Lenovo Legion GO: Everyone is wrong

what's up everybody and welcome back to joystick Aon it's been a little while and I promise you I am alive and I do happen to have a Lenovo Legion go and this video is going to be a little bit different so let's go ahead and Jump Right In okay welcome back to the channel everybody I appreciate each and every single one of you watching it's been about 60 days since I've posted it's been a crazy time uh more about that at the end of the video but this is all about the Lenovo Legion go so this is going to be a little bit of a different video I've spent about an entire week testing this out checking different benchmarks performances playing with bugs um and I'm not going to do a video like the fox or a video like Retro Game corpse because if you want to know all the ergonomic details of it you're going to go watch those guys videos anyway I don't want to make a carbon copy of the same thing so this is going to be tackling this device in a completely different light than any of those guys uh even looked at it and I think that's why I disagree with almost every single video I've seen so far so much I just I haven't seen a video I completely agree with yet I don't think and uh ETA Prime did a fantastic job I enjoyed that video I enjoyed the foxes video I enjoyed Retro Game corpse but I heavily disagreed with a lot of the things they were saying um and some of that comes down to lenovo's fault because some of it is simple it's marketing and it was poorly marketed FPS mode and this and that and so we'll talk more about that as we dive deeper and deeper into the video so let's go ahead we're going to rip this thing out of the case we're going to talk about a bunch of different things I wrote an entire script I'm going to Loosely try to follow that but after watching the foxes video today and retro games Corps video today and nerd nest's video um and fan the deck I man I am in a whirlwind of emotions on how I feel about all of their opinions and mine so let's go ahead we're going to rip this thing out and talk about all of it okay so I've really fumbled through this for 10 or 15 minutes before recording this I really wanted to kind of get down to what the meat and potatoes of the script or the device in general is and I want to pack that into the front of this video but I am going to have time stamps down below so you can jump around and find whatever you're looking for but I want you to get all the information you could need take that make whatever decision you think is best and let me know in the comments section down below so we're going to start off with what I think you are probably the most curious about or most concerned about and that's the screen so the Lenovo Legion go has a 16 by10 aspect ratio that's the exact same as the steam deck the only two differences on this screen between it and the steam deck are the bezels are smaller on the Lenovo and the refresh rate is much higher higher it's also 2 in bigger obviously or 1.8 if you wanted to do that math so the 16 X10 aspect ratio um is different than the wi four or the rag Ally those are both 16 by9 which is your typical aspect ratio um the two major caveats with this screen that everybody is concerned about and you hear it in every video fan the deck uh Fox Retro Game corpse um the nerd Nest all of them two things this device does not have vrr neither does the steam deck neither does the GPD Win4 but the rag Ally does and this is a portrait display the steam deck is Portrait the wi 4 is Portrait there's a caveat to the Wi 4 and we're going to talk about that in just a little bit um but those are the two main things no vrr and it's a portrait display in my opinion those are completely irrelevant to any handheld gaming in any way shape perform 99.9% of you watching this video whether this video gets a million views or if it gets five I would argue that 99% of you will never run into an issue with a portrait display now there are some situations where Windows errors can occur and we'll talk more about that in just a second but the games that don't run from direct X7 that need a rapper to be installed for them to function are not more than likely games that you're going to play When the talks about these games or the issues that you run into where the game just won't launch or it crashes or it stutters so bad and it's not functioning and basically any way shape or form or it looks like it's on its last leg those are titles that 98% of us have never heard of don't care about and aren't going to play on a $750 handheld anyway so why does it matter well it really doesn't Because unless you are one of those people like himim who's in that top 1% it's never going to affect you you might run into a Windows error here or there and we'll talk more about that in just a couple of minutes but that's not going to affect you so portrait display or landscape display you should throw that out of the water as long as you're a normal everyday user gamer Enthusiast there's a few games from back in the day that you won't be able to play but guess what there's work arounds for that there's rappers you can install there's all kinds of Community Driven support for these things and three days in I was able to solve most of the issues with simple downloads from just enthusiasts out there like us so if you're in the top 1% of those people super concerned about the portrait display there are workarounds for it yeah you got one extra step to do but more than likely you're already jumping through all the emulator steps at that point anyway so what the hell um and if you're like anybody else more than likely you're not going to have issues you might run into a Windows error but more on that later the second thing everybody freaks out about is no variable refresh rate everybody loses their mind over this one and it's up in the air a