Here we are, another big release on Steam and sadly it's just seemingly not a good experience from my early testing. Even though it seemed like we might see good support, the result is nothing of the sort.
Starting with the big nuisance: even though you've just downloaded it, you won't be ready to play. It will take around an hour to build the shaders on the main menu, something you'll need to do, otherwise you're likely to see worse performance. In my testing, you definitely want to wait on that being done too. Before it was done the performance was far more erratic and it ended up slowing down to a 1FPS crawl during one attempt.
Apart from that, it has the same issue some other bigger games have where the RAM will fill up to around 14/14.1GB as noted on the Steam Deck's performance HUD and then crash completely, often taking the Steam Deck with it for a full reboot.
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Valve did give it a special Proton Hotfix, which doesn't seem to have done enough to make it properly playable or be something I can recommend at this time.
As for how it runs on desktop Linux? On my Ryzen 7 5800X and NVIDIA 2080 Ti (Fedora KDE), it gives an out of date driver warning that can be ignored to begin with. Then it took a good 30 minutes (almost to the dot) to do the shaders even with this clearly much more powerful system. When you only have a 2 hour refund window on Steam, that's not good. Now think about people who do genuinely swap between PC and Steam Deck, practically the entire refund window gone to see if you have issues with it.
For desktop though, you can of course get much better performance and at least on the Linux side, it actually seems to run reasonably well even at 2560x1440 with FSR set to Balanced it can mostly stick around 60FPS.
Both shots were actually 60FPS, but Plasma screenshot spikes the FPS down.
Seems it's quite a problematic port overall, as the Steam user reviews instantly went down to Mixed (Edit: and now "Mostly Negative"), with many people on Windows reporting problematic performance and constant crashes.
You can buy it on Humble Store and Steam.
Quoting: LoftyThat and, I sometimes get this feeling like the biggest and newest are kind of . . . too much for me?Quoting: KlaasWhen was the last big release where everything worked on release? You spend more money and are rewarded with a miserable experience.
I wonder if this is why retro gaming has become so big. Things just work and are mostly without bugs, even then the glitches/bugs are often funny. Ohh and you can game in 4k on an old PC still
Like, if I just want to kick back for a few hours, and, you know, relax playing a game, and what I'm being served up is almost a commitment to a lifestyle or some goddamn thing, I find myself just going back to some of the old reliable. This is true even with strategy games--I can't count how often I've just played a simple evening of Master of Orion because I didn't feel like I quite had the energy to keep track of my Stellaris empire.
Remember the Batman Arkham Knight PC port fiasco?
What I don't understand is why Sony didn't assigned Nixxes Software for this port.
Nixxes belongs to Sony and is very well know for to make good pc ports.
Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoIt doesn't surprise me considering who did the port, Iron Galaxy.Budget.
Remember the Batman Arkham Knight PC port fiasco?
What I don't understand is why Sony didn't assigned Nixxes Software for this port.
Nixxes belongs to Sony and is very well know for to make good pc ports.
Last edited by lejimster on 30 March 2023 at 9:43 pm UTC
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