Lenovo Legion Go In-Depth Review

[Music] hey everybody this is Russ Metro gamecore today we're going to do a final review of the Lenovo Legion go now this is a windows-based handheld PC and this will be the third video I've made about it the first one was an Impressions video so I talked about the look and feel of it and just those early Impressions when I first had it in the hands now the second video I released a few days later and that was an emulation showcase so played basically all the systems to show how they work on this device and the emulation is pretty great on here now this will be that final review so I'm going to take all that together and then decide whether or not it's going to be worth it for you we'll go over all the things I like about it the things I don't like about it and it's well I'm going to also talk about a wish list of some of the things I wish that they Implement sometime in the future anyway we got a lot of ground to cover here including a comparison against other similar handheld PCS like the Rog Ally in the steam deck anyway let's go ahead and get started [Music] started okay to start we're going to focus on all the things I really like about the Lenova Legion go number one is going to be the pricing so this starts at $6.99 that'll be the 512 gigabyte model and they all come with 16 GB of RAM there's also a 1 terab model that's also available this is going to be $750 personally I think that upgrading and doubling your storage for $50 is a no-brainer so between the two I would recommend the $750 model just so you can put more games onto it of course it also has an SD card slot so you can always add storage that way as well another thing I like about the legion go is that it's made by Lenovo a large manufacturer that means you'll be able to pick it up in various places for example I purchased mine from Best Buy but if you have a micro center nearby you can also get it there another thing I like about having it easily available is that it's also easy to return so for example if you pick one up and decide within a week or so that maybe it's not a good fit for you you can take a back with relatively little hassle for me it doesn't feel like a final investment compared to some of those other manufacturers when I buy a GPD device I know that I'm just going to be getting it and keeping it and just hoping that nothing goes wrong with this if something goes wrong heck I'm just going to take it back to Best Buy another aspect I like about the Lenova Legion go are the controls well at least most of them we'll start with the analog sticks now these have magnetic Hall sensors and also are quite large they're not quite console size but very close they have a nice smooth range to them so moving them around in a full circle feels very nice in addition the Caps are rather large which means it's going to be pretty form fitting for any size thumb I was also very impressed by the face buttons they are glossy and a little bit flat but they have the perfect amount of travel for me these are rubber membrane connections which means they're going to feel a lot like an Xbox or PlayStation controller probably more so like a PlayStation's controller than Xbox either way they've got a good amount of travel they feel very sturdy in the casing and I have no complaints about these face buttons and finally the last control component that I really like is the touchpad this is located on the bottom right of the device and is mostly going to be used for Windows navigation you could probably play some games with it for example a real-time strategy game might work out pretty well with that touchpad but it's not something that's going to work seamlessly with like a first-person shooter like you may be expecting with steam deck and it steam controls so instead it's just something to make the Windows Experience a little bit better and I do like the feel of it now it doesn't physically click down when you press on it instead you're just going to tap on it to click and then if you wanted to do a right click you just press press and hold for a moment and then the rightclick menu will pop up either way this is one of the very few Windows handheld PCS where I didn't feel compelled to plug in a mouse to get everything set up and that's a really good thing in my book next let's move over to the screen now this is 8.8 in it's massive and it's also pretty awesome 1600p resolution which is essentially a 1440p resolution but a little bit taller this has a 16 by10 aspect ratio which makes it really good for playing retro games because 4x3 content will almost fill up the whole screen in addition I think that the color and vibrancy here is really top-notch as well so altogether no complaints whatsoever when it comes to just the screen quality and the picture itself in addition it's also 144 Hertz so if you want to play a lightweight indie game that'll allow you to push all the way up to that much frame rate yeah you can totally do that but I do have a couple minor gripes about the screen number one is that it's portrait oriented that is going to give you some issues you want to play some older Windows games and even though that high refresh rate will help when it comes to timing DeLay So if you're playing like a first person and shooter competitively this is going to work out really well but it lacks vrr or free sync now variable refresh rate or vrr is a really important component and is only used in one handheld PC right now and it's the RG Ally and I love it essentially what it'll do is if you're having frame rates that are going all over the place which is very typical in a handheld PC running off of battery and all that other management it makes it a lot smoother to the point where if you just turn off the frames per second counter and you can't see it a lot of the time I don't even notice anything at all I can't say that about any other windows-based handheld PC and so in that regard I wish that the Lenova Legion go had that as well especially with that higher refresh rate I think it