Firaxis’ card-based superhero RPG leans heavily on the magical side of its source material, while distinguishing itself from most spandex-and-quip adventures by encouraging you to chat with and befriend your team of supes. Marvel's Midnight Suns Developer: Firaxis Gamesīestest Best badgewearer Marvel’s Midnight Suns loses none of its charm on the Steam Deck. Performance is good too: not quite a solid 60fps, but consistently about 47-50fps. Originally launched for the ill-fated Stadia before finding sanctuary on PC, Wavetale incidentally benefits from the Stadia controller inputs effectively matching the Deck’s, so it feels like it was meant to be here all along. It’s a blast, especially once you also get the hang of chaining together jumps and hookshot moves to navigate the flooded world even faster. An emotive platformer at its core, the greatest joy in Wavetale is catching a ride on your movement-mimicking merperson friend to zip across the rolling ocean. Wavetale runs as smoothly on the Steam Deck as your character does on water. Wavetale Developer: Thunderful Development There’s some very occasional stuttering but that’s present on high-end desktop PCs as well, and if you simply lower the Effects quality setting from High to Medium, you shouldn’t drop below 30fps. This translates perfectly to the Steam Deck’s controls, and despite being a bit of a looker, Stray avoids any serious performance issues on the portable hardware. Stray shakes off notions of merely being a haha-funny-cat novelty game with some stellar worldbuilding and intuitive puzzle-platforming, helped along by a sleek context-sensitive traversal style. That it’s more or less a perfect match for the Steam Deck thus makes me one very happy wannabe rockstar indeed. I’d happily recommend Tango Gameworks’ surprise rhythm action/hack-and-slash/platformer hybrid regardless of what you play it on: it’s a funny and satisfying brawler with some creative boss fights, and its final act kicks off with one of the single best combat encounters I’ve played in an action game. That chance becomes a certainty with its easygoing performance, allowing Medium quality to run at a nearly constant 60fps and High quality to rock n’ roll along at 45fps or more. Hi-Fi Rush is the kind of game that plays better on gamepad controls than a mouse and keyboard, so it always had the chance of being a great Steam Deck game. Being a rougelike – mostly – it wouldn’t normally be as suited for short bursts of portable play, say on a bus ride, but the Deck’s quick resume feature lets you take a break whenever and immediately hop back into a run. And it’s just as tense, inventive and witty on the Steam Deck: it runs at a perfect 60fps, and only needs the face buttons and a single thumbstick for its slick, combo-happy combat. Hades claimed, by Advent Calendar rules, RPS GOTY status back in 2020. It doesn’t suck (hahhhhhh) the battery too quickly either: although I haven’t done a full full-to-empty test yet, I’d say you can expect four to five hours of surviving vampires before the Deck runs dry. It only really needs the left thumbstick and an occasional face button for inputs, and the framerate keeps above 40fps even with the most overwhelming of monster crowds, so chalk Vampire Survivors up as another Steam Deck special. Simply moving around and auto-attacking sounds like a dreadfully dull premise but as the XP-unlocked weapon upgrades stack up, and the initial trickles of enemies become screen-filling bullet hell hordes, holding back the tide with time-stopping lasers and weaponised Bibles becomes almost hypnotically compelling. It’s a clever, surprising, and unrelentingly charming introduction to your new gadget, not a mention a reminder that Valve should really make more games.Īt the suggestion of several RPS readers (and with the implicit recommendation of, apparently, scores of other Steam Deck owners), I finally got round to playing Vampire Survivors. It’s essentially a free Steam Deck tutorial, designed to help you get used to the controls layout, but is entertainingly administered through a genuinely funny mini-jaunt through a pre-Portal Aperture Science. The short and sweet Aperture Desk Job isn’t just one of the best games to play on the Steam Deck – it should probably be the first one you try. Just don’t forget to grab one of the best microSD cards for the Steam Deck as well, so you don’t prematurely run out of storage space. Especially if they’re already installed on your main PC, as this means you can use Steam’s recently added local transfers feature to potentially cut down on download times when installing those same games on your handheld. Since the Steam Deck is designed to play most, or at least a good chunk of the games you already own in your Steam library, you may well already have some of these ready to go.
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