Review: Valve Steam Deck 

I've been playing PC games since I was a kid—I remember trying SkiFree on my mom’s desktop when I was too sick to go to school. Since then, I've amassed a vast library of games on Steam, the platform created by Valve; it's how most people play games on their computers. (Valve is also the creator of hits like Half-Life and Portal.) I was intrigued when Valve announced the Steam Deck last year, a handheld portable gaming console that lets you play your PC games anywhere. It's the potential kick I needed to get through my ever expanding Steam backlog. 

Well, I've been using the Steam Deck for several weeks, playing AAA and indie games on my couch, in bed, while sitting on an office chair, in my car, at a café, and on a plane. Some of my fears when I first heard about the gadget were validated—it's bulky, and the layout of the controls isn't very ergonomic, attributes you don't really want in a handheld console.

It also feels like Valve could've used a few more weeks (months?) to polish the software experience. (The Deck was supposed to launch back in December, so it's already been delayed once.) This console has been in development for four years, through a pandemic, so it's not surprising to see last-minute issues to correct. But since I received it, Valve has pushed system updates every single day—meaning I've had to retest certain functions over and over again. Valve says it will continue pushing out frequent updates to squash bugs after launch. 

That's both good and bad. It means the software needs more work, but it also shows how committed Valve is to the Steam Deck. I'm glad to see it, because this thing has a ton of potential.

I received the top-end Steam Deck that retails for $649, which includes a 512-gigabyte solid-state drive. You can pay as little as $399 for the Deck, but you'll only get a paltry 64 GB of storage. Considering that AAA games are 50 to 70 GB these days, if not more, you'll probably want to pay up for the 256-GB version ($529) at the very least. 

That said, the MicroSD card slot is hands down my favorite feature. You can hot-swap in MicroSDs once they're properly formatted to jump in and play a different game, essentially giving the Deck a whole lot more storage. I purchased a 1-terabyte SanDisk Ultra MicroSD card, and it holds all 41 games I wanted to download, including Mass Effect Legendary Edition (110 GB), ARK: Survival Evolved (101 GB), Destiny 2 (74 GB), Cyberpunk 2077 (67 GB), and Death Stranding (64 GB). 

The load speed difference between the internal SSD and the MicroSD is minimal—Death Stranding took about 19 seconds to load up on the SSD and 30 seconds on the MicroSD, though this does fluctuate. So far I haven’t noticed any major differences. I also tried this with 32-GB and 256-GB SanDisk Extreme MicroSD cards, and the results were no different. If you're worried about Valve's low storage options, MicroSD cards will have your back.

This Steam Deck is bulky, but not as heavy as I had imagined nor as uncomfortable to hold. It weighs 672 grams; for reference, the Nintendo Switch OLED is 436 grams, and the iPhone 13 is 174 grams. Much of this weight sits on each side of the console, which is curved at the back to fit more comfortably in your hands. It feels weird to hold such a wide handheld (12 inches compared to the 9-inch-long Switch), but you get used to it. Literally. The first time I played for an hour straight, my right hand went numb. I now mix in a few breaks and stretch my hands out regularly and it hasn’t happened since.

My biggest concern was the layout of the buttons, especially since you can't detach the controllers like you can on the Switch. Unlike most controllers, where the buttons and thumb sticks sit on a diagonal—a design iterated on over decades of testing to reduce strain—the Deck’s D-pad and ABXY buttons sit horizontally next to their respective thumb stick. They're quite high up to make room for two trackpads on each side of the console. There are also triggers on the console's shoulders and paddles on the back, which feel great and remind me of the Xbox Elite controller.

I didn't have trouble with the buttons or the D-pad, and switching between them and the thumb stick was fine. I did feel my thumbs straining to reach the thumb sticks themselves. As for the trackpads, I found myself relying on the touchscreen a whole lot more instead (especially for typing in passwords), as they can be difficult to use when you're trying to click on something small. 

The Switch's kickstand has spoiled me—there is no built-in kickstand here. So if you pair third-party Bluetooth controllers to the console, and you might want to, you'll need to buy your own accessory to keep the screen propped up. Valve has a dock (pictured above) with additional ports for connecting Ethernet or hooking it up to your TV, but it's not available yet. 

Speaking of the Switch: Because its charging port is on the bottom, it's hard to charge and keep it upright at the same time. The Steam Deck has a different problem. The USB-C charging port is off-center on the top, and the cable tends to get in the way, interfering with my access to the paddles and the ABXY buttons. It's a bit annoying, so you'll need to orient yourself a certain way based on where your outlet is (unless you use a portable battery).

Connecting the Deck to an external device is easy enough if it uses a USB-C cable or has Bluetooth; otherwise you’ll need an adapter. For example, I connected my Xbox controller just fine, but I had to buy a USB-C to HDMI adapter to plug the console into my 4K TV and computer monitor. (It worked seamlessly with both.) 

The Deck will run at the external display's resolution, but Valve says it has "some work to do in having the Steam Deck UI handle the resolution change gracefully.” I noticed that as Death Stranding added black bars on all four sides of my TV. The graphics, which look pretty great in handheld mode, don't look as sharp on the big screen though, and I didn't see any options to tweak graphics settings.

