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 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.
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.
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.
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.
If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.
A copy was provided by Stardock Entertainment for review. Thank you!
Returning for a long-awaited sequel, Sins of a Solar Empire 2 might leave fans of the franchise somewhat divided in their opinion. That's not to say that Sins of a Solar Empire 2 is a bad game, but more so that it perhaps sticks too close to the original to the point where players might feel a bit cheated.
At first glance, you'd be forgiven for thinking Sins of a Solar Empire 2 is the same game as the original, were it not for the re-designed and slimmed-down UI, the games themselves look incredibly similar. Not to mention the two games share identical ship and station designs, as well as technologies. I even went back to look at the original game and found that some of the voice lines, when you order a ship to move, are identical between the two games as well.
There are some differences, however. The most noticeable improvement in my eyes is the visual effects. Effects such as explosions and certain weapon effects definitely look improved in the sequel compared to the original, and if you zoom in on the ships (which you don't do too often, but it's an option) they are much higher quality than before.
The UI change isn't just aesthetic in appearance too, the UI is functionally different, and dare I say, a bit smarter too. It makes managing your empire a little easier when things start getting spread out and queuing up ships and structure construction well in advance is a breeze compared to a lot of other strategy games that I've played.
As Sins of a Solar Empire 2 follows the original so closely, it at least manages to be a good game to play, with fairly well-balanced factions and plenty of technologies to research, ships and structures to build, and careful strategic planning. The phrase "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" springs to mind, although I'm not sure how much that applies to a game you've waited 15 years for.
Not many games let you go against each other with huge fleets of spaceships, and I view it as a sort of "Stellaris-lite." It's laid out similarly, and you can still have the epic space battles. You just don't have to worry about all the planetary economies and politics as much. Victories will largely be decided by who has the biggest gun here. It's a much simpler approach that anyone can understand.
While your economy is important, it's very much an "upgrade and forget" kind of affair here. You don't need to keep checking in on your planets to see if they're still managed properly and if you're getting the best out of them; it's all flat rates of income determined by the planet's upgrade level.
Ship types, while the same as the previous Sins game, are also diverse and add a lot of variety to how battles play out and look. With fast strike craft launched from your carriers, corvettes outmaneuvering capital ships, frigates holding back to lay siege, and your capital ships taking the brunt of the fire, there are a lot of strategies to employ depending on how you choose to compose your fleet, and the battles are an enjoyable visual spectacle.
Unfortunately, my grievances with Sins of a Solar Empire 2 aren't just limited to how it's so similar to the original from 2008. Sins of a Solar Empire 2 lacks a single-player campaign, so the only modes available in this $50 game are multiplayer deathmatches and deathmatches against the AI on either premade maps or randomly generated ones for 2-10 players. A single-player campaign is in the works, but it's being released as paid DLC or as part of the Content Pass, which costs $60 for the campaign, some scenarios, 6 new ships, and a 4th faction.
It's an outrageous price for something that should be included in the base game. But apparently, we're charging $60 for a new faction and a campaign these days.
That sums up how I feel about Sins of a Solar Empire 2. Is it a good strategy game that's fun and worth looking at? I had a blast playing the game, and I'm glad I got a chance to check it out. But if you already own the original, is it worth the $50 to upgrade? I'm not so sure. You get a few nice visual improvements, a sleeker UI, and probably some improvements to things like the online gameplay, but content-wise, the game is almost identical to Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity/Rebellion.
That's not to mention that the main draw for returning players is likely the single-player campaign and 4th faction, both of which will be sold as paid DLC and not included in the base game, which is a shame.
Sins of a Solar Empire 2 generally runs very well on the Steam Deck. It supports the Steam Deck's native 1280x800 resolution, and although it doesn't have any controller support, it uses fairly generic RTS controls, so the default Keyboard (WASD) + Mouse layout works pretty well with it. The game's system requirements state 1920x1080 is the minimum resolution, but this is more so given the recommended UI scale; the Steam Deck has to run at 67% UI scaling due to this, but it's still playable, if a little small.
The game is surprisingly easy to run, although perhaps not so surprising given how similar it is to its 16-year-old predecessor. Therefore, I'm only offering 1 preset today.
I would recommend you apply a 60 FPS limit in SteamOS, along with a 10W TDP Limit.
In-game, I disabled the Variable Frame Rate, kept Bloom and Refraction enabled disabled Antialiasing, kept Shadows enabled and on "High," kept Dynamic Lighting enabled and on "High," set Effect Counts to "High," and then disabled the Use Only Dark Skybox. You can see the images below if you want the settings in that form.
My game ran at 60 FPS most of the time in these settings. Certain situations did cause dips, such as when fleets were warping between systems or when I was in a large battle with 100+ ships. These could cause drops into the 50s, and some rare effects drop the performance down to the 30s, but they don't appear too often. Given the type of game this is, the game is perfectly playable even at 30 FPS.
Also, the game has a habit of freezing for 1-2 seconds at times, likely due to the excessive amount of VRAM it uses (around 8GB). This usually occurs when zooming in/out, but it can also occur when a lot of visual effects are spawning.
The pictures in the gallery below show some of the most intensive moments I experienced during play.
The power draw stays pretty low, with the game drawing around 10W-14W most of the time. You can expect around 3-3.5 hours of battery life from a Steam Deck LCD and about 4.5 hours from a Steam Deck OLED.
Temperatures stay low in the 55C-60C range, with no audible fan noise.
Sins of a Solar Empire 2 doesn't have any accessibility options. There isn't even support for color-blind users, and ships do not have symbols/shapes attached to them to determine what faction they belong to, which may present some issues. The game does feature UI scaling, but it's disabled on the Steam Deck, as the game technically only supports 1920x1080 or above resolutions for UI scaling.
Sins of a Solar Empire 2 is a solid RTS, although that's to be expected considering how closely it follows its predecessor, a well-received game in the strategy genre. There are a few niceties added to this "sequel", such as a redesigned UI, but it perhaps would have been more accurate to call this game a remaster as opposed to an entirely new game. The $50 price tag is a little hard to swallow given how close it is to the original, and the single-player campaign being paid DLC instead of being included in the base game just adds salt to the wound.
As for how the game works on the Steam Deck, for the most part, it runs pretty well, the performance is great aside from the occasional freezes, and the controls also work decently. However, you may not want to attempt playing online like this, as mouse + keyboard players will be able to act faster than you. You do feel somewhat limited with how fast you can click buttons, as Sins of a Solar Empire 2 is a fairly fast-paced game as far as strategy games go.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.
Railroad Corporation 2 was provided by Iceberg Interactive for review. Thank you!
Railroad Corporation 2 was in Early Access at the time of this review, so content and performance is subject to change.
The transport logistics genre has been going strong for over 30 years now, and I've been a huge fan of it ever since playing Transport Tycoon as a kid on my Windows 95 PC. I'm glad to say that while Railroad Corporation 2 isn't quite as large in scope as something like Transport Tycoon, but it still handles itself well.
The basic premise here is simple: build a functioning (and profitable) railroad network that ferries vital goods between towns and cities to expand further and thus open up further transport routes so you can earn even more money. It's all very capitalist and a perfect setting for a business management game.
Railroad Corporation 2 has a campaign mode with objectives spread across four chapters (or missions). They're all pretty similar, just with a different map and set of objectives to accomplish. You also have the option to play in the sandbox mode, where you build a profitable network without objectives.
Here is where the Early Access nature of the game stands out. There are no adjustable settings for either mode. The campaign will have difficulty options in the full release; however, "Normal" is the only option. Sandbox mode is also set to allow AI opponents and adjustable map sizes and biomes. Right now, there are no AI opponents in the game, the map size is fixed to be "Medium" with about 20-25 towns on the map, and the only biome is snowy.
Thankfully, once you're in the game, there's a decent amount to keep you busy. There's a good variety of resources and production chains for you to get your head around, requiring the creation of reasonably complex and well-thought-out railroad networks. Whiskey Distilleries, for example, need both glass and grain shipped to them before they can output whiskey, which larger cities desire. So you'll need to build a station next to the distillery, find nearby industries that produce grain and glass, create a train route to supply the distillery, and then a further train to take the whiskey produced to a city.