would have been a great match now sticking with the things I actually like about the device let's talk about tabletop mode this has a kickstand built in and they actually have a really wide angle to it so you can kind of put it in any angle that you would like which is really awesome and additionally the controllers are detachable we're just going to call them joycons for the rest of the video and hopefully Nintendo doesn't sue me or Lenovo either way this is a very seamless experience when you pop them off even though that is a little bit awkward it works really well to the point where you don't have to do any sort of configuration just pop them off and start playing it's very similar to a switch and I found that in tabletop mode I really enjoy holding these big chunky controllers and playing around with them I have a couple complaints in the fact that when playing them just independently of one another they do feel a little bit lightweight and cheapish but I understand why they tried to make them lightweight and that's because they have another feature called FPS mode I went into detail about this in my Impressions video because I do think it is a no idea but essentially what you do is you take that right joyc con and you put it inside of this little hockey puck that comes with a device and then you can now use it as a vertical Mouse now like I mentioned in the Impressions video the button configuration is a little bit awkward just to kind of get used to but over the past week I've been determined to figure it out and I think I've done a pretty good job and the reason why this was attractive to me is because I'm a left-handed gamer which means that my left analog stick is my dominant hand and that's one of the reasons why I've never been a keyboard and mouse player because my dominant hands on the keys which honestly probably don't take a lot of nuance and as a result I feel like it's a wasted opportunity for my dominant hand this one's kind of The Best of Both Worlds I have the left analog stick to do that fine control of my character but then also I like this vertical Mouse with my right or weaker hand because it just feels a little bit more sturdy and I feel like I'm in more control compared to a regular Mouse so yes as I kept practicing I got used to FPS mode and where the buttons were all located it's still a little bit awkward but at least I could scroll through using the scroll wheel and I knew where each button was and I wasn't accidentally pressing them as much as I was initially however the ironic thing is that I found that FPS mode didn't work very well for me with firstperson Shooters and I don't know if it's something with the field of view but it just felt a little bit limiting and so when it came down to it I still preferred to play first-person shooters with my traditional like handheld mode with two analog sticks however I did find one big benefit and that was with third person shooter game so risk of rain 2 is a perfect example and I think it's because the camera is just a little bit further behind your character and so you can see more things at once and as a result I don't know I just kind of felt like I could see more and had a little bit more detail that I could actually follow additionally I was able to use the fine grain controls of that vertical Mouse and it is much better than a right analog stick when it came to aiming and whatnot and so when playing a game like Risk of Rain 2 it was actually a much improved experience over playing handheld in fact this was the best experience I'd ever had with this particular game and as I was playing it just kind of hit me at one point where I was like man this is really working right now and so I think it might take a little bit of time and also some practice to figure out what type of game works best for you but yes I think when it comes to tabletop mode and FPS mode I'm going to be playing third person shooters like Risk AR rain 2o because that was a lot of fun and finally the last thing in my positive category is the USB 4 ports and honestly this one's a little bit mixed I love the fact that we have full speed USB 4 ports two of them on the device but it's also a little bit weird that there's one in the top and one in the bottom now when you're in handheld mode and you're just plugging it in no problem there however when you put it in tabletop mode you're going to be covering one of your USB 4 ports and so that diminishes your flexibility by 50% anytime you want to use tabletop mode or you want to dock it now that being said I don't think it's the end of the world because having one usb4 port is better than zero but all the same I would have liked to have one to charge and then one also to give video out that way I'm not relying on a USB C Hub and speaking of which this moves into one of the negative aspects of this device in that the USB 4 ports to me don't feel feel very stable and it's a subtle thing that took a while for me to identify and I'm not sure if it's something to do with my unit specifically but also bear in mind this is a retail unit so not a pre-production unit this is like anybody else buying one of these devices and so there were two problems that I experienced number one was plugging in an external SSD which I often do when I'm trying to run an emulator it would not boot an application from my hard drive and so as an example I have all of my emulator applications on my SSD along with my games and all of it's been pre configured it makes it very easy for me to plug it in to say something like a Mini PC and then do a bunch of testing I wasn't able to do that with the Lenova Legion go instead I had to move all those applications directly onto the device and then boot the application from there if I tried to boot it from the hard drive it would give me an error so I'm not sure what's happening there some sort of read write issue but all the same I've never experienced this in a USB 4 device ever before in addition I found that USB C hubs would just crap out on me if I tried to plug them in