Keep in mind this is all without the need to be tethered to Wi-fi through game streaming services (although you can do that too if you would like). Not only can you play a large number of AAA titles from your Steam library, the Deck can even handle emulation of PS3 and some X-Box games. Sure, there have been lots of other portable consoles from major OEM’s and also Chinese startups, but the Steam Deck arguably outperforms anything out there as of the publishing of this article. The reason I feel that performance holds more value for this particular product is because we honestly have not seen a product like this before. That’s slightly ironic seeing as this should be a portable console, meaning form factor should be of pivotal importance. I would rank performance as slightly more important than design when it comes to the Steam Deck. The second is the design and build quality that Valve decided to use for this portable console. The most important one is how the Deck performs in terms of what games it can handle. All you need to do is look at this product in the scope of two categories. The Steam Deck is quite simple to review. It’ll all make sense at the end of this full review. So now that it has been nearly half a year with the Steam Deck, I’ve come to the conclusion that while the Steam Deck is amazing, it’s also not a great consumer product. The times that my body would allow my hands to press buttons, they were on the Steam Deck. I then lost a month of my life, literally bedridden and hospitalized thanks to a nasty Covid spell from that trip. My excitement was at an all time high as this machine, in theory, gave me everything I ever wanted in a mobile console. I took it with me 3 days after I received it in the mail onto a 5 hour journey from LA to New York. When I first received the Valve Steam Deck, it coincided with my first airplane trip since Covid began.

The new steam deck