Limit and set your TDP Limit to 10W.

For graphical settings, you can see the side panel or click the images below, but we are sticking pretty close to the Medium preset here.

We can hold a steady 40 FPS with these settings and we get some pretty nice visuals to boot. We do have the occasional stutter, but it's not anything that's particularly noticeable or affects the gameplay.

Power draw with these settings goes up a notch, so expect around 12W-15W drain on the battery. Temperatures were again around 60C-65C. You can expect about 3.5 hours of battery life from a Steam Deck OLED and around 2-2.5 hours from a Steam Deck LCD.

Battery Life Build - 30 FPS

To maximize your battery life, you'll want to set a 30 FPS Frame Limit in SteamOS, along with a 7W TDP Limit.

For graphical settings, we keep the same as those in the settings above, with the exception of setting Screen Space Reflections to "Off."

At these settings, the game pretty much held 30 FPS. There could be occasional frame drops when something new loaded and a few stutters here and there, but general gameplay was stable.

The power draw for this one was around 10W-11W, with temperatures of about 60-65C. Expect around 4.5 hours of battery life from a Steam Deck OLED and 3 hours from a Steam Deck LCD.

Accessibility:

Two Point Museum has some accessibility options. Importantly for Steam Deck, it has a UI Scale option, which you should set to large, making some difficult-to-read text slightly more legible. You can also disable camera shaking and certain flashing light effects in the game.

Subtitles can be enabled for certain flavor text, like the tannoy announcer.

Conclusion:

Two Point Museum is brave in that it takes aim at an industry that is usually not regarded as all that interesting and tries to make a fun game out of it. Unfortunately, this was attempted by injecting a lot of "humor," which just didn't pay off for me. I'd have much preferred a more authentic museum experience with real fish and exhibits rather than being hit with a joke-a-minute, which rarely pays off. If you can tolerate the comedy, the gameplay works well and there's still an enjoyable experience to be found here.

That being said, Two Point Museum does run great on the Steam Deck, so if you have had your eye on this one and a bit of silliness doesn't put you off, you shouldn't hesitate to get it to play on your handheld.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

Heart of the Machine was provided by Hooded Horse for review. Thank you!

This review was created using an LCD Steam Deck. OLED testing will be carried out at a later date.

As an Early Access title, gameplay and performance is subject to change.

Indie publisher Hooded Horse is one of my favorite game publishers, and Heart of the Machine is another fascinating title under their umbrella. Developed by Arcen Games, Heart of the Machine is surprisingly ambitious for a turn-based 4X title. I love games that push boundaries and the genre they represent, and while that endeavor comes with a steep learning curve, I am enthralled by this game.

Set in a brutal cyberpunk world, Heart of the Machine takes place in a crumbling city filled with criminal gangs and ordinary folk trying to survive. Players take on the role of an illegal sentient AI who escapes their lab and is forced to take shelter in the city.

With unimaginable potential and learning what it means to be alive, Heart of the Machine guides players through an extensive narrative. Early Access can mean many things in the industry, with launch builds ranging from a barebones experience to a ‘fully playable’ game needing further polish. For this title, players can play the prologue, Chapter One, and a large chunk of Chapter Two. It might not sound like much content, but this is an incredibly complex game that will make the content worthwhile.

Chapter One is an extensive tutorial, and the gameplay loop gradually reveals itself to the player. You set up a Network Tower as a base of operations and develop structures to bolster your processing power while recruiting androids you find in the procedurally generated city. Androids can be used to scout and find spots to investigate to further your growth, but be warned that Gang Members around the city can attack and steal their gear.

All units have a movement point system that replenishes every turn, but I like how everyone shares the action point system (mental energy in this game), so you have to be cautious when planning. Moving androids around the map also uses up an action point, and in the beginning, you have limited power while trying to survive.

I recommend playing the tutorial. It guides players through the gameplay loop, but it took me a while to scratch the surface, even with the in-game codex. Despite its complexity, Heart of the Machine is one of the more accessible 4X games I have played. It takes time to learn the tricks, but it is fairly easy to wrap your head around. I appreciate how Arcen Games also eases you into the gameplay, with mechanics and abilities gradually opening up the more you play so you don't get overwhelmed.

Chapter Two is when the game takes the training wheels off, and the full scale of the game sinks in. Even while you’re scrambling about developing your city, there are devastating Doom events that will strike the city and must be prepared for. The default mode gives more time to explore and experiment, but there are higher difficulty modes if you fancy an even more significant challenge. A Final Doom is the ‘endgame’ to fight against, but it is not the end even if you fail.

