Steam Deck OLED Review - Blinded By The Light

mmorpg.com:

Ever since the first Steam Deck came out, I’ve been a fan. I bought the Deck in the first wave of units, getting mine a few weeks after it initially launched in 2022, and it has certainly been put through its paces with me. I’ve traveled the world with my Steam library following me wherever I went, from Iceland, Canada and more. I’ve loved this device, even with its limitations.

However, it wasn’t perfect. The Steam Deck is heavy over long periods of use and had a tendency to get rather warm if playing a heavy triple-A game over time. Since I bought the cheapest version, its internal memory was snapped up quickly, meaning I constantly swapped out SD cards for storage. The screen always left a bit to be desired, especially after I experienced the incredible display found on the ASUS ROG Ally (Z1 Extreme) I reviewed a few months back.

However, theSteam Deck OLED is here and has addressed quite a few of the nagging issues I’ve had, and in almost every way, it feels like a true upgrade over the base variant of Steam Deck.

When the Steam Deck OLED arrived on my doorstep, I was reminded of how much I appreciated Valve’s minimalistic packaging the first time I grabbed a Deck from the company. Indeed, this goes way back even to the Steam Link’s physical device and the Steam Controller almost ten years ago, but the Deck has seemingly streamlined that further.

The packaging on the Decks is playful and thankfully made of mostly recyclable materials, which I think every major company should be doing nowadays to limit landfill waste. The case of the Steam Deck itself is a much-appreciated upgrade over the standard Deck’s case, which was never bad, but the OLED case feels a bit more premium. This could be down to the textured Steam