little bit but vrr didn't come out until about three years ago and before the end of the video I will put up the exact date of when vrr became a main stream thing but it's really not been around very long we've been using handhelds we've been using the steam deck the wind4 devices for a really long time with no vrr it doesn't fix game stuttering that's not what it does it makes the screen when you're having very high and very low frame rates bouncing back and forth it makes it less tearing so the screen doesn't look like it's tearing as much it's very non noticeable especially in a gaming handheld it's highly used on devices like the series X the PlayStation 5 um the series s uh the switch all these games that are on large TVs where it's stretching itself to be the the size of the TV and can cause tearing and different issues that's where vrr makes a massive difference not so much on one of these handhelds I would argue that you couldn't tell the difference between the displays having vrr or no vrr if you had them all in front of you and you didn't know so we're going to show some gameplay from the rag Ally from the Len Lenovo Legion go from the deck from the wind four and show you that they're just there's no difference there and it doesn't matter and the best quote that I can tell you from major techtuber or YouTuber that I was watching was the nerd Nest saying this is a fantastic screen and if I didn't know from Lenovo that it didn't have vrr I would have no idea so it's not an issue so no vrr portrait display completely irrelevant what you have to decide is do you want a massive screen 8.8 in this thing is Hefty it is Big compared to this 6in GPD Win 4 or the slightly smaller 7in steam deck although in reality holding the deck and the Lenovo Legion go there's really not a whole bunch of difference there so it's a beautiful screen I absolutely love the size and we'll talk more about that later in another section where we talk about the sizing and the weight and everything but screen's awesome you don't need vrr and portrait doesn't matter at all for the normal 99% of us so let's go ahead and move on okay so before we move on from the screen actually I did forget to tell everybody this is 144 HZ refresh rate I think that's just a marketing ploy to be completely honest with you because there's not a whole lot of games that you're going to play at that high of a refresh rate and most people I think care a lot about battery life and lowering that down to 60 and staying within that range makes that a lot better as well so just keep that in mind when you're thinking about the screen as a whole because I forgot about it in the previous section so the next thing that I think most people think about or care about or want to know about and where I heavily disagree with pretty much every single thing the fox has to say uh is FPS mode but I do think this is where Lenovo messed up in where they kind of they open the door for people who don't necessarily like it to be right and that's the marketing behind it so this is FPS mode where you have your right joycon you can flip the toggle on the bottom turn this guy into a mouse um use the was wasd for your left joy conon and so on and so forth that's FPS mode and the idea behind that is maybe you'll play Call of Duty or Doom maternal or whatever first-person shooter you greatly enjoy for me I don't really understand why you would necessarily want to do that um I think when you have a handheld device and you're playing Call of Duty or Halo you might want it to be up here but if you're playing it far away doing WD your view is a little different for me I have a really hard time playing competitive games on my giant TV on my fireplace I'm a little ways back from it but I have a hard time doing that I need to be up in the fight my screen right here going and that's why I really enjoy the legion go and it's 8.8 inch screen that's a big selling point for me but all of that besides I really think FPS mode should have been called RTS mode because you can easily play Total War you can play Warhammer you can play Civ 6 you can play any realtime strategy game pretty much flawlessly Company of Heroes um the first two before they added in Gamepad support there's so many RTS games that this now allows you to do now I understand that the steam deck did at one point like it you can do it on there and you have both of the trackpads and it's doable this makes it way EAS easier so it really should be called RTS mode now let's talk about this mouse it's a little hard to get used to but I think once you actually get used to it I don't think you'll hate it now it's all imperfect uh I think it's I'm not going to say it's a Half Baked solution because I don't think it is I think there's a reason for all of these keys on each one of them because you need them when you're playing uh V rising or you're playing Total War you need all of these different macros to be able to make the game function properly so I honestly think in an RTS setting where I'm playing Total War I kingdoms or Empire or Rome that you're you need all of them and even though some of them in are in hard to reach places where you might have to move your finger in a weird way you really can't get by with any fewer amount of buttons whether that's an RT s game or whether you're trying to play Doom or so on and so forth I don't know what else they could do now one major design flaw that I'm going to completely and wholeheartedly agree with the Fox on is that this Bas you should have this joyc Con somehow transform into something like this uh I don't really know how to do it I don't have an engineering degree even if this isn't going to be like a Transformer I have it attached to the actual unit itself um I don't disagree with the fact that that's an inconvenience but for me personally I have no issues having this