it took about 20 minutes but IED tried multiple ones and some pretty high quality ones as well I even tried some docs and all of them would have issues when I plug them into USBC sometimes it be something as simple as like my USB mouse would no longer be working but often it would just make my USB drives disappear and then they would reappear and disappear and reappear so I was having this disconnection issue all the time now I don't want to make a big deal about it because it may not be a widespread issue and after all this is only the first week of this device being available but all the same it was something that I couldn't ignore and so I had to bring it up now one of the benefits of having a fullspeed USB 4 Port is that you can use an external GPU and I was really excited about this Prospect so I did some testing with the legion go to start I have one of these razor chroma things these are terrible by the way I would not recommend buying them for their price but all the same I have kept it around for testing now inside I have a full desktop GPU it is the RTX 370 TI and this is a fairly decent mid-range GPU I think I got it for like 350 bucks but one thing to bear in mind this is a thunderbolt 3 Connection so it is bottlenecked by the transfer speeds there now unfortunately I couldn't get this to work at all when I first plugged it in it detected that the GPU was plugged in and then it prompted me to try and install its RGB lighting software and that was it I couldn't actually connect to the GPU after that from there I tried manually installing the drivers both from the generic GeForce drivers app which said that there was no GPU connected and then same thing when I tried to manually install the 3070 TI drivers and so unfortunately no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get it to pick up on the egbu now this is not an un common thing with this razor chroma in fact if you go on Reddit you will see just a ton of posts of people trying to plug it into various PCS and either not working or just may be magically working sometimes so there's probably several reasons why this may not be working but I just wanted to highlight that it's not a plug-and-play experience if you were hoping for that now it also happens that I just got an egpu in the mail and I'll be doing a review about this very soon this one here is the gpd1 this has a Radeon RX 7600 MXT inside and that is a laptop GPU that's why you can see it's much smaller than the Razer chroma now off the bat I knew it wasn't going to work with the Lenova Legion go because it's an AMD GPU and this unfortunately is a driver's issue not the fault of Lenovo but really of AMD and that is that you need adrenaline to be able to install additional Graphics drivers from an external GPU and the Z1 extreme does not have proper drivers for the legion go yet as a result you cannot open up adrenaline using the OEM drivers that come with the device you have to uninstall those and then Sid load different ones and so as it stands right now it's not a plug-and-play experience for either of these egpus yes if I probably dedicated a couple days to it I could probably get these up and running but there will also be some trade-offs for example with the GPD G1 I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to uninstall and reinstall other drivers every time I want to switch between the docked egpu mode and handheld mode so as it stands right now I love the fact that we have USB 4 ports however they don't really work as intended I'm hoping that you know 6 months from now this will be a non-issue we'll have new updated drivers and everything's going to work seamlessly if you want to use an external GPU but I do think this whole situation is a good indication that the software is just not ready yet for this device speaking of which now let's move over to our dislikes starting with the software okay I talked a lot about this in my Impressions video but I just want to go over some of these items really quickly number one Lenovo has their own software suite for this device it's called Legion space and the idea here is this is your software ecosystem you can purchase and download and install games and then you can also launch all your installed games from various storefronts so for example your Steam games your Xbox games Epic store all that's supposed to work seamlessly however I have found this is not ideal for example I've installed a bunch of Steam games on my SD card and none of them will show up in the legion Bas app so I was constantly having to remember okay do I have this one actually installed I have to go into steam itself and then find it and play it from there and so it made the legion space app a little bit less critical for me now within the main Legion space app you also have a suite of settings but these are all accessible in an easier way as well and so I often would not go in here to change out the settings but I would use a quick menu so let's talk about the quick menus to bring this up you're going to press the top right button and honestly once you're within here there are lots of good options here you can adjust your brightness and volume and then there's all the performance tweaks that you would want within the main Legion space app but within here but I was also being held back by the entire interface in the fact that I had to tap that button three times wait a moment and then it would pop up now luckily there is one way to get around that if you press the left left Legion button plus the left bumper it'll bring up a bunch of hot keys and there are two in particular I did find to be very valuable the first one if you press that top left button and the B button it'll bring up an on-screen keyboard so that's going to be very easy if you want to just bring it up and then take it down and then also if you press that top left button and the Y button it's going to swap between the four different performance profiles and so that kind of negates the need to get into that performance setting which is great but all