Lenovo Legion Go S reviewed: semi-portable

Not quite a Steam Deck, the Lenovo Legion Go S sets the stage for SteamOS by someone else. It’s a shame the battery life and fan both need work.

As good as mobile phones are for gaming and being the ultimate convergence device, they don’t really have the edge on your standard gaming PC. Between the sheer number of games available on a laptop, not to mention the style of controls, laptops and gaming PCs are difficult to go past as the logical path when you want to game on the go.

In recent years, developments have made gaming PCs more portable than they’ve ever been. From the slim and sizeable high performance laptops to portables in the you can carry in your hand and bag, the sheer number of laptop options means it’s never been easier to take your gaming to go, and Valve’s Steam storefront could be one of the reasons why.

While it’s not alone in offering a bunch of games you can install with ease, it has been around seemingly forever, and many gamers (including this reviewer) happen to have a lot of games on their account.

It’s no wonder then that Valve, the makers of Steam, decided to make a portable gaming PC that lets people play as many of those games as possible.

Running on a variant of Linux called “SteamOS”, Valve’s approach to portable gaming does a lot of the heavy lifting in emulation to let Windows games run on portable game systems like the Steam Deck. There are other Windows handheld gaming PCs out there, but SteamOS is a different beast altogether.

Developed by Valve, it’s an operating system we’ve only seen on Valve’s hardware, but that appears to be changing.

In the Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS edition, we’re seeing another player try to get Valve’s concept working, all the while improving the hardware for a new generation. Is it a success, or can you still do better?

Design

Lenovo’s take on the Steam Deck may seem a little familiar, largely because it is, with controls flanking a large screen, compared with some of the more unusual approaches the company offered in its first gen model, with controllers that separated from the screen, and a kickstand on the back to hold the whole thing up.

By comparison, the Legion Go S is a little more, well, normal. It’s a large 8 inch screen flanked by controllers and available in white and black.

We’re reviewing the white edition, which offers analogue sticks with RGB colour LED rings and plenty of controls, plus a design that screams “high-end Switch”.

Which is to say it’s a portable gaming PC that really looks and feels like one.

Features

Inside, this portable gaming PC isn’t quite a Steam Deck, even if aspects of the hardware certainly get close. But there’s a little more in the tank, making the Legion Go S slightly more capable than a Steam Deck, even if Valve’s name isn’t on the label.

For starters, you’ll find a more recent spot of AMD hardware than what the Steam Deck ships with, as Lenovo opts for the Ryzen Z2 Go clocked at 4.3GHz. Our review model shipped with 16GB RAM and 512GB storage, but the Legion Go S SteamOS variant found in Australia arrives with 32GB and 1TB storage, giving a little more room for storage and performance.

Lenovo also includes a way of upgrading the storage with a microSD card slot, and there are only a handful of wired connections, too, including two USB 4 USB-C ports for charging and data, plus a 3.5mm headset jack. WiFi and Bluetooth are both covered via 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3.

You’ll also find a microphone and small stereo speaker system built into the hardware, with the whole thing made of textured plastic and weighing around 740 grams. What you won’t find is a camera or fingerprint system, as this is solely made to be a gaming platform, rather than like another laptop.

But like a laptop, the focus can also shift to the display.

Display

And one of the best aspects of the console is the screen, which feels better than you might expect a portable gaming PC to arrive with.

While you won’t find OLED here, you will see an 8 inch Full HD 1920×1200 touchscreen sporting a 120Hz refresh rate, making for a slick and smooth display that offers more pixels than the 7 inch HD and Full HD displays portables typically see. That’s a decent res to match that size, and a refresh rate that more or less guarantees clarity as you game.

In-use

A sizeable 8 inch touchscreen is one of the ways you’ll use the Legion Go S, but so are the number of controls, because there are many.

Two analogue sticks on the light and right side, a directional page to the left, four console-esque buttons on the right, plus menu and control buttons on the front. Up top are bumpers and at the back triggers, while you can also find a few extra function buttons, too.

And there’s even a range switch for the buttons on the back, giving you a little more to work with.

Lenovo also includes a small square trackpad for your thumb, kind of like what Valve includes for the Steam Deck, but there’s only one catch: we couldn’t get it working.

Whether in games with a mouse or back on the desktop, the Legion Go S trackpad never switched on when we needed it. Games or the Linux desktop, we just couldn’t get it to work.

Lenovo says it’s a button-less touchpad, but it just feels like a square of impossibility.

Performance

One thing you can rely on is the performance is a little better and a little more capable, thanks to a difference in hardware.

On benchmarks alone, the difference between Valve’s custom AMD Ryzen and the Z2 Go used by Lenovo means there’s a little more power in both single core and multi-core CPU operations, while graphics capability more or less blows the Steam Deck out of the water.