There are plenty of other resources, including logs, planks, paper, flour, bread, quartz, and more. It'll take you a while to familiarize yourself with all the resources and the production chains they're used in, but for the most part, the resources are used to produce more valuable resources, which are then shipped to cities, which allow them to grow. Bigger cities have more plots of land available to buy, and when you buy a plot of land, you can build further industries on that land to open up more potential trade routes or expand the city itself to make it more profitable.
Railroad Corporation 2 also has an interesting mechanic where your trains must purchase the commodities they pick up before transporting them and selling them for profit. Still, if you don't have enough money to purchase the cargo, the train will simply "pause" at its position, even when the money becomes available, which is terribly obnoxious. The game could do with an option to resume the route when money becomes available automatically.
The game's construction element is pretty basic, but it gets the job done. You can build stations beside towns and industries within their "catchment area" to pick up and drop off goods. These stations can be upgraded with facilities that allow you to buy trains, repair trains, refuel faster, etc.
Railroads are constructed using a spline system, where you can just place nodes, and it'll build your railroad along the path following the nodes. Construction of bridges and tunnels happens automatically when the situation calls for it, but constructing them dramatically increases the cost of the railroad. Seeing your sprawling network grow across the map is basic but also satisfying.
You can also place signals that allow you to manage trains more effectively if multiple trains run on one railroad. I'm not hugely into managing logistics that complex, so my extent of this was mainly managing "crossroads" when rails intersected, as there's no way of bridging over or tunneling under existing railroads. Sometimes, I had more than one railroad join up as they arrived at a station, as stations can only have a maximum of four railroad lines.
In terms of progression, if you aren't playing through the objectives and chapters of the campaign, your progression will mostly come from research. You can hire scientists at your office and assign them to research projects that will unlock new trains and upgrade existing ones.
As for the presentation, the game looks fine. It won't win any awards, but it's decent, and you can zoom very far in to see the trains at a good level of detail. Sounds mostly consist of hearing your trains "panting," at least when dealing with steam trains, and the music track is sort of your generic American Country Rock type of affair, with plenty of guitars in use at the very least.
The game does have an online multiplayer mode, which I wasn't able to test, as there were no games running whenever I checked. So, if you want to play this game with opponents, you'll probably want to organize purchasing the game with friends to try it out.
Where Railroad Corporation 2 is currently lacking, however, is in its quality of life features. There are just some things missing that I would consider as requirements for a game of this genre. For example, there's no way to auto-replace trains when they reach the end of their service life. That means you must constantly check your trains to see if they need to be replaced, as their maximum reliability is always falling as they age.
Another thing that's missing is the yearly profit logs for each train. You get a profit/loss log for each train, but it's over the train's lifetime, not yearly, which means you cannot know if a train has recently become unprofitable. You could be running a train at a loss for years if it had been profitable for a few years prior and have no way of knowing. It's small, but you need access to information like this when you're running a business.
At the end of the day, Railroad Corporation 2 is a pretty solid title. The base mechanics are good, but content-wise, it might be a little lacking right now. With only four missions (although they are fairly lengthy), no AI, and only a snow biome to play in, and with the difficulty being on the easier side, it's hard to lose money.
With the abovementioned issues, I'd recommend you wait a while before diving in unless you've been looking forward to this one. If you are interested in transport management games, put Railroad Corporation 2 on your wishlist, as a few months down the line, this could be one of the best in the genre.
Railroad Corporation 2 sadly doesn't support 16:10 resolutions, so you'll have black bars at the top and bottom of your screen. The closest resolution we can play at is 1280x720. The game also has no controller support, so you'll need to make a controller layout, or you can use a controller layout I made called "SteamDeckHQ.com Recommended" in the community layouts.
Text is somewhat hard to read in the game, especially regarding commodities on the map. As they aren't rendered as UI elements, they'll get smaller and larger as you zoom in and out. Fortunately, this does mean you can zoom in to read them.
We're setting the SteamOS frame rate limit to 60, and we'll have no TDP Limit here.
In the in-game settings, I selected the "Low" preset and then set the in-game FPS limiter to 45, as using the SteamOS limiter introduces input lag. You can see the settings I used in the image below.
At these settings, the game runs at 45 FPS sometimes, although when scrolling the map, FPS often drops to the low 40s or high 30s. Also, when you build a railroad, the FPS drops depending on how long the railroad you're building is, to the teens if it's very long. Fortunately, as this is a slow-paced, non-reactionary strategy game, the mild drops to around 40 FPS are barely noticeable, and the game remains pleasant to play, except for the drop when building railroads, which can't be avoided.
The power draw generally stays on the lower side, with the game using around 13W-15W for most of the time.
Temperatures also don't get too high, holding around the 65C-70C range for me, there is some fan noise, but it doesn't ramp up and get irritating.
Railroad Corporation 2 doesn't have any accessibility options right now. This includes no UI Scaling, which is a shame because the game has some hard-to-read text.
Railroad Corporation 2 is a pretty solid start for an early-access title. There are some rough edges, such as the lack of accessibility options, especially UI Scaling where the Steam Deck is concerned, and just options in general for the game. There are also a number of quality-of-life features that really need to be added soon, such as auto-replacement of trains when they reach the end of their service life and more financial information per train.
For now, I would say put this one on your wishlist and let the developers flesh out their ideas, introduce some AI opponents to make the game more challenging, get a biome other than snow, and add some quality-of-life features. The developer roadmap states that a grass biome will be coming in Q2 2025, but it'll be a long wait until Q4 2025 for any AI opponents, which is a shame. You can always play with up to 4 players in online multiplayer, but you'll likely need friends, as the game was dead online when I checked.
Railroad Corporation 2 runs OK on the Steam Deck. Performance is perfectly acceptable for the kind of game this is, and the controls, while not ideal, do work fine. I would love for additional hotkeys added so we can map them to a controller layout though, as the game is severely lacking hotkeys right now, even on the keyboard. From what I can tell, speeding up the simulation time isn't mapped to a hotkey, nor are any of the menus, meaning we need to use the touchpad as a mouse to navigate all menus.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.
Arco was provided by Panic for review. Thank you!
This review was created using an LCD Steam Deck. OLED testing will be carried out at a later date.
2024 has seen many fantastic indie titles, and Arco is among them. If you like tactical games with deep world-building, or if you want a challenge, it will sate those taste buds. I like both, and although Arco pushed me to hell and back on the difficulty front, it deserves its Overwhelmingly Positive score on Steam with every juicy mouthful of berries, and it is a great Steam Deck performer.
Arco draws upon Meso-American culture for its world design, blending some fantasy elements into a delicious RPG. After a short prologue, when players grasp the basic mechanics through an integrated story tutorial (and the massacre of your village), the game picks up many years later with you as a grizzled, grumpy old veteran jaded with the world who has to find those responsible for another village massacre. Expect some great plot twists throughout the story to keep you on your toes.
You will navigate the map through small pixel-art locations to get to your destination, where you will find resources for battle or little mini-quests that open up more places on the map. Every scene brims with detail and little bits of lore, which makes the simplistic exploration more satisfying than it has any right to be. Some games are too heavy-handed with world-building, preferring to vomit lore to the player in overly long dialogue sequences. Arco favors style over substance, and despite the simple graphics and pixel art, I felt emotionally tied to the world.
Many maps hold secrets and their dangers in the form of wild animals or pissed-off bandits looking to make a quick buck. Other areas, such as villages or towns, offer places to barter and a nice way to sell off any loot you pick up. The quests are usually very basic, with little more than fetch quests or clearing infested places, but I never got bored doing them, and they do not feel out of place. You will swap characters in different acts, and they come with unique skill sets but are easy to understand.