told you know the software suite here is very much so in its infancy and I think that Lenovo still has a lot of work in their hands and I also have some concerns about like their power management profiles we'll talk about that in the battery life section later in the video now earlier I mentioned that there were some control components I really liked but there are a couple I don't number one I don't think the d-pad here is very good for certain types of games I think when playing Modern games you know just trying to hit the cardinal points it's no problem however like I demonstrated in my Impressions video it doesn't work very well for like retro Platformers and I don't think it's very good for d-pad style fighting games either and so the way I see it this device is more built for playing with analog sticks than it is the d-pad so for example when playing Celeste yeah it's serviceable I can play the way I want to but it is a night and day difference when I try to play with something like the Rog Ally to me playing the Rog Ally and its kind of soft clicky d-pad is a genuine pleasure to use by contrast the legion go is something that I just kind of put up with and it's not half bad another aspect about the overall controls are the ergonomics and I don't think they are the best they're pretty good on the legion go but I still have some complaints number one let's talk about just the overall design of it as you can see see right here it kind of has a cut off or a square-ish kind of aspect to it and this isn't bad I think it's a fairly ergonomic feel especially we have these nice big grips but all the same this doesn't feel very natural when it comes to like the length of your shoulders and your elbows and the way you're actually going to hold a handheld instead you kind of have to tuck your elbows in in order to be able to get a full range of motion and I don't think that's ideal now again I don't think these ergonomics are terrible but there is room for improvement now another thing worth noting is the kind of squarish or flat feel of the face compared to the sides of the controller this is basically a 90° angle right here and that corner right here is going to jut into the palms of your hands it's not an unpleasant feeling I don't think it's like sharp or painful but all the same I think it could have been better and they could have rounded it especially here near the bottom if they had inset this a little bit and made it a little bit more ergonomic I think it would have been a just more comfortable device to hold additionally a thing that just kind of happened to me all the time when playing in handhold mode is that I would push all of these extra buttons there's a ton of these here and and you can hear just as I'm like playing it if you squeeze this device you're going to push any number of buttons on the right hand you can push 1 two three four different buttons as you're playing these four buttons won't actually do anything as you're playing but all the same you're going to squeeze them as you're playing on the left side here there are two additional ones here and you also will touch these inadvertently I just think that they are not very well hidden to the point where you can press them when you want to and then don't press them when you don't these are just so front and center that you're going to press them accidentally now whether or not that bothers you it's going to be up to you like I said it's not actually going to input any sort of button press but all the same it was something that was distracting to me on day one and continues to be distracting to me here on day 10 or whatever it is another thing that I didn't expect about this device but I found got worse as time wore on is how smudgy it is you can see here on the back I haven't wiped this in about 3 days at this point but you can see it's just really smudgy and this may not bother you at all but for me it just kind of makes the device look cheap and a little bit greasy overall and this is not a problem in other high-end handhelds like the steam deck or the Rog Ally now I did find that the front also would get smudgy but not quite as much as the back I'm not sure what's going on there I will also say that I wiped down the front all the time just because it was something that I saw a lot so if you don't have a microfiber cloth already I would recommend investing in one if you're going to get the legion go okay and finally the last thing in this kind of dislike section of this video is the performance I was actually surprised to find that often this device would perform worse than I was expecting I think this is 100% within the realm of performance tweaks and software so it is something that can probably be improved over time but as it stands right now within this first week or so of launch it's a little bit disappointing I'm going to give you two examples starting with stray this is a game that's not super demanding but it's also hard to get to run smoothly and so here we are playing at 800p resolution so I am downscaling it quite a bit but I'm also running in performance mode which is going to be a 20 wat TDP that's a pretty significant battery requirement and as you can see here the average frame rate's about 35 frames per second it would kind of go all over the place as well I would often get some stutters like I mentioned this is a game that is kind of hard to play smoothly so in the end yes I think this game is playable 800p with low settings but all the same you know it's over 30 frames per second it doesn't look half bad now on the flip side let's compare it against the Rog Ally exact same chipset here but this one's been out for over 6 months so a lot of software tweaks have been happening since then and so here I'm playing it at a 720p resolution this is a 16x9 display so it can't do 800p but it's going to be very similar in terms of graphical Fidelity and we're also using low settings right here however for this one I'm using its balance profile which is going to be 15 watts so a lower TDP