Valve’s Steam Deck kicked off a new era of PC gaming when it launched nearly three years ago, offering a lot of the flexibility you’d get from a full gaming rig and access to Steam’s unrivaled library of titles in a portable, Nintendo Switch-like form factor. Ever since, I’ve watched jealously as friends and colleagues have hopped on the handheld PC bandwagon with devices like the $549 Steam Deck OLED and $800 Asus ROG Ally X. But so far, I’ve held off — for me, none of the options on the market today strike quite the right balance between price and performance.
At CES today, though, I got the chance to try the Legion Go S, Lenovo’s competitive new handheld PC that comes in both SteamOS and Windows varieties. With an 8″, 120Hz display, an AMD Ryzen Z2 Go CPU, 16GB of RAM, and a handful of other nice-to-have features for a starting price of $500, the Legion Go S might finally get me into the handheld PC game come this spring.
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While the original Lenovo Legion Go is available only with Windows on board, the SteamOS-powered version of the Legion Go S is the first third-party handheld officially licensed to run Valve’s Linux-based OS. Its display is a big draw: while it’s not OLED, it’s larger and higher-res than the Steam Deck OLED’s 7.4″, 800p screen at 8″ and 1080p. It’s also faster at 120Hz (to the Deck’s 90) and supports variable refresh rate. Portal 2 (not an especially demanding game, I know, but the selection of titles to try wasn’t all that large) ran at a smooth 120 and looked fantastic.
The rest of the hardware is decent, too. It doesn’t seem especially high-end — it’s a little plasticky, and the face buttons are mushier than I’d prefer. It’s also a little bulkier than something like the Steam Deck OLED. But it’s solid and doesn’t creak or flex with pressure applied, so it feels built to last, even if it doesn’t feel all that premium. It’s got hall-effect joysticks with RGB lights underneath, and switches that adjust the depth of its triggers. That’s great for swapping between analog triggers for racing games and hair-trigger bumper-style inputs for shooters or action games.
The Steam version of the Legion Go S comes in a slick Nebula Violet colorway that’s nearly black, while the Windows variant is Glacier White. The Windows model can technically access all the same Steam games as the SteamOS version in addition to games from other sources, like the Epic Games Store and Xbox’s PC Game Pass subscription. I tried a variety of games on both: I played Portal 2 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate on Steam, and Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5 on Windows. Performance was smooth across all of them. Forza seemed to be running at 60 frames per second on low graphical settings, but that still looked fantastic on the Legion Go S’s sharp eight-inch display.
A complicated release schedule
So I’m bullish on the Legion Go S. Its release schedule does complicate things a little, though. Different SKUs will hit store shelves at different times: the first version, arriving this month, comes with Windows, a terabyte of storage, and 32 gigs of RAM for $730. A version with a beefier AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme processor is expected in April. Finally, models running either Steam or Windows, with 16 gigs of memory and 512 of storage, are set to follow in May for $500 and $600, respectively.
That messy release schedule means that the model I’d be shopping for — the $500 version that runs SteamOS — won’t be available until well into the spring. It’s not so much that I mind the wait in itself; I’ve been eyeing handheld gaming PCs for years, so a couple more months will hardly kill me. But Nintendo is rumored to be announcing its next Nintendo Switch console any time now, and that device could very well be available before the SteamOS-powered Legion Go S. As a lifelong Nintendo fan, I’m sure I’ll be picking one up as early as I can after launch.
The two devices aren’t interchangeable, obviously; the Legion Go S is a portable PC while the Switch 2 is mostly a vessel for Mario Kart and Zelda. There’s theoretically room in my life for both. But their form factors will surely be similar, and if I’m picking up a new Switch early this spring, I’m not likely to drop another $500 on another gaming handheld just a few weeks later (as much as I’d like to).
Frustrating as it is that Lenovo’s bringing high-end Windows models of the Legion Go S to market first, it’s exciting to see the handheld gaming space continue to grow. Fingers crossed we hear more about that Xbox handheld sometime this year.