The combat is the meat of the game, and it makes me wish we had more of it! It is hard to think of a phrase to summarize Arco’s battle system because it is not seen much in this genre. ‘Superhot Turn Based’ might be the best way to describe it. Enemies will only act when you do, and they are a healthy mix of melee and ranged attacks to keep you on your toes. Some combat arenas have hazards to dodge or use, including fatal drops and spikes. It sounds very simple, and it is, but it is what makes the combat so satisfying. Successfully dodging a gauntlet of bullets and killing all the bandits while hanging on to my last shred of HP, I felt I had achieved something grand. You can only take two items into battle, so I habitually used a health-replenishing item and an offensive tool for my available slots.
With so many deaths plaguing our past, they haunt you in battle with unkillable ghosts that damage you on contact. Unlike other enemies, these little guys move during your turn, adding another little dynamic to the gameplay. You can take your time, but do not dawdle when these spirits come at you.
Arco is not an easy game. Enemy attacks hit hard; you must be strategic with your movement. You have an expansive skill tree to put points into new abilities or upgrade your stats, and you must take advantage of everything possible. Fortunately, Arco boasts a good amount of accessibility options. You can restart a battle at any time with no penalties, and if you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, you can withdraw and try again another time. There is also an Assist mode that allows you to skip some battles if you are struggling and gives you unlimited Dynamite.
A few fights are extremely punishing, and I spent dozens of attempts ramming into a brick wall. By the end, I was pretty sure my character would reach through the Steam Deck screen and sucker punch me in the face. I admit I turned on the Dynamite mode for several of these boss fights. While this greatly improves your damage output, you must still dodge attacks to avoid dying. It's a perfect balance, offering an easier difficulty but still requiring skill to survive the battles.
However, the game has a couple of shortcomings. On the technical side, Arco experienced a troubling launch with quite a few bugs. While Arco has received a lot of bug-fixing patches over the last few weeks, it will crash now and then. I had to force restart the Deck more than once as the game froze mid-combat, and your character can get stuck on terrain during battle or exploration. I also found a bizarre jittering bug with the controls while selecting my weapon during combat.
I encountered an unfortunate freeze upon Act 3, and no matter what I tried, I could not continue. While this was unfortunate, going by the forums seems pretty rare, and I probably just had awful luck. I will keep searching for a solution and update the review if this is fixed.
Despite my bad luck with the technical state, Arco is an easy game to fall in love with. With its fairly unique battle system and great world-building, this is a shining example of how to do strategy games well. It needs a few more performance patches and I would like more graphical options to tweak in the settings. Still, my disappointment with the unfortunate corruption has not sullied my impressions of Arco much.
Arco is classed as Verified by Valve for Steam Deck compatibility, and I find this to be accurate. With its pixel art visuals and full gamepad support, it's a lot of fun on the Steam Deck while performing well with battery life. There are no real settings to tweak in a game that impact performance, so what you see is what you get. If you are running on battery and don’t mind a little extra framerate drops, the 3W TDP setting gives more than an hour extra battery life, at the cost of some more dips.
If you have the Steam Deck docked or plugged into the mains, the default mode with 60hz refresh rate is the way to go for maximum performance. While I appreciate the extra battery life on my Steam Deck, keeping a stock mode with 40hz refresh rate provides the best balance between battery life and performance.
As usual, I began with stock settings (Unlocked TDP, 60hz, 60fps), and Arco was perfectly playable at these vanilla settings. I thought the standard Gamepad controller profile might be a detriment compared to playing it on a PC. Still, I could control my character very well in both the exploration and combat sections. The frame rate stays fairly solid at 60fps, although occasional frame dips occur during intense combat scenes. Thankfully, these are few and far between. The power draw is also decent, even at full power, with an average of 10 watts in most cases. Most of the time, this will be enough for you.
With no way to tweak graphical settings, our options are limited. We can do better on the battery life at the cost of some performance in extreme cases. Capping the refresh rate to 40HZ shaves a little off the power draw while maintaining that smooth framerate. If you want full 60fps, you will have a grand time in Arco while still enjoying over 4 hours of gameplay on the LCD Steam Deck. There is no performance impact by capping the refresh rate to 40hz while gaining a little more battery life: up to an extra hour in most cases, so I recommend this mode the most.
I experimented with TDP settings, and Arco is one of those games that can work at a 3-watt TDP limit! Those little frame dips are a little more frequent at minimum power, especially during combat sequences, but the power draw savings are significant. At this setting, I recorded an average power draw of just 7 watts, granting the LCD Steam Deck an average battery life of nearly 6 hours.
For the smoothest experience I recommend stock settings with 40hz refresh rate, but the turn-based nature of Arco’s combat makes that extra couple of hours in battery life more appealing, while sacrificing only a little performance.
Arco is only available in the English language right now, although more language support has been planned.
The Assist mode can toggle infinite dynamite, turn off the Ghosts, and skip combat. You can change the font style from Normal to Pixel version, adjust volume freely, and adjust the camera pan, screen shake, and hit stop amount. There are no ways to change controls or any graphical settings, and it lacks colorblind support.
Despite the disappointing accessibility options, I had no problems with the controls or reading the text.
Do not let my unfortunate save issue downplay Arco’s strengths. The Meso-American world is breathtaking to experience with its subtle approach to writing and world design, and the combat system is the perfect mix between punishing and engaging. While I hope Arco receives some more patches to squash the last of the bugs, Arco is an easy recommendation.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.
Rogue Waters was provided by Tripwire Interactive for review. Thank you!
I'm always in the mood for some pirating adventures. While Rogue Waters might not give you the freedom of games like Sid Meier's Pirates or Sea of Thieves, it does offer a great nautical-themed adventure that should delight tactical combat and pirate fans alike!
The story of Rogue Waters is one of classic betrayal, with your former captain turning against you in exchange for personal gain. Now, years later, it's up to you to form your crew and embark on a journey of revenge. Of course, when you were betrayed, you naturally gained immortality, as did the rest of your crew, so no matter how many times you fail, you can get up and go again.
This forms the basis for the "rogue" part of "Rogue Waters." In traditional Roguelite form, dying ends your run, but you'll carry over any currency you managed to loot to upgrade your ship and your crew and come back even stronger than before.
These upgrades take a variety of forms. Your ship always starts with some equipment, but using the currency you collect, you can open up additional cannon slots to begin with an advantage. You can also get more module slots to fit on your ship, which typically enhances your crew's abilities, such as giving them more HP or movement in the tactical combat section of the game.
On top of just equipment, your captain and the officers you recruit can also gain experience after each run, allowing them to level up and earn skill points. You can then spend those skill points to give your officers extra abilities and improve their stats.
Once you've got your crew and ship kitted out, it's time to take to the seas, and the game neatly offers you three choices of "raid" to embark on. These vary in length, slightly affecting the type of loot you might find and the ships' fittings you will encounter.
The raids take the form of branching paths, allowing you to choose what you'd like your next encounter to be, although often, there isn't too much choice going on here. It's quite common to be given 2 or 3 choices, which are all ship battles. Very occasionally, you will encounter an event, which is dialogue, where there's a chance to get some free loot or heal a crew member, but 90% of encounters are ship battles. Sometimes it feels like the choice is a bit of an illusion, with the only difference between the ship battles being the lootable item at the end of it.
When you do enter a battle, however, things get interesting. The first stage of any battle is turn-based naval combat, where you will command your cannons to direct shots at the enemy ship or fort, damaging their cannons, modules, or crew, depending on what makes the most tactical sense to you. Certain cannons can only shoot certain parts of a ship, with Cannonbreakers specifically targeting cannons, Decksweepers targeting crew, and Shipwreckers targeting modules. You can, of course, get general cannons that can fire at anything, but these often cost more command points to fire, and you have a limited amount each turn.
In the end, I found that Swivel cannons are invaluable. These cannons can only target crew, but they cost no command points to fire, meaning you can fire them every turn for no penalty, whittling down the enemy's crew, ready for when the next phase of battle commences, the boarding battle.
The boarding battle is where most of Rogue Waters' action takes place. This is turn-based combat, although it plays more typically like a tactical RPG at this point, with a grid-based field containing both your and the opponent's crew.