requirement and we're also getting an average frame rate of somewhere between 55 and 60 frames per second so that means what we're seeing at least 20 frames per second better on the Rog Ally with the exact same chipset and at a lower power profile let's do one more example here is Final Fantasy 7 remake this one only plays at a 16x9 aspect ratio so we can use the exact same same resolution so this is 720p on low settings and here I'm really trying to favor a high frame rate over graphical Fidelity and this game is absolutely playable as well I'm getting an average of about 45 frames per second that's going to be a really great time and again we're playing at a 20 wat TDP here on the legion go now I would probably in my own situation bump this up to a 1080P and then lock it at 30 but all the same you can see performance here is pretty good 40 45 frames per second at 720p low settings now again we're going to go back to the r Ally 15 watts this time so a lower power profile again 720p low settings and lo and behold we're getting a higher frame rate about 55 frames per second on average so my main point here is that yes performance is probably going to improve with the legion go but Lenovo has a lot of work to do when it comes to actually dialing in these settings and I do expect these updates to come pretty quickly especially from a large manufacturer like Lenovo I mean after all they've been working on laptops and doing these kind of firmware updates for years and years at this point and since buying this device about a week ago I've seen like three software updates so I think it is something that we'll see improvements for over time now another thing I think will probably improve over time is the battery life again this is kind of going hand inhand with those performance profiles either way I did a full Suite of real world battery testing so let's go over that to start the best thing about this device when it comes to the battery is how quickly it charges even though the battery here is 25% larger than on the steam deck and the r Ally it still charges up super fast in fact it's about an hour and a half to charge it from 0 to 100 however one thing I did notice is that it discharges a lot of battery life when you put it in sleep mode so for example last night I booted up the device got it into the main Windows menu then I pressed the power button up top and then I just left it overnight when I came back this morning I had a 7% battery drain that is a lot more than I was expecting I was thinking it was going to be somewhere around 1 to 2% which is pretty typical for these handheld PCS now let's talk about the results that I got when actually testing battery performance with five different games we're going to start with our worst case scenario on the far left and then work our way up from there for for both god of war and Elden ring I actually played these at the performance or 20 wat TDP mode but for each of these games I tried to focus on different aspects for example with God of War I tried to get the best possible graphical Fidelity so I kept it at a 1600p resolution but then I did have to turn on FSR down to the quality settings just to make sure that the device didn't completely tank and at those settings I got an average of about 32 frames per second at that point I would probably just cap it at 30 and then go from there and you can see here I got a little bit over 90 minutes of battery life altogether that's not half bad next for Elden ring I tried to favor a higher frame rate so in this one I dropped the resolution down to 800p and then kept it at medium settings and here I got an average frame rate about 48 frames per second it was a very smooth experience this is also kind of similar in battery life altoe because of that 20 W TDP but it wasn't quite as power hungry as God of War and so as a result I got about an hour and 42 minutes altogether and of course bear in mind this is kind of a worst case scenario yes you can push it to a 30 wat TDP but I basically found no performance gains between 20 and 30 and so I think 20 is a really good cap and as you can see right here about an hour and a half in a worst case scenario at a 20 wat TDP now for the next two which is Ori and the will of the Wisps and Legend of Zelda Wind Waker HD these two I played at the balance setting this is going to be the 15 wat TDP for me this is the primary setting that I used for most of the games that I tried to play and because we were playing somewhat lightweight games I really tried to push the graphics on this to really take advantage of that full 1600p and the 8.8 in display so with Ori and the will the Wisps I did a, 1600p and then the default medium settings and I got an average of over 60 frames per second again this is where I would cap it at 60 and here we got some better battery life than at the 20 wat range but not by much I got 2 hours and 15 minutes or so altogether and it was similar for Legend of Zelda Wind Waker HD this one I also upscaled to a 1600p resolution it looked glorious on this display and this is a game that just caps out at 30 frames per second anyway so no problem hitting that Target and here also we got about 2 hours and 15 minutes Al together in battery life and to be fair at about a 15 or 20 W TDP I think this is about what I was expecting but I was surprised to find that when pushing it down to the lowest power setting possible it wasn't as good as I thought it would be so for this example I played Celeste one of the easiest games that you can play on any PC at this point and this game cannot scale Beyond 1080p so we just played it those default settings and again like I mentioned I use the lowest power profile which is called quiet and it averaged between 7 and 8 watts and even though I had vsync on it wouldn't go to the whole 144 Hertz instead it would just lock at 60 and here I got 3 hours and 44 minutes of battery life now for context you know playing Celeste for 3 hours and 44 minutes is pretty great but I was expecting a lot more especially given the fact