Lenovo Legion Go: What worked (and what didn't)

yeah there's one category of tech that has seen frankly a boom in growth it's handheld computers handheld PC gaming in particular and you know what I'm here for them clearly I'm a big fan of these handhelds because they have marked a shift in my own General gaming since I use a MacBook Pro for work also carrying around a high-powered laptop capable of video editing and gaming is a little bit too extra so instead I'm either gaming on my consoles at home or enjoying a nice time lying down with one of these portable gaming beasts but Beast is the operative word for the latest one I've been using coming from the folks over at Lenovo it's certainly doing the most but it is also managing to provide some of the most practical solutions for some of the pitfalls that this category deals with but it is also prone to some of the issues that we've come to expect but for now let's fire up some games because it's Josh of vagara what's going on everybody here's what worked and what didn't with the Lenovo Legion go starting off as always with the design one of the most striking differences between this and the rest of the handheld computers is how the controllers actually detach like joycons there's this little toggle on the bottom portion here that you can hit like maybe with your pinky or something and then there's a slight pop of the controller just downward a little bit that releases it from the main portion of the Legion go and yes you can definitely use these controllers wirelessly from the main unit making this sort of like a Nintendo switch PC hybrid now I don't really use it in this manner a whole lot but I have to admit that it's nice to have the option because of the larger screen of the Legion go after all it is a large beautiful IPS screen that comes in with a substantial built-in kickstand it would be easy enough to play most of my games on a table like this or even lying down with the main unit on my chest when I'm feeling particularly lazy now let's look at these controls for a second you do have all the controls that you'd need and even a little bit more than that all the face buttons the triggers the shoulder buttons and the shortcut keys feel good enough with somewhat shallow depth but plenty of tactility the d-pad here is especially clicky and kind of big which provides a bit of a give and take that I'll touch more on a little bit later these Joy joysticks do feel nice but for the first few weeks of my own testing I just couldn't get past the tuning that was on them the dead zones originally on these joysticks were way too big making moving the camera around in games like cyberpunk feel like a chore but thankfully an update eventually arrived that allowed for Dead Zone adjustments and sensitivity customization needless to say I did what I could to max out sensitivity and thus the usability from my play style over here on the right controller there is a nice small touchpad area which allows for cursor control when needed sometimes you don't get this other handheld and thus you have to rely on the on ly janky way that Windows handles touchscreen inputs then again any actual text entry is just going to rely on the onscreen keyboard but at its core I have what we'll call a opposite but familiar problem to when I'm playing with the Nintendo switch joycons detached I think the joycons are a little bit too small for Comfort but in this case they seem kind of big and they don't really feel totally natural to me even after weeks of using the legion go not to mention I'm constantly feeling these extra buttons on the back sides and I don't even really use them at all they're easier to ignore when the controllers are attached but when gripping around each unit like this noticing and feeling these buttons can be kind of distracting long story short I tend to play the legion go with everything in one unit like this which means that the big screen and everything going on underneath that surface is all up in my face and that's fine because what we're getting here is an 8.8 in display which basically makes this main unit like an overachieving Windows tablet it's a Quad HD IPS panel specifically 2560 x600 uh and it Sports 144 Herz Refresher R underneath all of that is the AMD ryzen Z1 extreme which might be familiar to any of you following these handhelds uh and then there's 16 GB of ddr5 RAM and a 1 TB SSD in this more expensive model that is my review unit $50 less than this gets you half a terabyte of storage instead tempered expectations and pretty much any AAA game is required uh but that's something that we should be used to by now with these handhelds in the case of games like cyberpunk 2077 and my current Obsession of balers Gate 3 medium graph graic settings were possible when turning the resolution down a bit smooth gameplay was still possible and I just had to rely a bit more on the AMD rsr to make a lower resolution game look more than that but once things are going this set of specs has proven and continues to prove itself as a viable way to get proper PC gaming done on the go the problem is in the law of diminishing returns and I say that in a very specific way I'm talking about how Lenovo is trying so hard to provide the biggest and most capable PC handheld that some parts of this equation struggle to keep up and in this case I'm talking about the cooling and the battery the legion go is the first handheld PC I've used thus far that requires as much cooling as it does presumably because of the large IPS display adding onto the demands of the specs but Windows here is just not a particularly efficient operating system especially considering you get the full Windows desktop experience installed on here it just doesn't take too much for the fans to fire up and make it sound like this will Legion Go off into space now now if that doesn't bother you too much or headphones are your best friend then that's fine but the fact remains that this might be one of the noisiest portable gaming PCs or handhelds that I've used so far it's also not spectacular in the battery life Department either now bear in mind that I'm usually keeping the TDP pretty high especially in the performance settings right here uh because of the games that I'm playing but I can't get much more than maybe a couple of hours with the legion go before having to plug it into the 65 wat minimum charger or let's say power bank that I might have you'd think that a 5050 W hour battery can keep things going for a while longer but then again everything around that battery is just really sucking up the energy I mean sure like I just showed you can go into the custom settings and actually set up a TDP of all the way down to 5 Watts for let's say games that don't require a whole lot of power uh and you can also lower the resolution of the display if you really need to like right here uh but ultimately uh it still has other things in the background like Windows that gulps up the juice now while at home it isn't much of an issue because I treat the legion go like a li in bed cons using it the way its name implies like on a plane it's just a different story I almost think that Lenovo actually thought about this because there are two that's right two USBC ports on here making it more friendly for anyone keeping the console plugged in but still wanting to dock like peripherals