The difficulty ramps up after the first power grid is built and you receive your first narrative decisions. Many choices are offered to you that shape the narrative, and it is deeply compelling. It is around this time that the first severe attack on your Network Tower begins, and it initially caught me completely off guard.

Buildings get destroyed quickly, and after a certain amount of damage, they will stop working until they are repaired. My first significant battle with enemy forces became a hilarious struggle as I desperately moved my team of androids back to the Network Tower to protect my fledgling empire. I got pasted, so I had to reload a save from a few turns before moving more androids back to my base in preparation. Lesson learned!

I appreciate the visual design. The sprawling city might lack finer details; you won’t see the streets crawling with people going about their lives, but the cyberpunk ambiance is fitting. Cars trundle down roads and fly over the city, and military forces occupy fortified map sections. It does not sound imposing, but Heart of the Machine looks nicer than many 4X games, and the soundtrack is great, too.

The number of things to keep track of in Heart of the Machine is immense, and the game’s complexity will not be for everyone. If the tutorial were not as intuitive as it is, I would find the game too obtuse, even for veteran 4X players. For example, I spent hours wondering how to increase my Android capacity until I discovered forming a Shell company did that, and I found nothing in the tuition that mentioned it. However, I can happily say it isn't like that, and it was digestible enough to understand the mechanics.

Heart of the Machine - Steam Deck Performance

Arcen Games has paid much attention to making Heart of the Machine work on the Steam Deck, and the overall experience is solid. However, a couple of things hold it back.

While full controller support is not yet implemented, Arcen Games has set up a default controller profile that works well. The interface is also surprisingly easy to read with how many menus you can access, but the amount of information available on screen can make navigating challenging.

Recommended Settings

The number of graphical options you can tweak in the Heart of the Machine is enormous. However, there is a dedicated Steam Deck graphics preset already in the game, and this is the one I used. With stock settings and an untouched TDP, the performance was stable across the board.

This is quite the ambitious 4X game regarding controls and visuals. In this game, you can adjust the camera in many angles, and the city has a lot of action going on in default mode. While the game stayed at 60 FPS most of the time in standard settings, I saw a couple of frame dips when zooming out or during combat with several enemies simultaneously. These drops weren’t frequent and happen on more powerful hardware, regardless. I lowered the FPS cap to 40 with a 40hz refresh rate and found that to be the most stable profile.

With all the effects happening on screen, I should not have been surprised by the power draw, but it did nonetheless. With these settings, I found an average power draw of 17 watts, especially when you progress further in Chapter One and beyond. It often spiked as high as 20 watts during more cluttered scenery. When playing with my recommended settings, you should expect roughly two and a half hours of battery life on the LCD Steam Deck.

Battery Saver Settings

There are some ways to improve battery life. Reducing the number of vehicles that roam the map on screen helps, but we can do more. Turn-based games usually get away with a lower framerate than other titles, so I experimented with TDP settings.

With a 40hz refresh rate, Heart of the Machine still requires some power to run smoothly. Even when I changed the graphics preset to Very Low, I needed at least a TDP of 5 to maintain stable frames. At minimum settings, the visuals are rather blurred and muddy, but it lowered the average power draw to 13 watts, which is a significant drop.

Until we see some performance patches during Heart of the Machine’s post-launch, this is probably the best we can manage for battery life. By sacrificing framerate and some visual quality, you can gain an average of an hour of battery life while maintaining acceptable performance.

Accessibility

The game is available in English, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.

Usually, we list all the accessibility settings available, but there are so many options that I barely know where to begin! There is colorblind support through high-visibility unit colors, larger NPC hitboxes when targeting, toggle screen shake, freely change and toggle all the interfaces on and off, change camera sensitivity, and toggle Vsync.

You can also change the font size, toggle a few different font styles, and change the line spacing. There is more than what I have listed here, but Heart of the Machine’s accessibility settings should be the golden standard from now on.

Conclusion

Heart of the Machine’s ambition and complexity is a breath of fresh air for better and worse. Whenever I thought I had scratched the surface of what was on offer, the game opened up further. The bigger surprise is how well all these mechanics blend, and I have not had this much fun learning a 4X strategy game in years.

However, this is not a game for inexperienced players. The learning curve is steep even for a 4X game, and I have struggled despite my experience with strategy titles. The tutorials and codex go a long way towards making the game not feel obtuse, but it is still a ton of information to digest. The Steam performance is good, but watch out for the high power consumption. This is one early-access game to be excited about, and I can't wait to see how it develops!