that we have a 50w hour battery to give you an example I've played other games at a 7 watt TDP on the r Ally like steam world dig 2 that one can also get 3 hours and 50 minutes so about the same but again remember the Rog Ally battery is smaller by 25% so that's kind of a red flag for me I was trying to be the least power hungry as I could be but still the battery life was the same between the rogg Ally and the Lenovo Legion go at its lowest setting so honestly I don't know where all this battery is going and if this is something they can fix in the software but I certainly hope they can of course the panel itself is probably requiring a lot more power just because it is a larger display but I have a hard time believing that it's going to account for an additional 25% battery requirement okay and the final section that we have here in this video before I start wrapping up is going to be a comparison against the Rog Ally the steam deck and then the Lenova Legion go now before we get started I do have a couple ground rules number one is I want to keep this to the closest parody is possible and so what we're going to do here is we're going to compare 512 GB models between these three in addition even though we just got an announcement about the OLED steam deck I personally don't have one just yet at the time of making this video and so as a result we're going to compare it against the LCD model of the steam deck the 512 GB model which had the $650 price point now of course I realized this product is being discontinued but all the same we have a lot of data about it and I've been using mine for almost 2 years at this point and so I think it is a good comparison example and we'll talk about the OLED steam deck in a future video either way this is the table I came up with with some of the most important parameters for me let's start with the display I gave the legion go a 9 out of 10 and that's because I really love the big screen and I think the colors are very good however I don't consider it to be a 10 out of 10 because it lacks variable refresh rate and it is also portrait oriented now the r Ally I also gave a 9 out of 10 I'm not saying these are equal in any way in fact I think the legion go screen is better than the RG allies when it comes to the size and the display itself however the RG Ally does have variable refresh rate which makes a big difference to me when I'm actually playing games that being said it's not a 10 out of 10 because I prefer a 16 X10 aspect ratio especially when it comes to Retro Gaming and so in that regard it's just a little bit shy of perfect now the LCD panel on this steam deck is pretty good but here I gave it a 7 out of 10 I like the aspect ratio but it is is only an 800p resolution and then also it just doesn't have very good color vibrancy either next let's talk about audio now I think the legion go is a distant third between the other two and I do prefer the steam deck audio quality over the Rog Ally and I did a bunch of testing with this in the Impressions video I did earlier so no big surprise here that the top firing speakers on the legion go just don't sound that great although you can make some fixes in software if you use a third party app next we'll talk about fan noise again this was something I covered in my Impressions video and in that I mentioned that the fan noise is about equal to the steam deck and I still think that's about right if anything I would say it's a little bit louder and so because of that I gave it a 6 out of 10 compared to the 7 out of 10 on the steam deck meanwhile the fan noise on the rogg Ali is pretty incredible like there are so many times when I'm playing I'm like is this fan even on I'm not even sure next up we have controls and this is pretty subjective but I gave the legion go an eight out of 10 and honestly that's because they got a lot of things right I like the analog sticks I like the face buttons I also like having a touchpad but like I mentioned for my own needs I think the d-pad could be better better meanwhile the Rog Ally has a great d-pad but I don't like the face buttons they're really clacky to me they have a lot of Wiggle or play to them and so as a result I did get this a lower score now the LCD version of the steam deck just kind of gets all of these right it's not that any of these are perfect but there are none that I would really say have a big problem next for ergonomics we'll talk about the steam deck first because this is the first 10 out of 10 that I awarded and that's really because I have no issues or problems with the steam deck ergonomics I still think they're Best in Class when it comes to handheld PCS now the Rog Ali is also very good but a little bit squarish and sharp in some of its angles and so as a result it's not quite there with the steam deck and the legion go is a pretty ergonomic device it's a 7 out of 10 which is still way above average but all the same I do have some issues with the ergonomic profiles like the sharp corners on the front and sides and then also the squarish kind of feel of the device when in handheld mode in fact it's kind of weird to say but it's more comfortable to take the joycons off and play it in tabletop mode than it is to actually play in handheld mode for me next we have the software and the legion go still has has a ways to go to catch up to the others for what it's worth I think that the Rog Ally probably does Windows gaming on a handheld the best in the sense that the Armory crate software does basically everything I needed to do and it's not very buggy now the steam deck software is also very good it gives you a very conso like experience but I'm also not a fan of the desktop mode and just the clunkiness of that interface altogether so to me these are both an eight out of 10 they are pretty good but they still have room to grow meanwhile the legion go software is so bad that I found myself wanting to use third party software instead and that is is never a good sign now when it comes to Performance I did a little bit of objecting here