How is the Steam Deck(OLED Model)?

Hey all its been a bit I will be explaining about all of that soon but I am now trying to get back into the groove of things some more. I am gonna try and record videos that go with blog post more than other things until I am good to go for streaming. With that said I got a Steam Deck recently and wanted to post about my experience with it. The things I will be talking about today will be how games run, new and old, how do they control, and finally 2 test videos of me playing a game while hooked up to my tv/capture card and with a controller hooked up via Bluetooth.

List of games I tested on the Steam Deck:

SWTOR on my Deck being played in Handheld Mode

1. The Saboteur

2. TMNT Shredders Revenge

3. Dark Forces Remastered

4. Star Wars the Old Republic

5. Sonic Generations

6. Command & Conquer Generals

7. Freedom Force

8. GTA 5 Online

9. Red Dead Redemption 2

First off lets talk about how the games run. I will say I love the Steam Deck, will call it Deck from now on, cause it runs older games just wonderfully. Also newer games run well but not all will work. I look on the forums for any steam game I want to play and see what people talk about and see if I want to chance about trying to play it. One game I looked up was Enshrouded. What I read and still need to test is that the game will not run over 30 to 45 frames. This from what I was reading said it was unplayable. Which really makes me sad I wanted to play this on there, but again I still need to test it out and see for myself. But for the newer games for TMNT Shredders Revenge, when not in the mode that I have it hooked to my TV and with a Bluetooth controller, it runs so well I cant tell you how happy I am. I had no problems with timing dodges and could do everything perfectly. Now once I was in “Docked Mode” I had some lag or my controller desyncing. Same goes for when playing Dark Forces Remastered. It was perfect when playing in Handheld mode, but as soon as I tried to use a Bluetooth Controller I had the controller desync and resync and it made it very hard to play. I was playing these games with the Deck on my desk with my USB C wire that goes to my capture device.

The other games on my list I played in Handheld mode. All of those games worked great, only 3 games I had trouble with was Freedom Force, The Saboteur, and SWTOR. With Freedom Force it wasn’t as big of a deal and it was annoying. When you click to move a character they would keep moving in a direction, and I couldn’t grab a street light like the game told me to. To stop the character from just randomly running off I just click in the open by where I want them to go to and they would usually reset. SWTOR was a tricky one but I had to fully remap the default controls to fit my needs. I have 1-4 on the Dpad, 5-8 on the Face Buttons, and 9-= to the left touch pad, swipe in a direction to use those buttons. Then I have the right touch pad as my mouse. L2 and R2 and Right and Left mouse buttons. I ended up using the touchpad to just use my abilities on 3 toolbars. It felt good once I got used to it, but I don’t suggest it, cause you can not move your camera to easy while doing the abilities with the touchpad. Finally the other game I had trouble with was The Saboteur, this only was trouble cause of the other controller I had synced up. Once I noticed that I changed the Deck back to controller 1 and everything worked just fine.

Red Dead, GTA 5 both worked wonderfully. I have them and all games in a 720p resolution. It makes things a little harder to read, but it runs smooth. The one thing I noticed is that it drains the battery semi fast. I did 2 missions in Red Dead story mode and drained the battery about 20%. GTA 5 I went online and ran around for a bit and it was about the same, for the same amount of time played.

Now the tricky one to play was Command & Conquer Generals. This one I was worried about and I played this before most of the other games. The reason I was scared was being able to use the touchpad for the mouse. I mapped Left and Right mouse button to L2 and R2. And it worked great for Skirmish mode, I played about 4 matches and never had any trouble. I mapped Control to one of the buttons on the back, and 1-4 on the Dpad. So I can group up my units and select them as I need them. Does it let you play on a high level no, but it lets you sit and enjoy the game.

Now next are videos from when I played in “Docked Mode”. You can tell the sound is so soft I have to look into why its like that, and hopefully you can see my controller going in and out. I need to look into this mode of using the Deck so I can get some video recorded to share my experiences for everyone to see.

In all I really enjoy the Deck and have a micro sd card coming in the mail so I can extend my memory to 2tb from 1tb. Then I can play more games on here, granted I will rotate them out as I finish them. Some games will stay on here forever. Now do I suggest that one should get a Deck if they can’t get a Gaming PC. I would say yes if you don’t mind playing games that are not brand new. The Deck feels like a mid level gaming pc, that is also a handheld. I hope more companies make their games run well on the Deck and more people can try and enjoy PC gaming. I feel like the Deck is a great addition if you have a Gaming PC as well. This way you can take most games on the go with you.

I want to thank everyone for taking time to read this and know I am working on getting back into things. I had some stuff happen in the past couple of months and I will explain what all happened when I am ready to talk about it and hope to get back to streaming soon!

Have a great day!