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

Ballionaire was provided by Raw Fury for review. Thank you!

Ballionaire seems to be an indie hit that came out of nowhere. Having launched in December 2024, I quickly started hearing about the game in various places, so I was excited to be offered the chance to review the game on the Steam Deck now. Spoilers: this game is a great one to play on the go on your Steam Deck.

Ballionaire presents itself as an "autobonker", with the aim of building the perfect Pachinko machine. You're given a new object to place on each drop, where you must create the best combos and synergies to accumulate the most money possible in as few drops as you can.

The objects you can place on the pachinko board vary wildly. From simple bouncy objects that grant you money for each "bonk", to "carryables" that your ball can pick up, and then deposit at another object on the board for a reward. There are even objects that spawn more balls when you hit them or objects that "age" and offer a reward if they reach a certain age before being bonked by your ball.

All of these mechanics create a complex and strategic experience. You have to think about what objects will work well together (called synergies in the game). For example, placing a campfire that can spawn fireballs next to a candle, which doubles the value of surrounding objects when lit, is a surefire way to get some extra money. Placing a caterpillar which, if left unbonked for five drops, turns into a butterfly which functions as an extra ball every drop can be really useful. But you'll need to place it in a position where it won't get hit, but also still be useful when it turns into a ball every drop.

The aim of the game is to accumulate as much money as possible. You have to pay tribute to the game's ELDERS, whose demands will increase exponentially on your run, meaning you will start small but need some killer combos to satisfy their demands as the run progresses. Each time you satisfy an ELDERS' demands, you can activate a "boon" that will change the game rules, such as modifying gravity or giving you a cash injection after every drop.

There are over 125 objects and 50 boons that you'll be able to use in the game, including some that are locked at first but can be unlocked by a, you guessed it, gacha machine. Fortunately, all the unlocks are done with in-game currency, so no micro-transactions or real-world money are involved here.

You'll also have five boards to play on, ranging from a simple Pyramid structure to more diverse layouts such as a rotating wheel or a slot machine. Each one requires a different strategy due to the layout of the pins and where you can place objects.

This helps the replayability of Ballionaire, because while the game can be finished in just a few hours, you could have a lot of fun finding new strategies and ways to maximize your income. Sadly, the game seems to lack any sort of online leaderboards, which seems to be a missed opportunity and could have been a fairly easy addition.

On several occasions, the controls were a little temperamental, with the d-pad or analog stick not selecting the pin I wanted to place an object on. Fortunately, the right analog stick allows fine cursor control, and you can select it that way.

Visually, the game is fairly pleasant, with a vibrant and sometimes psychedelic art style. It's an interesting one, but not bad by any means. The sounds are good for that serotonin release, having plenty of "bonk" sound effects as your balls hit various objects. It' i's complete with pretty forgettable and fairly non-descript background music, for better or worse.

Ballionaire is a solid title. If you are a fan of pachinko and watching virtual numbers flash up on your screen, indicating you're earning big bucks, then Ballionaire should be on your radar. The game only has 5 boards, but it has various difficulty levels and mod support, and for the MSRP price tag of $12.34, you should easily get a few hours of enjoyment out of this one.

Ballionaire - Steam Deck Performance

Ballionaire is close to a flawless experience on the Steam Deck. The only issue I noticed with the game is that it doesn't support 1280x800 as a resolution, meaning you will get some black bars along the top and bottom of the screen.

The controls are perfect, allowing you to play the game with the gamepad. Ballionaire doesn't have graphical settings, as the game simply doesn't need any.

On my Steam Deck OLED, I could run the game at 90 FPS and get a power draw of around 7-8W, or you can lower that to 60 FPS to drop that another 1W or so. Steam Deck OLED users can easily get 7 hours of playtime from Ballionaire. Steam Deck LCD owners should expect around 4-5 hours. As the game doesn't benefit from 90 FPS, I played at 60 FPS and ran with a TDP Limit of 5W, which seemed to hold a solid 60 the entire time.

Accessibility:

Ballionaire has no accessibility options, although it could be argued that it doesn't need any. Every object is clearly defined regardless of color, the text is quite easy to read even on the Steam Deck's display, and the controls are simple and always displayed on-screen.

