I finally got my Steam Deck portable gaming personal computer today, delivered in, while stylish, a blatantly conspicuous wide box with the Steam Deck logo printed outside of it. And yes, there is even a Portal reference on the box. If this was an Amazon delivery, you know the driver would have just taken it home and reported it missing, risking his or her livelihood for the sake of snatching up a rare PlayStation 5 unit. Oops, wrong story. But yes, you can tell that the box is holding the Steam Deck but I suppose Valve probably had these things tightly insured right up the microSD slot to eliminate delivery issues.
I opted for the 256GB unit and it came with a power supply brick and a carrying case. I also received the "exclusive Steam profile bundle" which translates into new customization options for my Steam profile. Surprisingly, I also got 3 custom virtual keyboard themes for the Deck, which I thought was only for the 512GB tier. Strangely, I can't seem to use these keyboard themes even though I have them in my inventory. The initial setup for the unit was surprisingly long. It took forever for the Deck to boot too before you move beyond the Deck logo and I am not going to lie, I was a little worried. It took nearly half an hour before I could start using the Deck. Once I was logged in to my Steam account, it was smooth sailing from there. I must say that the user interface that is running Steam on the Deck is not as smooth as one used on my desktop's Big Picture mode, with the only difference being that you get access to more features on the Deck. Hopefully, this will be improved over time.
A fully decked out Steam profile.
When the Steam Deck was announced, I was worried about the small face buttons on the top right hand corner of the device. Thankfully, the Deck feels very comfortable in my hands and the bulky sides of the Deck provide a nice, supportive grip for your hands with the face buttons, thumb-sticks, trackpads, and d-pad easily accessible compared to their horrible placements on the Steam Controller. I am disappointed with the 800p LCD touchscreen however just because I am now spoiled by the fidelity found on my Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+. The screen does look nice overall: it's just unfortunately quite low res for 2022 but there is a rationale behind this.
Whether you're docked or on the Deck, Steam is THE place to game.
Now let's talk about the gaming performance. We have to be honest with ourselves here: The Steam Deck will never replace your desktop gaming PC. It's not supposed to. So to make a fair evaluation of the Deck for someone who has been spoiled by high end gaming PCs, I have tested 3 games that are marked as Steam Deck verified, a label which signifies that these games have passed all the compatibility checks for the Deck. First, something low spec: Vampire Survivors. This game should run perfectly and as expected, it does. There were some framerate hitches plaguing my initial time with the game but then the problem seemingly just disappeared when I played the game again later. Next, a game that was developed specifically for the Deck: Valve's own Aperture Desk Job. Now this short introduction to the mechanics of the Steam Deck itself is a glorious example of what can be accomplished visually on this portable PC. From physics to lighting to special effects, everything is there, though at the cost of the frame rate when things get a little too hectic. Lastly, I downloaded Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom to give the Deck some workout. It ran perfectly at 60fps with all the graphics setting maxed out. The low resolution is more apparent in Ni no Kuni II than Aperture Desk Job however because ADJ must have used some voodoo-level graphical techniques to give that title some serious visual polish. So overall, I am pretty impressed. It doesn't look like too much is needed to be sacrificed visually to run games on the Deck well. The key here that you have to remember is that the downgrade to 800p in itself will do most of the work to make the games run great. Manually reducing the in-game resolution and then upscaling it using the Deck's built-in AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution will ensure that your games will always look pleasing. I also want to mention that you don't even have to install games on the Deck to play them. The Deck can connect to your desktop and stream the games directly to it like the Steam Link app. This is a neat feature to have even though the main reason for us to use the Deck is to just have the games run natively on it.
Bigger and better than the Nintendo Switch.
As it is, the Steam Deck is certainly worth owning if you are interested in getting some quality gaming time away from your desktop PC. My own usage of the Deck is probably going to be limited to accessing my Steam library with its 795 and growing Steam Deck verified titles. If you don't have a desktop PC, the Steam Deck can even turn into one by connecting it to your monitor, as long as you don't mind using the included Linux but you can always install Windows on it too. I will have to play around with the desktop mode in the future. The device can run real hot real fast and when the fan kicks in, you can even get a nice hot breeze blown to your face if you look down at the vents on the top portion of the Deck. The battery gets drained rather quickly but for someone like me who doesn't plan on taking this to a remote area without access to an electric socket, it's not a real problem. But you know that the Steam Deck is great when I actually skipped a couple of streaming sessions just to play it on my bed.
FIRST IMPRESSION: 5 out of 5
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