The Steam Deck Is Not Fit For Purpose
The Steam Deck is a piece of kit with great potential. If you’re into diving into the code or tweaking your PC’s BIOS settings just to run Crysis at a couple more frames per second, then I’m sure you’ll love it. It’s a gaming laptop in the body of the Nintendo Switch. A Switch after it’s been souped-up, put on a course of anabolic steroids, and taken up bodybuilding, that is.
My gripes with the Steam Deck are not that it’s too bulky, however. I’m also not bothered by the fact I don’t want to dive into the nitty gritty of the console’s code to run certain games – although I am consciously aware that I could be getting more from it. I’m not too bothered by the fact that it can double as a radiator when playing games I didn’t think were particularly intensive. Kaiju Wars turns it into a bona fide hot water bottle.
Related: Steam Deck Review: Impressive Hardware But An Unapproachable Experience
I’m not even arsed about the abstruse systems, meaning that I couldn’t dive into The Witcher 3 on a long car journey because I didn’t have an internet connection. It was fully downloaded, but because I didn’t load it up for the first time when connected to the internet, it was unplayable until I did so. Okay, I’m a little bit arsed about that, but most of all I hate the battery life.
The Steam Deck is great for playing your games on the go, and I’ve never seen more power in a handheld device. Cyberpunk looks great, and runs okay, and that alone is impressive. But how long can you play it for? Three hours tops.
In the car journey that I downloaded (and couldn’t play) The Witcher for, my Steam Deck died before I reached my destination. It was fully charged and I wasn’t playing particularly intensive games – a mix of Kaiju Wars,
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