Positioning is everything in Rogue Waters. When you attack an enemy, most of your attacks will cause you to "advance," which pushes the enemy back a tile and allows you to take their place. But if the enemy gets pushed back against a wall, they take additional damage, and if they get pushed back against one of their allies, both them and their ally will take some damage. This requires you to assess where you want your crew positioned to deal the maximum damage to your opponents while considering where you'll be pushed if the enemy attacks you.
All of this, combined with the ship modules at play, ropes that allow you to swing extra distances across the battlefield, and a mixture of enemy types that you'll be facing, work together to create a great tactical experience. When you've got your crew in the perfect position and start to execute your turn, taking out enemy after enemy, it's a really satisfying moment.
Rogue Waters is also pretty nice to look at. The ocean/water effects are well done, and there are some good visual effects when ships are firing at each other with their cannons. While most of the game is played from a zoomed-out perspective, occasionally, when pulling off a melee attack, the camera will zoom in to show a rather gruesome execution of the move, which often involves a sword running through someone and plenty of blood being sprayed.
So, Rogue Waters does what it sets out to do. It's a linear-feeling game, as games of this genre often are, and the game is nearly entirely based around combat, which is saved by the fact that Rogue Water's combat is a strong foundation for the game to be built on.
Rogue Waters runs at 1280x800 and fully supports controllers, so we're off to a good start. The game has no black bars or controls, and it's just fine with the Steam Deck's controller.
Performance-wise, we have a bit of a mixed bag. The game can't hold a stable 60 FPS no matter what you do. While the game's map and naval combat tend to run fairly well, the tactical boarding combat is much harder to run, and therefore, both the options I'm giving you today are targeting 30 FPS.
I did encounter an issue where every time I rebooted the game, it would default to the "High" graphics preset, undoing the settings I had previously put in place. Hopefully, this will be fixed for the game's launch.
I debated whether to make these my recommended or the quality settings below the recommended ones. Still, I'm not keen on running my Steam Deck at high temperatures, so I've made these my recommended settings.
We have a 30 FPS Limit in SteamOS and no TDP Limit for this one. Then, in the in-game settings, we'll have VSync On, turn Anti-Aliasing Off, the Texture Quality to High, the Ocean Quality to Medium, and the World Details to Low. We set the shadow distances at 0 to disable shadows.
We could lower Ocean Quality to "Off" to save more battery life, but it genuinely looks awful. It turns the water into a flat blue plane with no visual effects or movement.
Visually, the game still looks okay. The omission of shadows is the most noticeable difference, but it doesn't make a huge impact. I think the game looks good enough, even without Anti-Aliasing or shadows.
The power draw is generally around 18-21W here, but it can rise as high as 25W in intensive combat. Steam Deck LCD owners should expect around 2 hours of battery life, with Steam Deck OLED users getting around 2.5 hours. The power draw drops dramatically outside of combat, around 12W on the world map.
Temperatures were about 70-80C, with the CPU running hotter. The fan noise ramps up during the boarding combat and will quieten during the rest of the game.
For this one, I'm prioritizing visual niceties over battery life. Regardless of what you do, your battery life won't last too long in Rogue Waters, but this probably isn't the kind of game you'll play for hours on end. With a 20-30 minutes long run, this preset should give you enough battery for 3 or so runs per charge.
Apply a 30 FPS Limit in SteamOS, along with no TDP Limit. You'll want VSync enabled in the game, too, as it gets rid of the input lag introduced by the SteamOS Frame Limiter. Then, you'll want to set the Anti-Aliasing to MSAA, the AA Quality to High, the Texture Quality to High, the Ocean Quality to Medium, and the World Details to High. Then, have all the Shadow Distances at half—that's 250, 100, and 100 for those.
With these settings, you get good-looking water, shadows throughout the game, and a clear and sharp image. I did try running at the absolute highest, but running at those settings, especially having the Ocean Quality on High, can occasionally cause performance to dip to the mid-20s. With these settings, I did, on odd occasions, see dips to 28 or 29 FPS, but generally, we can keep 30 FPS.
We pay the price of visual niceties with a killer power draw. However, with the game often taking around 20W-26W from the battery, don't expect more than 1.5 Hours of battery life from a Steam Deck LCD, and you might be able to squeeze 2 hours from a Steam Deck OLED.
Temperatures are very high, at around 80-90C during boarding combat. The fan will be loud during these sections, although temperatures and fan noise drop outside of combat. This is the main reason I'm not recommending these, as the CPU often creeps around the high 80s in combat, and I'd rather not stress my Steam Deck out that much.
Rogue Waters has some accessibility options. You can disable blood if that's not your thing. You can also disable camera shake and sway if prone to motion sickness. There is also HUD Scaling and Font Size, which I had set to 105 and 22, respectively.
Rogue Waters is a fun pick-up-and-play pirating adventure. It's not the open sandbox that most pirate games aim for, but it's a fun time nonetheless. If tactical gameplay is your guilty pleasure, then there's plenty to enjoy about Rogue Waters' deep and satisfying combat mechanics, and I'd recommend giving it a try.
Steam Deck performance is a little worse than I would have hoped for such a game. Graphics settings seem to have a minimal impact on performance, with the CPU seemingly the bottleneck here, so don't expect more than 30 FPS out of this game. Still, given its nature and the game's good controller support, it can play fine on the Steam Deck. The game also autosaves after every battle, so don't worry about exiting if your battery life is low.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.
Breachway was provided by Hooded Horse for review. Thank you!
Breachway was in early access at the time of this review, so content and performance are subject to change.
Games based around building up a deck of cards to unleash upon the enemy are becoming increasingly more common, and ones that pair that premise up with roguelike gameplay are also on the rise. Combine those two mechanics, throw in a space theme, and get Breachway. As a fan of deck-builders, roguelikes, and space-themed games, I'm all for it!
There isn't much of a storyline to be found in Breachway, at least not that I noticed in the early access build that I was able to try. You get the chance to play a prologue, which is there to set you up with some form of storyline, but right now, it quickly disappears into forgotten memory once you start a run. This likely won't be a game you play for its intriguing storyline.
If you've played the ever-popular game FTL, then you'll have some idea of how part of Breachway functions, in that the game largely takes place on a galaxy map, where you will direct your ship to travel between nodes, with each node you reach having some form of event that happens there. You can encounter hostile ships who will fight you, friendly ships who will help you, space stations where you can refuel, recruit, buy, and sell equipment, and more.
I'm not sure how many different events can appear in the game. There appeared to be some repeats, but there's enough randomness and variety with regard to the game's combat that it can get away with it. The ship that spawns to attack you will likely be equipped differently each time, and you yourself will be equipped differently each time, meaning the strategies at play will be in constant motion.
That brings us to the combat system of Breachway, which needs to be solid. In my time with the game, I think it's a very well-put-together turn-based system. Not only do we have the variety of different enemy ships appearing and the ability to outfit our ship with different equipment, but the equipment each ship has determines what cards you have in your deck to draw, meaning there's even further variety brought upon by just what cards everyone has in their hands for that turn.
You can have different systems and weapons fitted to your ship, which come with some default cards, and then further cards that can be gained by winning battles, allowing you to add to your deck with powerful combinations. A laser weapon, for example, may come with two cards that can deal four damage each and cost 3 ordnance to fire. However, upon winning a battle, you may add a card to the laser with a different effect, such as dealing the damage and costing the ordnance, but each subsequent laser fired that turn will cost 1 less ordnance to fire.
Beyond weapons, you'll also have other systems, like shields and hacking. Shield cards can be played to give you some defense, and hacking cards can be used to affect your opponent's deck so that you can remove a powerful card from play.
All of these cards, however, have a resource cost associated with them. Your resources are spread across Ordnance, Energy, and Mass. These are fueled by your generator, which will generate some of these resources each turn. You can upgrade your generator with credits and adjust it to decide how much of each resource you want to generate. Weapons typically use Ordnance, whereas Shields often require Energy. You must balance your resource production to fit your ship's and deck's needs.
All in all, I found the system well-balanced and well-made. You can't consistently use your best cards to deal big damage, and you have to weigh whether it's best to use 1 heavy-hitting offensive card, 2 smaller offensive cards, or perhaps 1 offensive card and a defensive one to protect yourself from an upcoming enemy attack. The player can see the opponent's cards, as well as how many turns they are away from using that card, so that adds a further element of strategy as you can predict (roughly) how much shielding you will need to protect your precious hull points.