to it in my case charging in one port and then outputting the image to a pair of XR glasses was one scenario I actually indulged in a few times clearly Lenovo is all about providing options but like a lot of gaming laptops you have to kind of expect to be Tethered to a wall plug for the best performance and any semblance of longevity okay so let's talk about some of the other types of games that benefit from the legion Go's options I'm sure you know about this feature already but the right controller can actually be made into a mouse of sorts but I say of sorts because it is obviously shaped differently than what you are probably used to there's this base here that comes with the legion go and it does sit in a little section of the case that magnetically attaches to the base of the controller which then props it upright and it gives the sensor some slide and from there the mouse kind of looks like a control stick but make no mistake it is straight up a mouse and the buttons here on this side are the left click and right click with a small wheel over here where your thumb might lie uh for scrolling up and down various Pages or just going through your inventory in video games this took some getting used to let me tell you uh while it was certainly viable for games that benefit most from mouse and keyboard configuration trying to find the best hand position actually took a little while and even then I don't think I really have it down it is cool to have a handheld PC like this provides such an option uh because basically every other device sticks to controllers uh third party controllers or onboard touchpads or just asks you to connect a mouse and keyboard anyway the bottom line is did it work yes but is it made a little bit weird just by nature of the Legion goes design definitely and that's because mainly to get the most out of that kind of game there still needs to be some sort of keyboard input that's why controller mouse or regular Mouse I still had a keyboard of some sort connected to the legion go to get my WD and and shortcut keys that are basically necessary to be effective you could always forego the mouse and just go straight into games like the finals and play casually with the controllers but anyone trying to get sweaty in valerin or fortnite might still need to kid out the legion go to their needed style which is exactly why the legion go is such an exercise in give and take for me because I'm a big Street Fighter 6 fan and honestly this d-pad just isn't doing it for me I'm usually pretty picky with stuff like this to be fair but I'll just say it outright the steam deck is the only major gaming portable so far that has provided a good d-pad for fighting games the Rog Ally is second but a kind of far second with its webbed version and then the legion go right here is basically last because this flat and clicky type doesn't handle command inputs very well at all so since I'm prone to being extra with my devices I get around this by just enjoying the legion go without the controllers attached and then plugging in my snackbox micro for the best fighting game experience possible let this be a light but significant declaration for me though if the d-pad isn't good for for Street Fighter I'm definitely immediately docking points now you've seen me play games from a few different launchers you can actually access them pretty easily inside of lenovo's own software here you have everything from Steam to Xbox game pass to epic games all of these are available and that's where PC handhelds like this Excel by providing access to all the different libraries you might want beyond just steam the same goes for almost any other app that runs on Windows compatibility just gets a nice boost when the main software is not hindered by one specific library and the same flexibility can extent to emulation if that's your cup of tea I have no idea what the main popular emulation apps are these days but if they work on Windows they should work on here and the specs in the legion go should be way more than enough to play the games of yester year however as a Windows handheld like I keep saying there are obvious pitfalls to the efficiency and sometimes usability of the Legion go sure having full windows means the legion go can do more than just game and maybe that's what you'll attempt to do with yours but that's not the case for me having the option then just feels like bloat to me I mean when I first booted up the legion go it was still a a straightup window setup that was cumbersome to get around because I meant dealing with the touchcreen here and even now like you have to kind of move around and exit places and all the touchscreen areas um and you have to use the on-screen keyboard it was just a chore honestly once I was past all that the legion software then had to update and give a tutorial on its available settings like the performance toggles and the joystick RGB lighting and then finally you could get into whatever game libraries you might have at some point a keyboard and mouse just made more sense to get connected to the legion go which at that point felt like a Mini PC more than like a console while Windows allows you to access pretty much anything and that is a blessing getting to that point comfortably will require quite a bit of work like I showed before it is easy enough now to hit this button get into the Lenovo Legion software which once again had to do another update and then it's from there that I can access the various libraries like steam or Xbox game pass but a proper gaming forward minimalist interface is something that I think these companies should really try to invest some time into developing I've used one word a lot in this look at the legion go options I have to give Lenova credit for looking to provide as many options as they can in one product but that also makes the product itself a great option in a space that is starting to really see serious traction portable PC gaming consoles are all to rage now with companies like Lenovo and nus realizing that there's a whole new category they can dive into and I'm a fan of their attempts the steam deck specifically the steam deck OLED that recently came out and I'm still going to make a video on is still the one that essentially jump started the craze and continues to be one of the easiest to recommend but the point is that we now have multiple devices that can be recommended in the same breath for different needs and so far the legion go is the only one of its kind that provides this many options and this much flexibility even if it contends with some of the uh diminishing returns as I said in certain aspects ultimately it's a great option for anyone who wants to PC game on the go but requires more more more and it's a worthwhile portable companion to the rest of lenovo's offerings making it an essential part of the Legion and so there you have let me know what you think of the Lenovo Legion go especially if you're rocking one right now but from there I'm going to go ahead and call it on this one thank you so much for kicking it with me again today please take care of yourselves and each other and enjoy your tea everybody

Channel: Joshua Vergara

Views: 29,371

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Id: lniDFRBZJm8

Length: 12min 13sec (733 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 26 2024