at the bottom of the bag or the case um because I will definitely use it and what I'm going to coin RTS mode I think that's a far more likely solution I think there's a fairly big community of us who are going to use it just like that so I think Lenovo yes this solution could be better where I think there's a lot of potential is they can sell different joycons you can sell this unit by itself and have game only Centric joycons where it's just set up like the steam deck where you only have a couple extra buttons for extra keys like um the back buttons on a PS5 Edge controller or an Xbox series controller um where there's a lot of potential there for them and for third party manufacturers to really jump into that but I do think that they could improve on it and getting these actually off of the device itself is somewhat hard one thing I would like to see is if you could kind of design it your yourself and I heard that in the nerd Nest podcast today where it's like you know I'm going to go to novo's website I'm going to pick my model I want the 2 terabyte version and I want the RTS mode left-handed joycons for the device that would be super cool and would give everybody their own unique experience based on whether they're left-handed or whether they plan on playing it like this or whether they only want it to be a game pad so I think what I'm going to coin as RTS mode is fantastic I don't need a mouse mat I don't need anything I can lay in bed and play Total War Empire and let me tell you I've been looking for a handheld that could do that for six years and this is finally the one and the the phrase that everyone keeps using is that this is the first handheld that's not missing something that the deck has and this is actually the first handheld that not only is it not missing something the deck has it has something the deck doesn't it can play games the deck just can't play in that capacity so I think FPS mode RTS mode in my opinion is a huge win for Lenovo yes it could definitely take some improving the ergonomics of it is a little weird takes some getting used to but personally for me once I was able to set the keys to what I wanted to in about five minutes I had it together for RTS Games first person shooters I'd much rather have it just set up just like the normal Lenovo Legion go comes uh with joycons on it but I think RTS mode FPS mode is a huge win for them I'm super happy that they took a step towards doing something revolutionary something nobody else is doing because that's what makes it unique that's a big selling point for me and I think a bunch of other people and I also want you to keep in mind I think that Lenovo took risks they gambled on the FPS mode they gambled on the bigger screen they gambled on a lot of things the fact that this can just flip over and turn into a tablet which for me is honestly pretty sweet um they gambled on the kickstand they gambled on a lot of different things that I think turned out to be awesome which is why I think they're getting so much blowback from the media I would argue that it sounds like a lot of people don't like this device just by watching reviews and I didn't hear that much animosity towards the Ally has SD Card issues no word you know nothing but crickets from Asus uh no different than them putting capacitors upside down on motherboard and trying to burn people's houses down and all kinds of different things that Asus does but God forbid that another company takes an idea and tries to run with it and yeah there are flaws but they're just getting destroyed for you it seems like and maybe I'm reading the room wrong and tell me if I am in the comment section down below but for me personally it takes time yes the software we're going to talk about that soon is Half Baked it might be a quarter baked but when the Ally came out that software was pretty buggy to start with too I would argue this one's a little bit worse off but we gave the Ally the benefit of the doubt 3 months four months for them to get that thing regularly tuned up and pretty good to go and it still has its fault and it's got an SD card reader that catches on fire half the time and it's got all kinds of RMA issues for bad joysticks and right bumpers and hell I had three of them all three of them were bad and I haven't had a bad device in the first year of owning it and God since I've been like 12 so ah it just kills me I think RTS mode is absolutely awesome RTS mode to me FPS mode to them I think the marketing was wrong and I think if that marketing was changed you might see a completely different tune out of reviewers so let's go ahead and move on okay so let's move on from all of that and talk about something right down the middle it's not really a great thing it's not really a bad thing it's the battery and this battery is about 20% higher capacity than the steam deck and the Rog Ally and it's really hard to compare them like for like because there's so many different things on each one of those devices and windows is a totally different ball game than running Steam OS and things of that nature but with this being a 20% higher capacity battery it runs fairly close to what the steam deck does so we're going to throw up five different games that I played and exactly how long the battery lasted in each one of those titles I'm not really too worried about comparing it to the Rog Ally because with the smaller battery in that that running Windows as well and having the same Rumble the RGB that battery life is far worse than the deck or the Lenovo Legion go this is pretty much on par with the steam deck you're going to see about an hour and a half to two hours in highly uh you know really intense games running higher presets on the TDP and you can get between 3 and four hours on games like Hades and emulation so we're going to go ahead move on from the battery it is