I gave the Lenovo Legion go an8 out of 10 now in honest truth the performance here is worse than the steam deck and the RG Ally but I think this is a software thing that needs to be tweaked and I think that within like a month or so Lenovo will probably have some tweaks that will give us big performance gains so I'm kind of banking on the fact that Lenovo is a big company and they also have been doing this for a long time and so we'll see these software updates coming up and so I am projecting a little bit by giving it an 8 out of 10 when it comes to performance just because I don't want to dog on it right now in its first week of release so really what we're doing here is looking at potential performance across the board so really in that regard the Rog Ally and the legion go are going to be kind of neck and neck sometime in the future meanwhile we are seeing performance limitations in the steam deck there are certainly some AAA games that are just not playable on this device so I do think that as Time Marches On from a performance only standpoint the steam deck is going to lag behind next we'll talk about game compatibility in the sense that you can play just about any game you want now now the steam deck is going to lose in that regard because there are many games that will not play on the steam deck in its regular Steam OS interface some key examples for me are going to be like Call of Duty and Destiny 2 now the legion go can play those games and a bunch of other windows games which does give it a leg up however because it has a portrait orientation many of those older Windows games are not going to play correctly without a bunch of intervention meanwhile the Rog Ally has a landscape display and it also runs Windows which means that basically any game you can think of is going to run on that device and so I'm giving that a 10 out of 10 10 next we have extra features and I think the steam deck wins in this regard not only do we have dual trackpads and all the control schemes that you can come up with that but we have the whole steam controller interface which can really revolutionize the way that you use the device there's just a lot of nuance things to the steam deck which I think are really still best in its class meanwhile I gave the RG Ally the worst score among them and it's not because it's doing anything bad but that it really is just a handheld PC it's not really doing anything special meanwhile the legion go has some pretty interesting Innovations as well including that tabletop and FPS mode so I still gave that one really high marks of an 8 out of 10 next we have battery life and again I'm going to be doing some projecting here just because I do think it's something that's going to be fixed by Lenovo in their software so I'm being a little bit gracious by giving it an8 out of 10 but you have to bear in mind this also has a 25% larger battery and so I think we are going to see those battery gains in the future now the steam deck I also gave High marks just because the Apu itself is really efficient and they've done a lot of things that are within the Steam OS to improve that efficiency as well and so often you'll get better battery life than you would expect on the steam deck compared to the others meanwhile the r Ally is just going to be the worst out of the bunch it has a small battery but then also doesn't have the efficiency gains that you can get in Steam OS with the steam deck and unfortunately this Still Remains one of my biggest issues with the r Ally next we're going to talk about value and I kind of copped out here and gave them all an eight out of 10 and this is a moving Target because some of these have been going on sale for example the r Ally and then of course the OLED steam deck just kind of threw everything out of balance as well either way the price point is pretty similar to these about $600 to $700 and I think they all bring something unique to the table and so they all are of very good value now my final category here is going to be issues that I think will detract from the overall score for the legion go I talked about the USB 4 issues that I've been having I only knocked off one point here because I'm not sure if this is a widespread issue just yet or something that's happening with my device either way it's something worth mentioning and I couldn't ignore it and so as a result I did take off one point now for the Rog Ally I took off five points and that's for the micro SD card issue I think at this point I've owned three different Rog allies and two of them have had micr SD Card issues now there is an RMA process to fix your micr SD card but again that's kind of inconvenient the fact that you have to send off your device and then wait for it to come back and then you can start playing again so I did deduct this quite a bit and so here you can see the final tally 80 and so here is the final tally 81 points for the legion go 83 for the Rog Ally and then 89 for the LCD version of the steam deck now in addition to being very subjective because this is basically only my opinion but also this is just numbers and you have to bear in mind that the numbers will not tell the whole story all the time so when all is said and done yes the L NOA Legion go did score lower than the other devices but there's a lot of opportunities for this device to break ahead for example if they update their software suite and then also improve the battery and performance then this might actually Edge out the Rog Ally at the very least now in the end you're probably wondering whether or not I recommend the legion go if you are interested in picking it up and there's many factors to consider but number one is whether or not you prefer Windows over Steam OS I think if you just want to play Steam games and you can't be bothered about the whole Windows thing then the steam deck is still going to be a no-brainer however if you're looking for a Windows machine then I do think that the Lenova Legion go is worth considering I think it has a decent price point and I love the