By comparison, the 4GHz Legion Go S is much faster and more capable, accounting for roughly twice the graphical power of its counterpart, making it that little bit better overall.

On graphics, the Legion Go S can feel like the update and sequel to the Steam Deck gamers have been wanting. You get a sharper screen with more graphical grunt, and plenty of power to work with, as well.

Battery

What you don’t get is a good battery life, with the system struggling to get past a couple of hours depending on the game. When it came time to play some of the more meaty games — Battlefield 4, we’re looking at you — the Legion Go S didn’t even hit one hour. That’s bleak.

Lower power games are going to give you a little more juice, but not a whole lot more. We found really a max of 2-3 hours was likely on the Legion Go S, and it almost always sat under that performance in our testing.

We couldn’t get anywhere near Lenovo’s suggestion of up to 15.4 hours of local video playback, and we’re not even sure the relevance of that test, begging the question: who would use a thousand dollar portable gaming PC to watch movies?! (The answer is no one, and this isn’t a great way to judge a gaming PC’s battery life.)

Technically, there’s a marginally better battery than the OLED Steam Deck’s 50Wh battery here, offering 55.5Wh. And yet, despite the addition of a full five watt hours, the battery performs worse.

The one upside for the Go S is that its standby time is typically really solid. Leave the handheld off charge for a few days, and it will still be ready to rock when you need it.

It’s just that when you do need it, the battery life isn’t fantastic. You’ll definitely want to bring a portable power pack to keep this portable topped up. The battery life is really one of the weaker parts, likely not helped by that high-end display Lenovo opted for.

Value

The price is also a little on the high side, but not overly so in the grand scheme of things. Priced at $1329 in Australia, the cost is only around $300 more than its next obvious competitor, the 1TB OLED Steam Deck which costs $1049 locally. Comparatively, it’s a device with a less impressive display and system spec.

By comparison, the 1TB Legion Go S technically has more going for it, so the $300 increase isn’t a dramatic shift. And it’s lower than the $1599 Asus ROG Ally X, an obvious competitor even if it runs Windows rather than Steam OS (though a year old now, you can find the Ally X for the same $1299 price point).

The possible saving grace of the Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS edition is its street price, because you can sometimes find this model for $999.

If you can forgive that battery life and crazily hungry cooling system, $999 is a staggeringly good price. Its RRP isn’t as solid, but the discount price is excellent.

What needs work?

The problem with the Legion Go S is that as good as the hardware is, not everything works. It’s not quite a Steam Deck, even if the more powerful hardware manages to outperform Valve’s portable in some ways.

For instance, it’s much louder thanks to a fan that tends to work over time, even when there’s not a whole lot happening.

Technically, Lenovo is using its “ColdFront” system, which is basically a large fan and heatsink system, using airflow to cool the several gigahertz AMD Ryzen Z2 Go chip down. The problem is it happens all the time.

The system is more power hungry, so even something as simple as the mere action of downloading games turned the fan on. It’s a little much.

Turning that cooling system on and the performance up is likely what’s contributing to that aforementioned lacklustre battery life, also not helped by the massive Full HD screen.

You don’t even get a case in the box, something that was a surprise inclusion with the Steam Deck, which arrives inside a first-party accessory.

But perhaps our biggest issue with the Legion Go S is the compatibility, because not every game that works on the Steam Deck and other portable gaming handhelds work here.

One of these, Mass Effect, just constantly shut down and crashed back to the Steam library screen no matter what we did. No Man’s Sky was totally fine, but the Legendary Edition of the classic Mass Effect just refused go run.

It’s then that we noticed that you’re not so much buying a Steam Deck, but rather a SteamOS device, and that appears to be slightly different from a compatibility stand point. While the compatibility should be the same, our experience paints a different picture.

Final thoughts (TLDR)

Overall, Lenovo’s take on the Steam Deck has ups and downs, with performance clearly in the better category, even if battery life feels worse.

It’s an interesting handheld PC for lots of reasons, if only because it shows that SteamOS doesn’t need to be limited to a console or computer made by Valve. Other companies can build something equally compelling, even if they need to iron out some bits here and there.

There are many reasons to consider the SteamOS Legion Go S, and longevity could be the best one. Armed with slightly better hardware than its official Steam Deck competition, it’ll likely handle games more nicely over the years. Sure, you’ll want to plant yourself near a power pack or wall plug, but at least it offers that little bit of future-proofing.

For now, the Legion Go S is more of a semi-portable, beckoning an update and improvements to keep that fan and system performance at bay while you get the most out of your hardware. It needs work to be a true Steam Deck challenger, though the bones are definitely there.

Frankly, we think waiting for the next version might be the ideal move, but if you can find a solid price, the case is definitely clear (even if it doesn’t come with one itself).