After an hour or more of nonstop gaming, the Deck got hot on the top edge where the fan is, but since you never have to touch this area, it's not really an issue. As for noise, let's just say it's a little quieter than a MacBook under load (not those new fan-less Macs), though it depends on the game. Death Stranding made those fans run louder than Townscaper.

That brings us to battery life, one of the Steam Deck's biggest weaknesses. Running it off the 40-watt-hour battery is a race against time. An hour-long play session of Subnautica and Death Stranding caused the Deck to lose 10 percent every 10 minutes. This was while it was in airplane mode, with volume levels at 50 percent and screen brightness at 25 percent. You’ll likely get around an hour and 40 minutes of playing time before the thing dies. For a portable gaming device meant to be used on the go, this is not great.

The Steam Deck’s operating system has been its next biggest flaw. The good news is it’s something that can be fixed—and Valve is working on it. Several problems I ran into have already been patched, but considering the sheer number of bugs I've seen, there's a good chance you'll run into your fair share.

After six days with the Deck, it got caught in a startup bug loop that required a full factory reset. I didn’t have the necessary accessories on hand, so I bought a USB stick and USB-C hub to plug the drive and a keyboard into the Deck. I had to use my PC to create a bootable flash drive with the recovery image on it. This process took about 15 minutes (excluding the time I had to wait for those accessories to arrive). Valve developers assured me this is a rare bug and it has since been fixed, but if it does happen again, Valve says it's working on a “smoother, more user-friendly flow for re-imaging” to fix it.

Using the Steam Deck in desktop mode also requires a bit of tech-savviness. This is useful as it lets you run games that have third-party launchers unavailable on Linux, like Blizzard's launcher, Microsoft’s Game Pass for PC, and EA's Origin, but you'll want to install Windows first. For this, you’ll need a bootable drive or MicroSD with Windows on it plus a keyboard to connect to the Deck. The whole process, for someone who isn’t adept at Linux or writing bootable drives, can be overwhelming. 

The 1,280 x 800-pixel-resolution LCD screen itself is fine. It's no Switch OLED, but it gets quite bright, so I often leave it pretty dim. However, PC games are designed for large screens, typically 13 inches or more. Switching to a 7-inch screen doesn't always lead to the best experience. Not to mention the shift from keyboard and mouse controls to the D-pad, ABXY buttons, trackpads, thumb sticks, triggers, grip buttons, gyro, and touchscreen—it can all feel a little clunky and overwhelming. 

The upside is the ability to remap the controls to suit your own preferences or input an external device—like Xbox’s Adaptive controller—if the existing controls or layout don’t feel comfortable. People with visual accessibility issues, however, may have problems seeing small text on the Deck. I'm slightly nearsighted and had trouble seeing certain markers in Death Stranding.

You technically have access to the more than 60,000 titles in Steam's marketplace, but many games are not going to have optimal performance on the Steam Deck for some time. To help players find optimized games, Valve has a Deck Verified program. This is essentially a marker Valve doles out after testing a game on the Deck. There are four markers: Verified, which means it “works great on Steam Deck, right out of the box"; Playable, where some things work and others may require some tweaking to make it playable; Unsupported, where the game is “not functional” on the Deck currently; and Unknown, which means Valve has yet to check the game’s Deck compatibility. At the moment, most games fall into that latter category. 

I’ve played titles in the Verified, Playable, and Unknown categories, and my experience matches Valve’s warnings. For example, a game might not bring up the touchscreen keyboard automatically for text inputs. That happened in Timberborn, which is listed as Playable with a warning saying, “Entering some text requires manually invoking the on-screen keyboard.” Don’t let the Unknown category scare you away from trying a game, especially if you already own it, as it could play quite well, like Temtem. Games that are labeled Verified look and feel similar to playing on a desktop PC; the controls are generally intuitive.  

One hugely awesome feature I love? Continued Play. It lets you start a game on your PC, save, and then instantly switch to the Deck if you want to move to the couch. It was a lot of fun loading into games I haven’t played for years and picking up where I left off. Unfortunately, developers need to support this Steam Cloud feature, so you may have to wait for this seamless switching to work.

Being able to play games that have been stuck in my Steam library just about anywhere is amazing. I also love that some components of the Steam Deck are repairable or replaceable, like the thumb stick and the SSD. Valve doesn't think you should open the machine up, but you have the option. 

Still, it's tough recommending the Steam Deck in its current state just yet—especially if you’re not a hardcore gamer, have visual accessibility issues, or are worried about straining your hands and don’t want to spend extra cash on a separate controller. There is a lot to love, but it feels very much like an early-access game. That said, if you order it now, your expected ship date is somewhere between April and June, so things might be different by then.

Gabe Newell, Valve’s cofounder and president, tells me that Valve will seriously consider customer feedback and use cases for further updates and future iterations. And here's the thing: In my conversations with Newell and the developers, I repeatedly heard “future generations,” as though a second-gen Steam Deck wasn't far off. 

I've played multiple games from my backlog over the past few weeks, just because I'm no longer tethered to my gaming PC. The experience hasn't been as seamless as I'd have liked, but give it six months to a year and the OS could be in a completely different state. Or, you know, just wait for the inevitable Steam Deck V2.