Tomb Raider 🔗
I finished Tomb Raider (the 2013 version) this afternoon. I’ve got a number of games on the Steam Deck, but this is the first one I’ve gone all the way through. It was a lot of fun. Similar to Jedi: Fallen Order (previously), but with fewer of the contrived arcade sequences that bother me in other games in this genre.
I had the original Tomb Raider on a PlayStation and loved it, but didn’t really try to keep up with the series, so this was the first time I’ve played anything with Lara Croft in it in a long time. This edition is bloodier and more brutal than the original, but it was a pretty good ride: Simple controls and an easy ramp to proficiency.
The Steam Deck 🔗
I broke down and bought an OLED Steam Deck. I’ve always been curious, the reviews were great, and winter is here (weirdly, this week).
What to say about it?
The OLED display is pretty nice. It’s surprisingly comfortable to play for stretches on the sofa. The controls feel pretty good. The dock is a little finicky but not that bad.
In terms of fitting into my other stuff:
I tried using the streaming app on my AppleTV, but the Steam Deck dock provides a much better picture and I’ve got a switch in the t.v. room so downloads are way faster.
I tried using my Nintendo Switch Pro Controller with it – which it officially supports – but the Bluetooth connection was super flakey. I can’t tell if something else was grabbing it or what, but I swapped in an 8BitDo Ultimate with a 2.4G dongle and that has worked very well.
There are a few areas for improvement:
Not every game works perfectly with it owing to how many are written for PCs and assume keyboards and mice vs. a controller. There’s a soft keyboard but that can be pretty intrusive. I’ve got my v1 Nuphy Air 60 sitting around that I could probably use, but so far I’ve been happy to just stick to the extensive list of games in the Steam Deck Verified directory.
Sometimes … things … happen. Like, it doesn’t recover gracefully from putting it to sleep and trying to pick a game back up: maybe the sound gets choppy or it stops responding to controls. It’s pretty good about saving my spot in everything I’ve played so far, so it’s no big deal to exit and restart, but it’s a little annoying when it happens.
Sometimes the controller buttons are mapped well but the on-screen prompts suggest a keyboard and you can’t be sure in the moment which button is the right one to mash. Lara Croft may have plunged to her death, had her throat torn out by wolves, or gotten gored by vintage airplane parts a few times as I tried to figure out what the hell I was supposed to be pressing.
By way of comparison to a Nintendo Switch? Chunkier, bigger, performs better. The size difference is lost on me because I ended up buying a grip for my Switch a while back to make it easier to hold, and that pretty much adds all the size back.
But the few glitches now and then aside, I like it a lot: Great library of games, easy to pick up and carry around, comfortable to play in portable mode, looks good on my t.v. I’m enjoying it.