fact that it's widely available that you can go into Best Buy pick it up and then return it if you don't like it however from my own personal experience I didn't find the legion go to really meet my expectations when it comes to a price point that is this High I want a device that's going to fill me with pleasure and wonder and what I mean by that is that when playing a device it should be a very pleasant experience it should be a way to relax and unwind so that in the evenings I can just kind of pick it up and play it at the same time I want to have a sense of wonder in the fact that I want to Marvel that we even have a device at this price point that can be kind of magical and can play all these games all my emulated Classics but then also a bunch of PC games so when I pay that much money I want to have both those feelings at once and truth be told that with the legion go I found those moments to be fewer and further between than I did feel with the Rog Ally in the steam deck and of course there's a lot of factors involved with that those other two devices have been around for a long time and as a result they're a lot more mature in their software and user experience and so it may mean that the legion go just needs more time to become more stable and with that in mind here are some wish list items that I think would make the legion go a better experience for everyone number one I think that Lenovo needs to really look into inder scaling on this display this is something they'll have to do partnership with AMD but the idea here is that if we get a full 2x integer scale from 800p content it'll look a lot sharper than it does right now and this is really Technical and I don't want to get too far into it but essentially AMD only allows this on external displays right now so you cannot do this on a laptop or a handheld PC but I do think that the legion go is the perfect test case to actually have this enabled because of that 1600p resolution another example will be all the software updates that need to happen in addition to updating the legion space app and as well as those hot keys in the top left and right there is a bunch of other little things so for example if you're playing in 144 HZ mode and you want to drop down to 60 HZ mode you can only do that when plugging in the device and so if you're like on an airplane and you have it in 144 HZ mode and then you want to drop it down to 60 you can't unless you find a power source that's something that's just really weird and not found in the other devices so I do think this is something that they can hopefully fix in software another thing I mentioned in the Impressions video is that the charging indicator is non-existent on this device you'll plug it in and it'll show the charging amount right then and there but after that there is no other indication unless you unplug it and plug it back in and to me this is a very janky setup and something that they can hopefully fix and finally the last thing on my wish list is the idea that they could create other joycons so for example I'm not a huge fan of the ergonomics right now but there's nothing stopping them from having an update down the line much in the same way that there are a bunch of different joy-con options available for the Nintendo switch I'd love to see something similar with the legion go and I think that would really push up that experience for me because for me controls are like one of the most important things overall at the end of the day I think that Lenovo made a very good first product I love the idea that they have all these additional functions like tabletop and firstperson shooter mode and I hope that they continue to build on this and come up with new ideas in the future however for my part this is not the end all be all handheld there are many things about it that just kind of prevent me from really enjoying it so whether or not this device is a good fit for you is going to depend on a bunch of different factors do you want a larger screen do you want windows are you interested in fps mode if any of those things interest you then yes I think it might be worth picking up but for me personally it's not really clicking in the way that I hoped it would to give you an example you know I bought this myself from Best Buy and I have like a two-e return policy now the thing is like if I wasn't a YouTuber and I didn't need to keep this around for other size comparisons and whatnot I think I probably would have returned it and it's kind of a double-edged sword in the fact that it's a Best Buy and so I can return it if I want all the same I am keeping it because I need to use it for work but I think that did have kind of a profound conclusion for me in the sense that if I wasn't doing all this stuff and if I just wanted to use it for playing games I think I would rather return it and use the Rog Ally or the steam deck overall but of course like I mentioned that's totally subjective and so I value everyone else's opinions and if you think that this one's a better fit for you I think that's awesome if you think the alies is better that's also awesome same thing with the steam deck after all what we're all trying to do is just play video games in the best way possible and that's going to mean different things for different people for me personally I think the legion go is kind of a past right now but I'm really excited to see if they have additional joycons and then also if they make a legion go too either way I'll be there first day to buy that one and test that one out as well so let me know what you think in the comments down below is the legion go going to be the one for you or are you going to try something else as always thank you for watching and be sure to like And subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy [Music] gaming [Music]

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 206,376

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Id: 19d3TzN85mw

Length: 39min 6sec (2346 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 11 2023