Should You Play Helldivers 2 on Steam Deck?

hell divers 2 is taking the World by storm this game is huge at the moment and with good reason but can you play it on Steam deck this is the first time that Sony has released one of their exclusives simultaneously on PC as well as PS5 but as it's a PS5 game can it run well on this modest handheld if you want the bottom line of this video then hell divers 2 does run on Steam deck but I don't think it's the best place to play if you do have something like a PS5 or a decent gaming PC then I think the experience playing on either of those is much smoother than playing on the steam deck but at the same time the game is so amazing that if steam deck is the only option you've got or you want to play in handheld then I absolutely think you should play it on Steam deck keep watching for more details on how it runs on Steam deck the best ways to play and just generally my thoughts on this game so we'll talk first about Graphics now if just want to you know play the game real easily you don't want to mess around with the loads of Graphics settings and just stick with presets low will do the job for you however if you do want to dive in a little bit further and try and get the most out of the performance then here are the graphics settings that I've been using I'll show them on screen they're mostly low but with a few of the different texture settings turned up to medium instead of low because you can kind of get away with those and they do make the game look a little bit better that is the footage that you're seeing at the moment and you can see that most of the time it runs at about 30 frames per second sometimes it does dip down into the 20s but it's not too bad performance- wise now this does quite heavily depend on things like enemy density and you know which planet you've landed on the way the game works you can only land on certain planets you know depending on the day or the week that you're playing and these each have different terrains different environments different weather effects and all of this can have a bit of an impact on the performance now so far all of this is with the render scale setting left as default and if you're looking for this it's not actually under the graphic graic settings is under the display settings so you know you'd be forgiven if you couldn't find this however if you do flick between some of these settings back and forth it does make quite a big difference and I'm going to show you how the native option which is basically no upscaling that really does look the best you know the edges of models look a lot smoother there's much less pixel blurriness but you know the performance does take a hit because of it most of the time you can still play around 30 frames with it set this way but it does sometimes drop to the low 20s the ultra quality setting is what it was by default that was the footage that you saw earlier but on the other side of things quality and balance these lean much more towards giving you a better frame rate at the cost of the visuals now this seems to scale in real time so it's as you play as things around you change sometimes it's absolutely fine if there's not much going on the screen then you know character models look great nothing really changes too much it looks pretty nice and at a pretty high frame rate but on the other hand as things start to kick off the resolution sort of shifts dynamically and you can see an impact on the Graphics textures get pretty muddy and I've noticed in particular that smoke effects and fire effects they sort of turn into sort of big clumps of square pixels so just have a look for that and see how much it bothers you the upside of this of course is that the frame rate is much higher and sometimes you can even get sort of like these high 40s 50s sometimes even close to 60 frames using either the quality or the balanced scaling so really my recommendation would be set the graphics as I've sort of suggested and then when it comes to the scaling have a little play with the setting see which one you like try it on a few different planets and just sort of Judge whether or not you want that sort of higher frame rate or the better looking Graphics I tend to have it set on quality most of the time I'm not too sure what this is going to look like on the video because you're probably playing it on a bigger Monitor and YouTube's compression never helps but when you're actually playing handheld on quality it it doesn't look too bad you know the screen is smaller so you don't notice too many of those Jagged edges and I just prefer having sort of the option to have a higher frame rate if I can you can also change these settings on the fly without it having to reboot so don't worry too much about locking a setting in before you drop down to a planet when you land you know if you think something doesn't look right and you want to switch things up you can do that on the Fly just you know make sure there aren't any enemies around because the game doesn't pause so they will try and kill you while you're messing around with the graphic settings now everything I'm showing you all the graphics settings all the recordings these are me playing at some of the lower difficulty settings rather than the high ones and that's because just for recording and testing on Steam deck I was playing mostly solo some sometimes the game would matchmake me with some randoms but yeah most of the time is playing solo so it can be quite difficult to go into these higher settings on your own and so just bear in mind that there's less enemy density on these low difficulties and so I think it's quite likely that at higher difficulties