acceptable for me although I think they could have put a fairly bigger battery in such a big device but then you have to worry about weight so I'm all in all I'm kind of split right down the middle it's not a terrible thing for me it's not a great thing um I don't care about how long it takes to charge this thing half the time I play with the plugged in anyway if you want to see that um lenovo's website gives you a fairly good description I think it's from 0 to 70 and a half hour from zero to like 70 minutes give or take and I'll buy that story the fox said the exact same thing so let's go ahead and move on okay so one more thing that's kind of directly in the middle at least for me is the ergonomics we're not going to talk about this super long but I wanted to kind of cover it just so I could say the video pretty much covered all topics um if you want a more detailed version of at least the fox's opinion or Retro Game corpse I can link both of those in the description down below but for me it feels fine I honestly never notice Andor hit the M2 M3 M4 buttons or any of the FPS mode RTS mode buttons when I'm actually just playing in handheld mode um I have no problems with it whatsoever the joy-cons are a tad bit on the lighter side of things but I think the reason that is is they were really trying to bring the weight down from having a bigger battery having a bigger screen and all the things that accompany that you wanted to try to offset that a little bit that's one place that they can like we were talking about earlier them being able to just sell third party or additional joycons um might change that drastically so we'll just have to have see how that comes over um the next few months maybe a year or so but um the thumb sticks are a little small but I don't mind the placement of them um you can buy cabs for them if that's an issue for you I don't mind the d-pad at all you're not going to be playing um a very d-pad Centric games it's not the best d-pad on the planet but for anything that you might normally play it's pretty good um the triggers I think are fantastic I absolutely love how big they are I have slightly bigger hands so maybe if you have small hands that could be an issue for you uh the bumpers are great and again I have no issues with FPS mode I think it's fantastic but placement of buttons I do not like where the L uh Legion one and Legion two buttons are being at the top that's where start and select should be and your start and select buttons being on the bottom side takes a little bit to get used to I also am a big fan of the trackpad it does a really good job um keep in mind there is a little film cover on top of it right when you get it you might not be able to tell it and you might think you're digging at something they do a terrible job of having like a little tab to pull off of it so just keep in mind that that is there I saw that in a Facebook comment so uh that's kind of 50/50 for me I think the ergonomics are right in the middle it doesn't feel as great as the steam deck but it feels better than the Rog Ally or the Win 4 so let's go ahead and move on to everything that I don't like okay so before everything I don't like I did forget to mention the face buttons they're perfectly fine pretty much feels like you're playing on an Xbox um so the things I don't like I don't like the placement of the L1 and the R1 buttons for the Lenovo Legion Pace um and the starting select being at the bottom is really odd and I think that those should definitely be swapped around um and I just I would really like a fingerprint reader as annoying as it seems I think that's pretty big with Windows when you don't have a keyboard like you do on the GPD devices so those are the two big setbacks for me uh the software is a buggy mess I've had issues with different tdps going over performance up to 21 Watts on the first few days was causing it to be a bug mess I was having like quadruple or even more the amount of frames playing at 15 watts than I was at 21 Watts so there was definitely a bug going on there um lenovo's done a fairly good job coming out and saying hey we're working on this we're working on this and so on and so forth and unlike Asus and the SD card of crickets and more crickets and more issues I understand that an SD card is an SD card just by an internal drive but if you can't bother to have an SD card reader not explode or you can't bother to put the capacitor the right way up on a motherboard that's $700 you've lost a little bit of my faith um but that's that's for another video so those are really the things that I don't like the most about it um the kickstand I'm a little iffy on but that's really about it oh one more thing the speakers are God awful like God awful so you got it's wishy-washy battery wishy-washy or ergonomics I can I can live with that uh really bad speakers like I want a Bluetooth or hook up directly and thankfully with two USBC ports I can actually hook up my dongle while charging it at the same time so that's pretty awesome um that's really about it that I don't like yeah the software sucks but I'm G to be completely honest with you uh I'm used to the crappy Chinese software from GPD that works completely fine it doesn't have to be as intricate as this um I think it's going to get much better as time progresses but yeah the software is bad the button placement is somewhat bad but everything else is kind of attributed to being Half Baked coming out and every device has some kind of issue at launch kind of like the TDP one I was talking about so uh the speakers is probably the biggest disappointment to me on the entire device so one thing that I forgot to talk about so I'm re-recording this at the very end of all of my recording is the charging on this thing um I know I dabbled on it just a little bit but one of the things I don't like is there's no