Conclusion:

Ballionaire is a fun take on the standard Pachinko format. With a variety of objects you can place on your board, it opens up an endless variety of strategies you can employ. Couple that with the randomness of being unable to choose which objects you can place, which means that Ballionaire can keep you entertained for far longer than you might initially assume. The only thing lacking, which I'm surprised by, is the fact that the game has no leaderboard support.

That, coupled with the fact that the game plays incredibly well on the Steam Deck, offering long battery life and a smooth and pain-free experience, means that Ballionarie earns our "Best on Deck" badge for being a game that you should check out on your Steam Deck.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

SpellForce: Conquest of Eo was provided by THQ Nordic for review. Thank you!

SpellForce: Conquest of Eo is a very intriguing title, unlike any other strategy game I've played before, and I've played my fair share of the Civilization franchise. Still, while SpellForce: Conquest of Eo shares some similarities, it's a unique experience that is easy to understand while offering a lot of complexity.

SpellForce: Conquest of Eo is split into campaigns, either the Path of the Circle or the Origins campaigns, which can be played on pre-made maps or a randomly generated one, with a few shorter scenarios you can play through on procedurally generated maps. While this is the only content in the game, the campaigns are long, several hours each, and you could replay the campaigns and scenarios due to the random generation in the game.

At first, SpellForce: Conquest of Eo might look like another Civilization clone, but it differs greatly in how you play the game. Sure, you play on a hex grid map with borders around your base that you can gather resources within, but that's where the similarities end. In SpellForce, you merely have control of 1 tower, which functions similarly to a city in Civilization, providing a few spaces of borders around it, determining who owns the resources and structures in that area.

You can expand your area of influence through a few means, such as casting spells at certain points on the map that can be activated to create a border around them or by using a special unit to place a Lodge, which also provides borders and lets you claim control of the land. Ultimately, SpellForce is much more about acquiring resources to build your armies and make your Tower (your main base) more powerful by crafting more rooms and unlocking its full potential, and in that way, it differs from many other 4X strategy games.

There's also a heavy focus on questlines. It's not just about defeating your enemies in combat. Throughout the world map, there will be neutral parties that you can interact with, either giving them your aid in exchange for allegiance or forcing them to join you. These can bolster your strength, giving you an advantage against opposing factions. This gives SpellForce an almost "RPG-like" quality, where you are advancing a plot while gaining power and influence.

There are also various structures on the map, like Goblin Camps, where you can hire Goblins if you own the camp, Watchtowers that reveal large portions of the nearby area, and neutral cities, which can offer quests and several other map elements like harvestable resources if you have a unit with the worker skill with you.

When facing an opponent in combat, the game switches to a more tactical view, zooming in from the overworld to a more detailed hex-grid of the local area. This allows you to move individual units on the battlefield in turn-based tactical strategy. While these battles are interesting, with various abilities available to use and tactical positioning required, they do take a rather significant amount of time, usually a few minutes, for a single battle. So unless it's a tight battle that you want to control manually, you'll probably want to auto-resolve most battles when you have a clear advantage, and let the game simulate the fight.

There are various other classes, or archetypes, that you can choose from, such as Alchemists who can craft potions to boost their troops, Artificers who can create glyphs to upgrade their troops, and Demonologist who uses the power of demons to fuel their empires. Each uses a similar system but tends to lean into different playstyles, so there's a choice depending on how you like to play these strategy games.

In my playthrough, I chose to use the Necromancer. This archetype lets you build a room in your tower that you can use to create new monsters to fight for you without upkeep cost. This uses a unique system where the resources you collect on the map have values assigned to them, allowing you to combine various resources with a "soul" to create new types of monsters. It's a really innovative mechanic and a nice surprise in a strategy game like this.

Each of these archetypes also affects the spells you can cast, which are abilities you can use on the overworld map every few turns that can have drastic effects on the world, such as expanding influence or altering a unit in some way. And if you want to really specialize, you can create your own archetype to suit your playstyle, choosing which pages of the Grimoire you want access to, which affects the spells you can cast.

As for presentation, the game is quite pleasing to look at, although nothing particularly impressive. Other strategy games definitely surpass SpellForce in the visuals department. However, that's never really been a key point for strategy games, so it's by no means a big deal. It's certainly not a bad-looking game.

SpellForce: Conquest of Eo is an interesting and unique strategy game. While there is base-building and expansion of borders, a lot of the focus is placed on quests and the gathering of resources to expand and improve your army, moving from one major plot point to another to advance the story. This makes it stand out as unique in the turn-based strategy genre, and it's a game you should check out if you want a campaign-driven strategy.

