Hey guys, Valve sent me a cool present – a free Steam Deck for testing my games!

I played EBF5 a bit and it runs well enough, but is not particularly smooth, performance-wise. Which shouldn’t be too surprising as it doesn’t run great on most PCs either. EBF3 has lower requirements and seems to run better.

But the bigger issue is that the EBF games are designed for a mouse, and I wouldn’t want to play them with the Steam Deck’s track pads, which are quite similar to what the Steam Controller had. Maybe people who have practised a lot with the track pads will become quite comfortable using them, but so far that’s not me. The Steam Deck also has a touch screen, which you can use for the EBF games, but it’s still a bit clunky, especially since you can’t see tooltips this way. Controller support for the games would have been ideal, but I think it may be too late to be worth the effort at this point.

Bullet Heaven 2, on the other hand, runs great. It’s got the occasional stutter like it would on any PC, but it runs at a nice 60fps most of the time, and the controls are very comfortable. I think personally I’ll be playing a lot of 2D shoot-em-ups and platformers on the Steam Deck.

Sadly, I only received the middle model, so I can’t try out the anti-glare screen on the most expensive version (and we don’t have any sun in the UK at the moment anyway). It would have been fun to compare it to the Nintendo Switch screen, which is impossible to see on a sunny day. The Steam Deck screen seems to be about an inch bigger, which is cool.

As for hand comfort, it’s not quite as nice as an Xbox 360 or Xbone controller, or the Hori Switch controllers, but it’s not too far off. But that probably also depends on your hands.

Anyway, that’s my review for now. I’m not allowed to say much more at the moment.