To add even more choice to the game, you also have your crew, who have special abilities you can use depending on whether you have enough command points. These cover various buffs, including increasing your weapon damage for that turn, generating resources immediately, adding some shielding, etc. These are useful to use if you need to get an extra shot in to end a battle that turns or needs some emergency shielding, but you don't have the resources or card to do so.
All of this combines to make a fairly deep and tactical combat system that doesn't feel overwhelming to the player. There is a short tutorial that explains everything to the player without being too wordy, and things are laid out in an easily understandable and clear way. There are tooltips for the cards that both you and your opponent hold, so you can read their effects and what they will do.
Visually, Breachway is fine and does have some nice visual effects, but it's nothing ground-breaking, which is probably for the best, as it makes the game quite easy to run.
So, I came away very impressed by Breachway. I have slight concerns about the number of different events and the variety in that regard, as most nodes I encountered just ended up putting me in a battle rather than an exploration or diplomatic event. Still, as for the combat events and the combat itself, Breachway handles that very well, and I think this core mechanic is the most important thing to get right. The events can be added as they go through the early access period.
Breachway mostly functions just fine on the Steam Deck. We have 1280x800 resolution support, and while the game doesn't support controllers, the trackpads on the Steam Deck are perfect for deck-building games like this, meaning you can play the game with relative ease using them.
Breachway doesn't have many graphical settings; it's just a simple quality setting with a few selections.
I don't recommend applying an FPS Limit to run the game below 60 FPS, as the input lag introduced just feels awful on the trackpad. So I just kept the 60 FPS Limit, the default on the Steam Deck LCD.
Because Breachway's graphical options are simple, you can choose the Medium quality setting and then apply a 12W TDP Limit in SteamOS.
Visually, the game holds up here. I noticed some slight aliasing on some ships, as well as slightly blotchy shadows, but unless you are staring at your ship, you probably won't notice it much.
The power draw is generally around 11-14W, but there are some occasions when the power draw will rise and the FPS dips down into the 40s. This is largely when there's a nebula effect in the background of a battle or weapons are being fired. Fortunately, FPS drops are not a dealbreaker for a turn-based game. Even with a 15W TDP Limit, you cannot hold 60 FPS on the Medium preset in these situations, so I don't even attempt to.
Temperatures stayed around 60-70C most of the time, but when the heavy battles came in, they could rise to 75C. Fan noise wasn't particularly noticeable.
Breachway does not currently have accessibility features. However, no dialogue in the game is voiced, so everything is subtitled.
There's no UI scaling, but I felt the text was generally large enough to read on the Steam Deck.
Breachway has some great foundations in place. Good gameplay mechanics are here, the game plays and looks nice, and there's a decent amount of content already here. With some additional variety in the type of events and more equipment and cards available to draw and play, Breachway could easily become one of my favorite space games.
Breachway also functions well on the Steam Deck. The game mostly manages to play at 60 FPS, with some slowdowns into the 40s on occasion. With decent battery life, perfectly playable controls, and readable text, I can recommend this game for play on the go.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.
Sumerian Six was provided by Devolver Digital for review. Thank you!
Sumerian Six is a real-time tactical strategy game, and I went into this one with high hopes, as these types of games often play quite well on the Steam Deck, only requiring 30 FPS to be playable, and often with the ability to pause at any time being a feature of the genre. As it turns out, Sumerian Six delivered on these areas and more!
To fill you in on the basic premise of Sumerian Six, you take control of the Enigma Squad, a group dedicated to researching the effects of an otherworldly material known as Geiststoff. Meanwhile, the Enigma Squad eventually decided that the material was too powerful and should be left alone. One of their members breaks off and joins the Nazis, taking the group's knowledge about the material with them to help the Nazis build a supernatural superweapon.
The story is gradually expanded through short dialogue during missions and more lengthy cutscenes, usually at the end of missions. But the story is fairly basic and, for the most part, predictable. Most of the characters are two-dimensional, there to serve a gameplay purpose more than anything else. Although there are a couple of twists, the storyline isn't Sumerian Six's strongest suit.
The basic gameplay of Sumerian Six is your typical tactical strategy affair. With stealth being the order of the day, being detected very likely results in your death, so the entire game is based around studying enemy patrol routes, keeping an eye on the enemy's line of sight, and picking off vulnerable enemies on the outskirts of the group, or, if that's not possible, using the game's "action planner" system to allow several of your party members to act at once, thus taking out multiple enemies within a short moment of each other, so as not to raise the alarm.
The systems work very well together, with the game almost having a puzzle-like feel, as it's all about finding the right time to act and what actions to take. While there are multiple solutions to each situation, it is fun to work out how to tackle each problem, which gets increasingly more complex as the game progresses and you unlock more character abilities.
Speaking of character abilities, these form the crux of the moves you'll use to take out your foes. While all characters in your party can sneak up on enemies and take them out with a melee execution, each of your characters will also have several special abilities at their disposal, and it's up to you to decide how best to use them to tackle your current situation.
Early on in the game, for example, you'll be restricted to abilities that mainly distract enemies, causing them to either move from their current location or temporarily stun them so you can move them outside of the line of sight of their allies, or so you can take out someone they're looking at without them realizing it.
But as the game progresses, you'll unlock more abilities and encounter different varieties of enemies that will require more thought on how to handle them. Some enemies are immune to distractions, while others cannot be removed with the melee execution moves and are only vulnerable to offensive abilities. Soon, you'll be using chain lightning to take out grouped enemies, planting bombs on patrolling enemies and choosing the best time to detonate the bomb, and even using a launch pad that can displace enemies while simultaneously killing them, useful for quickly disposing of a body so their friends don't see it.
All of this keeps the game feeling fresh. New enemies will need new methods to tackle them, and the new abilities you get as you progress through the game keep opening up more doors for you to take when dealing with situations.
All of this combines to make a beautifully complex and yet not daunting game. I'm pretty slow when playing these games, often sitting back and analyzing the situation, deciding which enemy is the easiest to take out first, figuring out what ability I should use, and executing the plan. The game does reward you for finishing a mission fast but also doesn't penalize you for taking it slow either. Yes, it can take some time to work out how to proceed, but the game gives you that time. Plus, you can open the action planner and effectively pause the game at any point if you are in a rare situation where you need to quickly act, before say, a patrolling enemy finds you.
Visually, Sumerian Six holds up. A key aspect of these games is clarity, knowing where the enemies are, what they're seeing, differentiating enemy types, etc. And Sumerian Six executes this well. The line of sight is very clearly visible, enemy types have different models and key colors to separate them, and if all else fails, there's a minimap on the screen at all times which shows you where the enemies are and which direction they're pointing, for an easy overview of the situation.
From a technical graphics perspective, Sumerian Six won't be winning any awards, but the graphics serve their purpose just fine and are pretty pleasing to look at. No poor texturing or anything stood out to me during my playthrough, at least.
Sumerian Six is a solid tactical strategy game. While the storyline is basic, it provides a premise and intrigue about what you might face next. The gameplay shines through here though, with well-built stealth mechanics, a selection of different environments to explore, plus that variety that comes from facing new types of enemies and unlocking new abilities to defeat them. The game isn't too long, and if you're gung-ho in your approach, you can finish the campaign in less than 10 hours with the game split into 10 missions, with the "speedrun" secondary objective often requiring you to finish the missions in around 25-35 minutes each. But if you're a fan of this genre, you'll probably enjoy every minute of this adventure.
As a side note, one feature I adored about Sumerian Six is that the game autosaves every 30 seconds. This means that if you just made a mistake, you can load back up to before you made the mistake in a matter of seconds. This is incredibly useful, and I took advantage of it during my time with the game.
Sumerian Six is a pretty painless experience on the Steam Deck. The game is well-adapted to controllers, so you shouldn't have any problems using your Steam Deck controller, and the game defaults to settings that I recommend you stick with.