SpellForce: Conquest of Eo - Steam Deck Performance

SpellForce: Conquest of Eo supports 1280x800 as a resolution, so we don't get any black borders on the Steam Deck. It also has great controller support for a strategy game, so once you get used to the controls, it's perfectly controllable with just your Steam Deck controller.

Recommended Settings - 30 FPS

Set the SteamOS frame rate limit to 30 and no TDP limit.

For this preset, we use the standard settings used by SpellForce: Conquest of Eo when you start it: pretty much everything on High and Anti-Aliasing on SMAA. This gives you great visual quality, and the battery life isn't too bad if we limit it to 30 FPS.

Here are the settings used for reference:

At these settings, the game generally stays at 30 FPS, although at one point, I did encounter a sustained drop to 24 FPS for several seconds for no discernable reason. This seems pretty rare, though, so you should expect a stable framerate.

The power draw is in the middle of the road, mostly holding around 12-17W of battery drain. So you could get around 2-2.5 hours from a Steam Deck LCD and around 3.5 hours of play from a Steam Deck OLED.

Temperatures stayed reasonable, around 60-65C, occasionally getting close to 70C, but the fan never really ramped up.

If you want to increase the battery life a little, you can lower the Shadows and Anti Aliasing to "Low" and "Off," respectively. This lowers your power draw to the 10-14W range, giving you an extra hour or so of battery life.

Accessibility:

SpellForce: Conquest of Eo has text size options, and I'd recommend you set both Font Scale and Tooltip Scale to 120% as it makes the text easier to read on the Steam Deck. There are also ample tutorials that explain the majority of the mechanics in the game, even down to moving units.

Conclusion:

SpellForce: Conquest of Eo is a unique and interesting turn-based strategy. While the focus might not be as much on expanding your empire as it is in games like Civilization, the focus instead of questlines, story, and the world's lore enriches the game and places it in another category altogether. If you're a fan of turn-based strategy and tactical turn-based battles, SpellForce: Conquest of EO might just be the game for you.

As a bonus, SpellForce: Conquest of Eo works flawlessly on the Steam Deck, with a good control scheme and the ability to run the game at 30 FPS with no issues.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

Planet Coaster 2 was provided by Frontier Developments for review. Thank you!

It's hard to believe that it's been over 8 years since the original Planet Coaster hit our screens in 2016, and it's time for the long-awaited sequel, Planet Coaster 2. I was understandably excited for this next installment of the series, but when it launched, it received a very mixed reception from the player base. However, I am very glad I got to try it for myself.

Planet Coaster 2 does stick rather closely to the basics introduced 8 years ago. You are building a theme park, and a lot of the mechanics that were in the original, such as designing your own rides, building paths, making sure your guests are cared for, and staffing your park, are all here.

These mechanics work pretty well. There's a good variety of rides and objects for you to place, with this iteration adding additional rides by allowing players to build water parks. You're able to design your own pool and wave machines and even create a flume that guests can use to slide down into a suitable pool from somewhere else in the park. It's pretty neat and what you'd want in a game that aims to become the ultimate park simulator.

While many of you will probably dive straight into the sandbox mode to build your park just how you want it, Planet Coaster 2 has a fairly decent campaign/scenario mode, with voice-acted characters that will guide you through the basics of designing and running a park, into more challenging objectives later on. I normally don't do the scenarios in these games, but I enjoyed trying them out.

The game also has difficulty options that allow you to tailor the difficulty to your needs, from a fairly easy-going level where it's hard to go bankrupt to a more challenging one that tasks you with having some thought behind each investment you make into a ride.

So this all sounds very well and good. Planet Coaster 2 takes the base of Planet Coaster 1, with its ability to create any theme park you want, with a huge variety of scenery props, custom-designed coasters, a neat pathing system, and turn it up a notch with the addition of water-themed rides and some snazzy new graphics. So what's the issue exactly?

The problems that caused player backlash might be good for Steam Deck users. Firstly, there was an issue regarding the control method for PC players. The game has a UI designed for controllers, and yes, it is more of a console UI, even on the PC platform. While I can imagine that's frustrating for mouse + keyboard players, it works in Steam Deck's favor and makes the menus much easier to navigate.

Secondly, the game currently limits you to 6,000 guests in your park. While that may seem like a lot, bigger parks could have several thousand more guests than that and still function fine. The problem is that the Steam Deck likely wouldn't function. The more guests in your park, the more resource-intensive it becomes, and as you'll see in my performance analysis later in this review, having more than 6,000 guests could pose real problems for playability. The developers are removing this limit for PC players in December, so we'll see if that causes performance issues in the future.