indicator on whether or not this thing is charging no LED um just nothing going on and windows has a tendency to randomly turn on when the device is turned off but plugged in um so I would be careful about putting this in the case that it comes in and using the charging flap on the bottom of the box or the bottom of the case because it might just turn Windows on it kind of sucks because you can't see the charge status there's no nothing that indicates that um so you might think you can just click the power button and see what percentage you're at and know it boots windows on so that's a little bit of an issue but I think that can be changed in software most of the issues I have with this device can be fixed in software um so okay thank you okay so I've spent the better part of the last eight or nine days uh maybe even 10 only playing the Lenovo Legion go I haven't turned my PlayStation on I haven't got on my computer the deck has stayed exactly where it is uh the Win 4 I reset and I'm getting rid of it this device has completely changed the way that I play on the go um and I think the marketing behind it is pretty good I think FPS mode should be called RTS mode and I think you would take a lot of the blowback from the fox and Retro Game Corps and some of these channels away if it was marketed that way but I really don't feel like we're all playing the same device it it feels more nitpicky than it has with other reviews on other devices um and I feel like they took a step and they tried to do something unique and I feel I don't know I never liked Lenovo I'll be completely honest with you if you've made it this far in the video I would have told every single person for about the last 10 years don't buy a Lenovo laptop that's a piece of garbage don't do why are you doing that and I was an Asus Fanboy and I had every single laptop even the laptop I have right now is an Asus uh laptop and this device has completely changed how I look at trying to not be biased for one um but also how companies can improve and how they can fall off like the Rog Ally to me had a bunch of stumbles that I can't look past um it's a pretty good device but I had three bad models that's not a by accident thing there's no way that should happen um and other things that happened with that company I might be in a small subset much like the fox where a portrait display really messes with that inner group of 1centers I might be that 1% playing Total War and Civ 6 and all of these Warhammer games in fps mode on the go I spend a lot of time in a trailer in at hotels um so for me it's awesome I can play those things on the go I also really enjoy competitive Shooters playing Halo Apex Legends uh war zone sucks but pretty much those games and there's not a handheld that I can play them on quite like the legion um and that's really that 8.8 inch screen for me I have to be up in the fight and that's why I can't even play competitive games on my PlayStation hooked up to my big TV I have to be up in it um so with the legion go I can I can be right there I can play it on the go I can play it on the couch it's awesome there's always going to be those little quirks with Windows that's every single Windows device that's how the GPD had its issues and everything that was with it um and we're going to talk more about it in the later video too but I think it's a fantastic device I think for 700 bucks 750 if you buy the one terabyte model you're getting what I think is overall the best device um for a windows-based handheld I think the steam deck has its reasons why you could say it is a better device but I think for a windows-based handheld that is by far the best machine on the market let me know what you guys think in the comment section down below let me know if you think I'm in the 1% let me know if you think I'm absolutely crazy let me know if you agree with my opinions on everybody else's videos because it's been about 70 days since I've made a video but this upset me so much that I have taken as much time as I can out of my extremely busy life right now to make this because I think it's got its issues it's got some bugs that need to be worked out of but I think it's a fantastic device and I don't think that you should be scared away from it anymore than you were encouraged by the early days of the Rog Ally when everything it was like a war zone over there too it it's just it's a crazy place for gaming and Tech media right now and I don't agree with most of them but with that being said let me know what you think in the comments section down below I have about five more videos planned out for this I want to do Straight benchmarks uh pretty much want to make like an 8 minute video this has gone dragged on far too long I want to make a video just about portrait and landscape displays and windows and how that reflects on the steam deck that is a portrait based display but you can't find that in any of the major YouTube channels talking crap about its portrait display although it's a little bit different because Windows causes that to be a problem but anyway thank you guys for watching I really appreciate it uh interact with us in the comment section down below and we'll see you in the next one thanks for watching a

Channel: Joystick Ayrton

Views: 51,223

Keywords: lenovo, lenovo go, lenovo legion go, legion go, legion go review, lenovo handheld, lenovo legion go review, lenovo handheld review, legion go vs rog ally, legion go vs steam deck, rog ally vs legion go, new steam deck, oled steam deck, new handheld, new gaming handheld, gaming handhelds, best gaming handeld, legion go benchmarks, legion go vs rog ally vs steam deck, legion, best handheld, best handheld pc, gpd win, gpd, gpd win4, the phawx, retro games corps, fan the deck

Id: 8scZLm6-rKE

Length: 29min 34sec (1774 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 13 2023