By default on the Steam Deck, Sumerian Six is set to Low settings, with the exception of Textures, which are kept on High. I recommend staying with these settings. The only thing I would change is enabling the in-game FPS limiter and setting it to 30 FPS.
For SteamOS settings, you won't really want to have a frame rate limit, as the in-game limiter works well and doesn't introduce input lag. You'll also want to remove any TDP Limit, as the game is quite power-hungry.
At these settings, you should be able to maintain a fairly solid 30 FPS throughout gameplay, although some cutscenes will drop as low as 20 FPS, as they have a habit of showing you an overview of the map the mission takes place on, which pans over the area. Visually, the game still holds up quite well, though.
The game's power draw varies wildly depending on the environment and the enemies in your vicinity, but it stays on the higher end, ranging between 14W and 19W for the most part. I did experience power draw up to 24W on a later mission, though.
Temperatures also vary greatly, as you might expect, given the power draw situation. They are around 65C-70C on earlier and smaller missions before heading up to the 70-80C range in later missions with larger groups of enemies. The fan is largely quiet in earlier missions but becomes fairly audible later on.
Sumerian Six has some accessibility features. It has subtitles, which have adjustable font sizes and are perfectly readable on the Steam Deck. It also has constant auto-saving, which tends to save every 30 seconds, allowing you to repeat your last actions if you make a mistake and get shot! Plus, the game can go into slow-motion if you are in danger of being detected, giving you a couple of seconds to react to hide yourself if possible.
There are also some colorblind filters available.
Sumerian Six is a solid entry into the tactical strategy genre. The stealth mechanics are implemented and displayed well, the level design is varied and keeps you on your toes as to how you will tackle each situation, and the constant introduction of new enemy types and player abilities just brings even more variety to the game.
If you love the tactical strategy genre, you should definitely give Sumerian Six a play. Even if you are just curious about it, I'd recommend you give the demo a try to see if this is your kind of game. As someone who hasn't played many games in this genre, I did enjoy my time with it, so it's well worth a look.
Steam Deck performance isn't fantastic, with us being restricted to 30 FPS, but in a game like this, 30 FPS is sufficient to have a good time, and the controls work great. Sumerian Six is perfectly playable on the Steam Deck, and I don't think you'd miss out by playing it on your portable device compared to any other way of playing the game.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.
This review was created using an LCD Steam Deck. OLED testing will be carried out at a later date.
Athena Crisis is in early access, so performance and content is subject to changes.
Advance Wars was one of the biggest games from my childhood, and I have been enjoying picking the series up again on my various handhelds. Despite the lack of Advance Wars games on PC, several similar games are on the market with mixed success. While I enjoy Wargroove and Wargroove 2 for their extensive campaigns and map editor, the relative lack of depth in combat turned me back to Advance Wars. This brings me to Athena Crisis, and fans of the Advance Wars franchise should keep this title on their radar.
Developed by Nakazawa Tech, Athena Crisis is built from the ground up to be a spiritual successor to Advance Wars from the gameplay to the atmosphere. While some games struggle with content and polish at launch, Athena Crisis is not one of those. It is also fairly playable on the Steam Deck, although it suffers from some odd issues that drag down the experience for me.
Athena Crisis is a turn-based strategy RPG with much meat on the bones. Fans of the genre will know what to expect. There are loads of different units for players to unleash upon their enemies, fighting each other across a diverse range of battlefields. Like most strategy games, these units have different strengths and weaknesses.
The sniper has to bunker down for a turn to prepare himself but has a large range and firepower to compensate for the lack of mobility. Jeeps have no combat potential but are fast supply units and can transport infantry across the map. There are even plenty of tanks. Capturing buildings provides income on units, while terrain offers advantages such as increased line of sight and defensive bonuses against attack. Engineers can build various production facilities to fuel your war machine. It is the usual thing on offer for a strategy game, and Athena Crisis has enough variety to make missions interesting.
As for campaigns, the devs supply two of them, each with 40 missions. The story and dialogue have the same theme and feel of Advance Wars, and the little cutscenes before combat put a smile on my face. Some of these missions are pretty challenging even early on, and they should provide veteran strategy fans a fun time. There are three difficulty options to provide a good balance, and some maps can last quite a while.
There is a nice mix of mission types. Some require defending an area or escorting units to safety, while others require a careful mix of logistics and knowing all the unit options available to you. The main goals are usually based around capturing enemy headquarters or destroying all enemy units, but the maps have some twist to make the missions interesting.
In one early mission, I had to defend against two enemy armies while outnumbered and outgunned. It took me a few attempts to complete it, but I liked how the two enemy armies fought each other and me, so I was able to use my snipers to pick off enemy infantry while holding my ground with my tanker units.
That is not all, as Athena Crisis features not just full multiplayer but a host of custom scenarios alongside dozens of skirmish maps. With the solid map editor, you can quickly make new scenarios and upload them to the inbuilt mod engine, although the lack of direct Workshop support is a little disappointing. Some of these custom campaigns are massive and are in the opening weeks of launch.
This might not be vital if you only intend to play on the Steam Deck or PC, but I like how one purchase on a platform allows unrestricted access on all other platforms, such as Mac or Android, with crossplay support. I play on Android handhelds often, so being able to play on my phone and then pick things back up on my Steam Deck is a lovely bonus.
There is a lot to like here, although I have a couple of nitpicks. One thing I found Athena Crisis lacking was its settings. The options available are rather barebones in the way of tweaking graphical settings, and while it has some controller support, it is not perfect. I will cover that more in the performance section of the review, but I wish we had more things to tweak. While Athena Crisis is a fairly lightweight game, it does struggle with odd frame drops, and while there is a redo turn button, there is no way to take back a unit’s movement if you screw up, so I hope the developers add that in.
According to Valve, Athena Crisis is classified as Verified, which mostly holds up. While the game is perfectly playable on the Steam Deck, some weird things keep it from performing perfectly.
Athena Crisis suffers from odd frame drops. Even on stock settings (60Hz, 1200X800 resolution, and uncapped TDP), the game does not keep a steady 60fps, even though the Deck has more than enough power. Through testing, we found that the match purposely reduces the framerate for certain animations or when a player isn't moving to save on battery. This also happens on PC, so it is not just a Steam Deck issue. While this is a little frustrating, we can do nothing about it. Due to its turn-based mechanics, this is not a dealbreaker like in other games, but I wanted to be transparent about it.
Athena Crisis seems to work equally well no matter the performance mode, and with no graphical options to tweak, our options are limited. I performed my usual battery-saver test. Because Athena Crisis is unfazed by power management, I turned the TDP setting to 3 with a 40hz refresh rate and found it to have a similar performance to stock, which is weird, but I will take it!
The power draw will vary significantly, so hammering down a reliable average was difficult. Still, at the 3W TDP setting, I saw an average power draw of 6 watts, while the stock settings saw an average power draw of 8 watts. For this reason, I recommend playing Athena Crisis at a 3 or 4W TDP for the extra battery life, with up to 6.5 hours on the LCD Steam Deck.
Although I found some problems navigating the map editor mode, the standard controls work reasonably well. While you can navigate the map using the joysticks, I found no way to access the editing tools with the controller. I only got it to work by using the touchscreen, so I am unsure if this is a bug or a quirk with the controls. I could access the editor as intended by switching to the Keyboard (WASD) and Mouse configuration. However, I would recommend sticking to a computer when making a map over the Steam Deck.
Athena Crisis is available in English, French, German, Italian, Ukrainian, Spanish, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Russian, and Korean.
As I mentioned earlier, Athena Crisis is rather thin on accessibility options. You can adjust the volume, change the animation speed during combat, toggle map tilt, change map fog from hard to soft edges, and change the confirm action command from always to never. I found no way to rebind controls on the keyboard or controller, and the game lacks colorblind support.
You can change the name of your faction, character profile, and portrait and rename units.
Although there is no UI scaling, the text is easy to read out of the box.