when there's more enemies on screen the performance will just be slightly less than what it is that I've been showing now using these settings the battery life on Hell divers 2 on Steam deck is about an hour and a half which you know it's it's not that great but at the same time it's kind of still okay at least in terms of if you want to just play a few Missions at a time you know most of the missions that I've played have sort of been between that 15 to 30 minute Mark and so you know with an hour and a half you could sort of get three four maybe even five missions if most of them are on the shorter side because the game is an online game there's not too many benefits from the sleep mode on the steam deck putting it sleep mod Mission will just kick you out right away if you do go back to your ship you sort of between missions you put the game to sleep when you wake it up again you're sort of greeted with this screen where you have to try and reconnect and sometimes for some reason it can take multiple attempts to reconnect so sometimes it takes just as long as it would have done booting the game up from scratch so yeah like I said really there's not too many benefits of the sleep mode function on the steam Deck with this game which is a bit of a shame but it's online so I wasn't expecting to find anything too different finally just talking about the last couple of things playing hell divers 2 specifically on Steam deck the game does push this machine quite hard so it's not uncommon really for the fan to get quite noisy from time to time and then in terms of the using the actual controls while playing on Steam deck rather than something like say mouse and keyboard or a PS5 controller it's not too bad it's not too different normally I do struggle playing Shooters on the steam deck just because of the size of the thing when you're holding it you know I kind of feel like I don't have quite as fine control over where I'm aiming sometimes on Steam deck but I've not really found that with hell divis 2 maybe because it's third person or maybe it's sort of less reliant on that sort of quick snap instinctive turning I'm not too sure but either way it doesn't seem to be a problem and I also think it's nice calling strategy G in on the steam deck I really like the d-pad that's on the steam deck and that's what you use for stress gems you know pressing like up down left right that kind of thing so yeah I like using it on here okay so that just about sums up the performance and what it's sort of like to play on Steam deck but what is Hell divers 2 like to play as a game in general well I will say straight away that I think that this is probably the most fun I've had with an online shooter in years it's definitely more fun to play with friends I did have a good time playing those solo missions when I was testing performance on Steam deck and getting recorded ing for this video but other than that I been playing with a hell diving buddy and it's definitely much more fun to play it this way than on your own so that's just something to keep in mind as a squad of up to four you dive down onto various planets together to carry out missions against either the terminates which are these sort of alien bug like species or the automatons which honestly look like Terminators I have to say there's no campaign to this game the whole game is online and it's Mission based and what you do on these missions it can vary it depends what kind of planet you're diving down on to whether you're playing against the terminates or the automatons and also what the sort of overarching online objective is at that time and these can range from simple missions to complicated ones so on one hand you have things like just defending some civilians while they try and escape on a drop ship all the way to longer missions that have multiple steps so for example one way you might have to get some launch codes from a fallen soldier charge them halfway across the map then input these into a launch sequence do a few different mechanical things before eventually launching a nuke and sending it halfway across the planet as you gain experience and level up you start to unlock more and more Strat gems which you can bring along with you on missions these can range from things like air strikes to support type items new weapons some of them are just useful tools like ammo refills or jetpacks those are pretty fun you're only allowed to bring four of these with you on each Mission though and as you unlock more and more you sort of have to make that choice and it becomes a bit more strategic towards the higher difficulties maybe somebody will make sure to bring a turret along you'll ask your friend if they can make sure they're bringing an ammo pack or something like that it does add an extra layer to the game playay when you're on planet the game is so chaotic and it provides so many laughs especially when you're playing with friends and a big part of this is because Friendly Fire is on now naturally this means you have to be careful where you aim your gun and make sure that there's not an ally in between you and the enemy you're shooting at but it also includes things like grenades and even things like air strikes that you call down one of your stress jums you have to be careful where you're putting them in case an ally might accidentally wander into the path of the strike even friendly turrets can accidentally mow you down some sometimes if you stand between them and the enemy that they're shooting at they don't stop because you're there they just keep firing there's been plenty of times when we've broken down laughing because one of us has got caught in a huge air