Sonic Rumble Is Now Out And It's Pretty Great On The Steam Deck

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Sonic the Hedgehog is an iconic character and has appeared in so many different games. Whether they be full-fledged games where he stars or as cameos, he has appeared in a range of genres, going from 2D and 3D platformers to kart racers. Now, we can add party games that take some inspiration from Fall Guys to the list because Sonic Rumble is now out! It's an interesting game, going through rounds of racing or combat, collecting as many rings as possible to make it to the final round, and trying to get first place. It's a little on the weird side, but luckily, playing on the Steam Deck will be no issue at all.

Booting up Sonic Rumble and playing on the Steam Deck posed no issue at all, making good on that Verified badge it earned prior to release. It's able to handle the game nicely, with solid controller support, virtual keyboard and prompts for text input showing up, and performance is quite great. However, there are a few little issues I noticed here and there that are worth mentioning.

Most of the game can be played at 90 FPS, and it's fantastic, but the early stages with the most people competing, racing stages, and the Sonic 3 movie stage tend to drop framerate. So, I recommend setting the framerate cap to 60 FPS, making it completely stable and stopping the battery from draining too much at those times, sticking to the lower end and lasting around 3-4 hours.

I also found controlling menus to be a little difficult. You move a cursor around to navigate the menus and UI primarily, and it's a little finicky. Sometimes, the cursor will move to a corner of the screen after hitting an option, and there were two or three times where the cursor would just freak out as I was moving it and go in a completely different direction. It's a little annoying, but it would fix itself as I continued playing.

Still, it's a pretty solid experience on the Steam Deck, and I can see it being the most enjoyable way to play. I was having a good time, even though the reviews on Steam are primarily negative. A lot of it seems to be centered around the microtransactions, with users calling them predatory with skins and items that boost your score, which can affect gameplay. Hopefully, items that affect gameplay get changed or taken out, but time will tell for sure.

Sonic Rumble can be downloaded for free over on Steam.

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