Athena Crisis packs a lot for its $20 price tag with the content available. The tactical elements pack a punch, and plenty of units exist for diverse gameplay. I enjoy the amount of name customization you can put into your faction and the robust campaign editor. Strategy fans should enjoy Athena Crisis, particularly if you like a good challenge. This title is crafted with love and shows in every corner.
The odd framerate issues I experienced on the Deck do drag down the experience a little, and I hope the developers consider adding more accessibility settings to the game. If you can look past those, Athena Crisis is worth the asking price.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.
This review was created using an LCD Steam Deck. OLED testing will be carried out soon.
Songs of Silence is in early access, so performance and content is subject to changes.
Songs of Silence is a somewhat different take on the 4X genre, with a deep focus on the narrative and characters. I love strategy games and titles that feature strong narratives, so you can imagine how excited I was when Songs of Silence launched into early access earlier this year. The game is an enjoyable, if sometimes rough, experience. Due to some unfortunate problems regarding the text size, I could not progress as far as I wanted.
When starting Songs of Silence for the first time, I was strongly reminded of Songs of Conquest, another indie strategy title that recently left Early Access. Both games feature story-heavy campaigns, although Songs of Silence has full voice acting in its favor. The voice acting overall is pretty good, and it got me immersed in the story.
The narrative itself is relatively cookie-cutter as fantasy stories go. Two different races of light and darkness fight for control of the world, and only one can survive. The player takes on the role of the Starborn, and under the command of Queen Lorelai, you must fight back against the forces of darkness. It might not be the original story, but the setting and characters go a long way to sell it. Songs of Silence deeply emphasizes the narrative exploring its world in stark contrast against its rivals.
What I did not expect was how gorgeous the game was. For a 4X title, I was blown away by the visuals on hand, and even on the LCD Steam Deck, it looks fantastic. The map is vibrant with rich environments, making the game feel alive. Cities burn and smolder after a siege, and the terrain turns as armies traverse. It feels like every movement you make on the map has real consequences.
Unlike Songs of Conquest and many other strategy games, Songs of Silence favors an autobattling system for its battle mechanics. You cannot manually control where your forces attack but can manipulate the battlefield and armies through an interesting card system. There are a lot of different card modifiers to use throughout the game, and they operate on a timer system to avoid power spam.
I prefer this method over a ‘once and you’re done’ system, especially when you can hurl fireballs upon enemy armies with the click of a button. Other powers include healing units, protecting your forces from attack, summoning allies, and debilitating enemy units. That is a lot of variety and adds depth to the autobattling system. A 4X game with the auto battle is rare, and Songs of Silence manages it fairly well. While most auto battlers bore me after a while, Songs of Silence’s great visuals make battles enjoyable to interact with.
Battles can get quite frantic, forcing you to make snap decisions. In one early battle, I mistakenly attacked a much larger army, which was destroyed. By summoning Astral reinforcements behind enemy lines, I could divert enemy attention long enough for my surviving troops to rout the enemy. I encountered a few bugs, such as my cavalry units trying to return to their starting position right after a charge, which is not wise when my enemies are armed with big, anti-horse weapons. Patches in recent weeks have reduced the frequency of these bugs.
On the map, Songs of Silence plays like you would expect from a fantasy 4X. Recruit units in controlled cities with the same card system as in the battle mode, and you can construct new buildings the same way. Armies replenish when in a city, and you can bolster garrisons as well: you need all the help you can get because this is a challenging game, even on the easiest setting. While you must be aggressive with your military to stand a chance of survival, it must be done carefully. I have had to restart a few times because I overextended. After taking an enemy settlement, I had no time to replenish my army before the counterattack, and my poor queen was slaughtered. And this was in the first mission!
Above all else, Songs of Silence offers something new to the classic 4X genre, and it is a pretty solid game all around. Even for the Early Access version, there are enough bells and whistles to keep players invested, and the skirmish mode offers some additional replayability while waiting for more story updates. It needs more work with optimization, especially on the Steam Deck, which is a power-hungry game. Even high-end computers will struggle with this one. While the combat and empire-building mechanics are decent, it could spice things up with more options, such as random events.
There is also a skirmish mode, allowing up to six players to be on a map. A few modifiers can be unlocked to keep things fresh without big story elements. It's a nice way to play a quick game without narrative-driven elements.
And yes, all of this gloriousness is playable on the Steam Deck, with some compromises.
Songs of Silence is classed as Unknown by Valve, which is a fair assessment. This is an incredibly power-hungry game for the genre, and while it is playable on the Steam Deck, a few things are holding it back.
At vanilla settings, Songs of Silence runs smoothly enough with the Deck’s prowess, but it eats power and battery like I eat chocolate eclairs. With a 60hz refresh rate and an unlocked TDP, I experienced an average power draw of 18 watts, spikes up to 20 watts during battles. That is pretty significant, and it runs hotter than I would like. Without any adjustments, you can expect battery life on the LCD Deck to be around 2 hours.
Songs of Silence has several graphical options to tweak, a big improvement from the demo I played at the beginning of 2024. One nice thing about Songs of Silence is that you can drop many graphical settings to a minimum while not sacrificing too much on visuals. Conversely, I found little point in having graphics set above medium with the LCD Deck’s screen.
Changing the refresh rate to 40hz saves a little on power draw, although I found the game needs a high TDP to maintain a stable 30fps. I messed around with the resolution scale, manual screen resolution settings, and FSR to see how far I could push the game for battery life. My most extreme result was with a resolution scale of 0.5 and a 4W TDP with all settings on low. While the game was technically playable with these settings in the campaign map, with frame rates hovering in the mid-20s, I cannot recommend going to such lengths. This is why I do these experiments: you do not have to!
For the most balanced mix between performance and battery life, I found that a 6W TDP lock with low and standard resolution settings allowed some power draw savings while maintaining 30fps in most cases. This gave me an average power draw of 13w, although battery life was less than 3 hours. If you want a stable 40FPS for extra performance with medium settings, you will need an unlocked TDP and 40hz to make it a smooth experience. You will save a little on battery life compared to stock, but I found the benefits modest at best. On an LCD Steam Deck, you will gain perhaps an extra half hour of playtime.
One bright spot is the controls. Unlike other strategy titles, Songs of Silence is fully playable with a controller, and I had no problems with the controls on the Steam Deck.
Songs of Silence is available in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Russian, Korean, and Turkish.
You can toggle the in-game tutorial, adjust the interface scale, and apply gamma correction, and there is a colorblind mode.
However, the small text size was a major obstacle for me. This is a dialogue and word-heavy game, and while interface scaling exists, I could not read the text well, even with the text size at maximum. It got to the point I suffered frequent headaches while playing, and I had to keep taking breaks. I was the only one on the team with severe eye strain with the small text, for instance, but it is worth mentioning. Songs For Silence is difficult to recommend if you struggle with eye strain or small text. Because of this problem, I could not play as much of the game as I would otherwise.
Noah Kupetsky here. I also played Songs of Silence but didn't personally have this eye strain issue. I don't think the issue will affect everybody, but it's worth mentioning if you are sensitive to screens and smaller text.
There is much to like in Songs of Silence. We do not get many fantasy variants within the 4X genre, and a gorgeous game like this one with auto-battler mechanics is even rarer. The story and characters are solid, and there are plenty of units and powers to get stuck into.
This is an Early Access game, so there is a long way to go. Hopefully, the developers can improve performance in the future. The high price tag and sometimes rough optimization might put people off, but for the 4X genre, Songs of Silence is unique enough to get people’s attention, and it is pretty awesome on the Steam Deck, regardless.
I will be keeping a close eye on this!
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.
Endzone 2 was provided by Assemble Entertainment for us to review. Thank you!
This review used an LCD Steam Deck. OLED details will be coming later.
Endzone 2 stands out from its peers in the city-building genre by using a post-apocalyptic setting. This choice of setting brings with it plenty of new opportunities, as well as some difficulties. Endzone 2 has a unique blend of using the technology you have to survive in a primitive setting. It's best described as a survival city-builder, where water and food are your top priorities, not providing a sturdy road network and building your tourism.