strike called Down by by the other one it's not really that frustrating because it is very quick just to get your friend back in the action you just use one of the strategems to reinforce and then you get back to it the game just feels honestly really really good to play the developers have definitely spent a very long time fine-tuning all the different elements to make how the game feels to play really good guns have these really Punchy sounds they feel really good to fire heavier guns take time for you to sort of Swing them across if you're changing where you're aiming they don't go instantly like on some other games and it gives them a proper weight and it's a bit more immersive and of course there's a lot of explosions in this game and explosions just seem to look and sound so impactful probably some of the best explosions that I can think of in modern games you have accomplished Liberties will extract hell divers 2 does have a live service aspect to it with premium currency that you can use to buy Cosmetics but just before that immediately turns you off from this game we're not talking sort of Diablo 4 style you'd buy one set of armor for half of an entire game these are actual microtransactions again not only is everything really cheap to buy but you can actually find the premium currency sometimes on a mission you can find a few bits and pieces here and there and the game's version of battle passes don't expire so there's no rush to complete them you're not sort of forced to make sure you're logging in for 3 hours every single day just to unlock everything at the time that I'm recording this I've just unlocked this new dirty white armor that I unlocked just from credits that I sort of obtained naturally in the game I didn't pay any extra to get the credits to unlock this armor and I absolutely love the way it looks as well it makes me feel a bit like a stormtrooper which I think is quite fitting hellers 2 generally just evokes this feeling in you that you're in this epic battle even though you're just playing with a few friends especially when you're fighting the automatons there's lasers flying all across the place you know lots of explosions gunfire all sorts going on all at the same time it really does make you feel like you're in the center of this gigantic War especially when you're playing some scenarios at night and the lasers sort of Light Up the Sky I think it looks amazing I also really like the music on this game it fits in really well it has this epic feeling and it naturally swells as the action gets heavier and sometimes the game really makes you feel so cool especially when you're sort of standing on an extraction Point waiting for your shuttle you know heavy weapon in hand turret next to you your cape is flying in the wind and you're defending the point while you wait to make your way off the planet Landing sequence initi where you're standing extraction complete elic one beginning a set so the last thing that I want to talk about is that there's overarching mission objectives to Hell divers 2 earlier in the video I said that there was no campaign and that's right you know there's no single player story mode instead it's almost like the whole game is a sort of campaign story Arrowhead Studios have sort of been crafting the story around us as we fight to liberate the Galaxy on the mission map you can see how far each enemy faction has pushed towards super Earth and because it's happening real time that means that every time you log in if there's been a few days between you know there's a good chance that the map will look different different planets will need your Aid and there might be a different overarching objective now when I'm recording this video there's a lot of speculation that pilotable mechs will be coming to the game soon and in fact the main mission at the moment has just changed to the automatons having launched an attack on the main planet that manufactures these mechs and so the hell divers have to go in save the day and a lot of people think that this is how they're going to introduce this new mechanic to the game once we save the planet you know then we'll get these new unlockables that we can you know run around with and hopefully cause a lot more destruction and I think this is really cool things like this actually make this live service game feel sort of actually live and you know like everything is evolving in real time and I think if they continue to get the balance right then this game will last for a very long time so that just about wraps up my thoughts on Hell divers 2 on Steam deck like I said I do think it's a bit better to play on something like the PlayStation 5 or if you've got a good PC but on the other hand if the steam deck is the only way you have to play this or you really want to play handheld the game is just so fun and you can play it absolutely fine on Steam deck so I really think people should just pick up this game if they haven't already it is a blast especially to play with friends how about you are you playing hell divers 2 right now if so I would love to hear some of your stories this game does generate a lot of funny stories so please comment down below thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Tom Finler

Views: 22,390

Keywords: helldivers 2, helldivers 2 gameplay, helldivers 2 review, helldivers 2 steam deck, helldivers 2 steam deck settings, helldivers 2 steam deck performance, helldivers 2 steam deck best settings, steam deck, steam deck games, steam deck games 2024, helldivers 2 impressions, steam deck helldivers 2 review

Id: lMZqBvZz2tQ

Length: 13min 50sec (830 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2024