The good- No portable console has ever had such killer joysticks, and most other buttons are up to their caliber.- Built-in gyroscopic options, 3D audio add some next-gen hardware sparkle.- Relative openness with Linux means you can expect compatible apps to work in the background in a pinch.- Mid-grade games can run on a full charge for a little over six hours at decent brightness.- When a game simply works as advertised, Deck can turn around absolutely impressive 30 fps and 60 fps performance.- Deck's base $399 tier is an incredible value for its power and build quality.The bad- ...but that price point is low in part because Valve skips an install of the gaming-friendly OS Windows, and Deck too often struggles to parse games through its Wine compatibility layer.- Want to get your favorite game running on Deck? Prepare to tap around a mix of in-game menus and Deck's system-level toggles to either maximize power or battery life on a game-by-game basis.- When a game doesn't work, you might have to flip through menus—again, on a game-by-game basis—to troubleshoot possible problems like Steam Deck's buttons being incorrectly mapped or a Steam Deck element randomly freezing.- Valve cheaped out on Deck's 7-inch LCD panel.- Grip buttons, rumbling motors feel like an afterthought.- Deck owners may find themselves juggling microSD cards just to maintain a solid portable game library.- Despite Deck's power efficiency, it can only last so long when demanding games rev to 100 percent power.The ugly- When your favorite game glitches, crashes, or fails to boot.Verdict: You have to be a specific kind of patient PC gamer to enjoy Deck in its current state. If you're not, wait for its software side to match the value of its price-to-performance ratio.https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/02/steam-deck-the-comprehensive-ars-technica-review/