When you start a game of Endzone 2, you are confronted with a bounty of choices, which is excellent. It could look daunting from the outside, a post-apocalyptic city-builder where survival is the aim of the game. It could give you the impression there's constant pressure on you, and this isn't a game where you can relax at all, and that isn't the case.
The game does let you tweak the settings to be unforgivable brutal, or pretty forgiving, giving you a chance to play your way. Being entirely new for the franchise, I played on a mixture of both, where bad things could happen, but their effects weren't quite as pronounced as they could be.
In Endzone 2, the world has been destroyed, and large portions of the land aren't suitable for habitation. You start the game with a truck and must explore the nearby world to find a "zone," designated for building. Once there, you can create a settlement, place your town center, and work on providing the necessities of food, water, wood, and scrap.
Food can be gained from the arable land in the zone, water from lakes, wood from forests, and scrap from ruined buildings. Zones vary in size, but regardless, you need to plan out your building. Placing buildings could take away valuable arable land in short supply. Building around the water sources may take away space that you'll need for future jetties to gather water or fishing huts to gather food. The amount of space is limited, and one of the key elements of Endzone 2 is learning how to use it.
My first zone was a pretty small one, and after a couple of hours of playtime, I had pretty much used up all the available land, so it was time to load up some supplies and citizens into my truck and head off in search of another zone. After a few minutes of searching, I found one, a luscious zone filled with grass and about 4 times the size of my initial choice. You can run multiple settlements in Endzone 2, requiring you to have some micro-management ability. The saving grace here is that the game does have time controls, and when the game is paused, you can still manage everything. It doesn't lock the UI.
Progression comes in the form of Knowledge Points. You can spend Knowledge Points to unlock new building tiers across 3 categories: Society, which covers housing and health. Ecology covers things related to nature, such as farming, recycling, water treatment, etc. And the economy, which covers all kinds of industries.
Not only are you tasked with managing your settlement(s), but you also have your truck, which can ferry resources between settlements and be used to explore the game world, loot ruins, and occasionally find a point of interest where you can start an expedition. These expeditions put you in control of a single person and let you explore a ruin in a sort of point-and-click style puzzle/adventure. You'll need to find all the loot and have the relevant items/tools to progress through the expedition. If you make it to the end, you're rewarded with a bunch of resources, or a facility you can use. You'll also earn Knowledge Points as you progress through an expedition.
As far as the random events that can happen throughout the game go, I mostly encountered 3: Rain, Drought, and Sickness. You have to contend with Radiation and Catastrophes, but I didn't encounter these in my playthrough. Rain and drought, as you might imagine, mainly affect your food and water supplies, whereas sickness lowers the production of all your buildings and carries the risk of losing some citizens to disease.
You can mitigate the effects of these events by being well-prepared. For Drought, at least, you get some warning, so you can build up your supplies of food and water to ensure you survive it. When it comes to disease, it's suddenly put upon you, but you can at least lower the chances of it by having healthcare facilities and supplies.
The supply chains in the game are there but are fairly basic. You can gather Scrap from ruins using a Scrapyard, which you can turn into Tools at a Workshop or Plastic at a Recycler. Production buildings then use tools to produce resources. Coal from a Kiln and Clay from a Claypit can be turned into Bricks at Brickworks. You can build a Swamp Farm near a swamp to gather Herbs, which, combined with Plastic, can be turned into medicine. Water and Fiber from a Plantation can be turned into Cloth at a Weaving Mill. You get the idea that the chains are rarely more than 3 buildings long, and things are generally kept simple.
Regarding the visuals, Endzone 2 goes for a realistic, gritty/dark-looking atmosphere. And while it does suit the game quite well and is invariably good-looking, I found that it doesn't necessarily lend itself to clarity. Many of the buildings look similar, so it can be quite hard to identify specific buildings just by looking, and I often found myself clicking several buildings before I found the one I was looking for. Some things can also be hard to spot, blending in with the ground or foliage. It's probably more pronounced on the Steam Deck's smaller screen, but it can sometimes be frustrating.
I liked my time with Endzone 2; it's a unique take on the City-Builder genre, and I love city builders. I feel like the game needs to go deeper with its economical aspects while it's in Early Access, however, with most buildings being unlocked after just 2-3 hours, and from then on, you're just getting upgrades of existing buildings which produce slightly faster. This may be less of an issue on higher difficulties, where I assume you're meant to not survive for too long on your first few attempts.
Endzone 2 does support 16:10 aspect ratio resolutions, including the native 1280x800 of the Steam Deck. It also has some UI scaling, up to 125%, which you will want to use, as the default 100% is quite hard to read on the Steam Deck. The game has no gamepad support, so we must use the Mouse+KB Layout, which is selected by default. This works fine for the most part, but you probably want to enable backgrip buttons and assign one to Middle Mouse Click so you can hold it and rotate the camera. Some scroll bars are also quite difficult to click on with the touchpad.
I also found the loading times to be very lengthy. In the modern world of SSDs, loading times have sort of disappeared into the background, and we don't notice them as much, but Endzone 2 has some spectacular loading times on the Steam Deck. Reaching the main menu takes, on average, around 40-45 seconds on my Steam Deck. Loading my save game took 2 minutes and 16 seconds. Fortunately, there are no loading screens once you're in a game, but it is the longest time I've waited to get into a game.
There are a few graphical settings, but not many, and they're kept fairly basic. Anti-aliasing, for example, is a simple on/off toggle rather than being able to select the quality of it. Besides that, we have Texture and Shadow Quality and then toggles for things like Bloom and Fog.
Interestingly, although Endzone 2 is far more GPU-bound than CPU-bound on the Steam Deck, changing these graphical settings has little impact on performance, with gains of about 6-8 FPS from the lowest to the highest settings. So I suggest you just run with the best graphical settings and accept the slight frame rate loss. Regardless of your choice, you cannot maintain 30 FPS throughout anyway.
In your SteamOS settings, set an FPS Limit of 30 FPS / 60Hz; No TDP Limit for this one.
While at this point, I would typically tell you what settings to choose, ultimately, the experience is similar regardless of your settings, so I just ran with the maximum possible. I also used the Vulkan API on boot instead of DirectX11, as performance on DX11 is just worse. If you choose to lower your settings, I would avoid the "None" Shadow Quality, as it produced visual glitches for me.
At the max settings, the game runs at 30 FPS most often, with occasional dips into the 20s during certain camera cuts, such as when starting an expedition. What I did find, however, is that areas with great amounts of grass and/or scrap will tank the performance. Whether you are on the highest or lowest settings, the FPS will be between 20-25 FPS.
The plus side to this is that as you build buildings on the grass and harvest the scrap, it gets rid of it, so Endzone 2 might be one of the rare instances where the game runs a bit better late-game than it does early-game.
The power draw is pretty high in Endzone 2, with my Steam Deck usually pulling around 24-26W from the battery. So, Steam Deck LCD owners can expect no more than 1.5 hours of playtime from a charge. Steam Deck OLED users might manage 2 hours at a push.
Temperatures are also high, with the CPU and GPU staying around 80-85C at all times. The fan will also remain audible throughout playing.
It's also worth noting that Endzone 2 is currently in Early Access as of this review, so hopefully, we'll see some optimizations with the game as development progresses.
Endzone 2 has some accessibility options, such as the UI above scaling. You can also disable screenshake, rebind your controls, and adjust the volumes of many sounds independently of each other. Any essential dialogue is written on the screen, so those with hearing impairments shouldn't miss out on any necessary audio cues.
Endzone 2 shows great promise. Sure, a few things are rough around the edges, like the seeming lack of progression. I'd love to see some borders around buildings or toggleable icons to see which building is which, but in time, I think Endzone 2 will be a great game to challenge yourself with if you're looking for that city-builder that's just a bit brutal. After all, it is still in Early Access at the time of this review, and we do have a roadmap with promised new features and further progression that will be added.
As far as how it performs on Steam Deck goes, it's close to being perfectly playable. It's just certain areas on the map that let it down, with drops down to 20 FPS. It's hard to recommend playing Endzone 2 on a Steam Deck. You can play it, and it is playable, but you'll have a much nicer experience right now on a bigger screen and with a more powerful computer.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.