Beyond that, there are some issues currently with AI pathfinding, and I struggled with guests saying they couldn't find a way to ride when the ride was connected to a path right next to them. The staffing system is also a little confusing and isn't explained well, so it would be nice if a tutorial is added explaining how to manage staff (although they do 90% manage themselves), as right now, the tutorial says to "place the staff." Particularly, mechanics seem to have a few bugs associated with them.

By default, the game also allows you to be very liberal with where you place objects, which I disliked. It allows you to place paths through trees and other scenery objects, which makes it look terrible. Fortunately, there's a toggle for whether collisions apply to each type of object, so if you want a nice-looking park, you should consider enabling these extra options.

So, Planet Coaster 2 has its ups and downs. At its core, it's an improvement over Planet Coaster 1 in various ways. Still, the game does have its fair share of bugs, and I can understand some of the limitations the developers have put in place due to the game being on consoles, which is somewhat frustrating for regular PC players.

The developers do seem to be hard at work fixing these issues. However, with a planned changelog for the December patch already released, it's clear the developers know they have work ahead of them, and it's good to see them being fairly transparent with the community.

Would I recommend you dive in and purchase Planet Coaster 2? Well, the price is quite reasonable by today's standards. If you can live with a couple of frustrating bugs and a slightly questionable UI for PC players, then you'll likely get much enjoyment out of this game. It would be my top recommendation for a theme park simulator right now, even though there isn't too much competition in the space.

Planet Coaster 2 - Steam Deck Performance

Planet Coaster 2 fully supports the Steam Deck's 1280x800 resolution, and unusually for a strategy/management game, the controller support is excellent. This is likely a side effect of the game launching on consoles on day one.

The game also offers a Steam Deck preset for its graphics settings, which sets most settings pretty low, except Water, which is put on High for some reason. This is a pretty optimized preset, in my opinion, giving you decent visual quality without affecting the frame rate too much.

Recommended Settings - 30 FPS

If we set the SteamOS frame rate limit to 60, the game will auto-limit us to 30 FPS, and then we don't want a TDP Limit.

I know using the game's built-in Steam Deck preset is a bit boring. But we always ask developers to optimize their games for the Deck, and when they give us a preset that produces good results, I'm all for using it.

In case the preset disappears into the ether for whatever reason, here are the exact settings I'm using and what I found gave the best results overall:

As I said, at first, it might appear like these settings leave too much performance overhead, and you might think we can bump up the graphics for some extra quality. As your park expands and more guests flood in, the game stresses the CPU, and your FPS will quickly plummet. Running a park with 4,700 guests (the max is 6,000 right now), the Steam Deck couldn't reach 30 FPS, mostly running in the 23-27 FPS range, regardless of any graphics settings being used.

The difference between the game's Steam Deck preset and the absolute lowest graphics at this stage was about 2-3 FPS, and with that, you lose resolution quality, reflections, and shadows entirely. So it makes sense to use their preset, as it allows you some visual niceties at almost no performance cost, as the burden is entirely on the CPU by this point in the game.

The power draw stays roughly similar whether you have a large park, with a range of around 19W-21W. Expect about 1.5-2 hours of battery life from an LCD model and 2.5 hours from an OLED model.

Temperatures are on the higher end but still within reason, around 65C-70C and occasionally jumping into the low 70s.

Accessibility:

Planet Coaster 2 has a few accessibility options. You can adjust the interface scale—the max is 100%, which is acceptable on the Deck's display. You can also apply a colorblind filter, mute other audio when narration is playing, and switch the sound to mono, which is useful if you are hearing impaired in one ear. The game does have HDR compatibility as well.

Conclusion:

Planet Coaster 2 isn't revolutionary, but it builds upon the success of Planet Coaster 1, with some neat additions such as Water Parks and some extra variety to what you can build. For what you get, I would say the price is reasonable. Yes, there are some rough edges right now, but these aren't serious dealbreakers and are fixable, so I would still recommend this game to anyone looking for a park builder.

Steam Deck performance is middling. Yes, the control scheme works really well for a controller, and there is a Steam Deck preset given in the graphics menu, but the CPU load is pretty heavy, and as you start to get thousands of guests, you will have to accept playing at 20-25 FPS. When the guest limit of 6,000 gets removed in December, I could see serious performance issues for Steam Deck players if the game isn't optimized more, so it's something to be aware of.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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