In February 2022, Valve shook the handheld gaming world with the release of the critically acclaimed Steam Deck. Since then, many other companies have dipped their toes into the world of portable PCs, including Lenovo.
TheLenovo Legion Go’sbulky frame, lackluster performance, and considerable price tag position it clearly underneath its counterparts in the portable gaming PC space. If you’re after a beautiful display for cloud gaming and indie titles first and foremost, the Legion Go won’t let you down. But I can’t recommend it over Valve’s Steam Deck or ASUS’s ROG Ally.
Lenovo Legion Go
The Lenovo Legion Go is a portable gaming PC that checks off some of the important boxes but fails to deliver a performance that stacks up to the demands of modern-day titles. If your goal is cloud gaming or casual indie enjoyment, the Legion Go is a solution, but not the best handheld possible.
A Bulky but Beautiful Design and Display
When it comes to portable gaming PCs, I have the most experience using the Steam Deck as a daily driver, so that’s what I’ll be comparing with Lenovo’s Legion Go. They feature a similar design with a few key differences, which are noticeable both in look and feel.
First off, as soon as you take the Legion Go in your hands, you’ll feel it’s quite a bit bulkier than Valve’s Steam Deck. This is not necessarily a mark against it, but I was more comfortable during longer gaming sessions with the Steam Deck’s slimmer build.
Satisfying, Sporadic Controls
When it comes to controls, the Legion Go draws several parallels to Valve’s handheld with a few Lenovo twists. It offers left and right trigger buttons, left and right shoulder buttons, and an array of customizable buttons lining the back and sides of the controllers in an asymmetrical layout.
The front face of the left controller features a joystick, a standard D-pad, a LegionSpace button, and the View and Menu buttons. The right controller’s front face offers ABXY buttons, a second joystick, a small square trackpad, and a Quick Settings button.
How does everything feel? I’ll start with the usual controller aspects. The trigger buttons feel a little stiff, almost clicky, and provide a little “pop” sound as they bottom out and spring back up. Unless you’re a fan of slimmer triggers as on an Xbox One controller, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with these. They aren’t mushy, I never had any missed input issues, and they certainly don’t stick in place.
The shoulder buttons are par for the course of just about any controller you’ve ever used: clicky with a short travel time and a satisfying crunch.
On to the joysticks. These are a big win for the Legion Go in my eyes. They’re a comfortable size, snappy, and provide just enough resistance to make small adjustments possible without fighting your finger if you need to move them around quickly. Clicking them down is easy enough without the fear of depressing them at random. Plus, they offer small rings of customizable RGB lighting to spice up the overall look of the handheld.
The D-pad is nothing to write home about. It’s a standard clicky cross to navigate in-game menus and terrains. No major problems, either, so I’m counting this as a small plus. Last up for the typical controller setup, the ABXY buttons; these are excellent. Pressing them down gives off a satisfying pop, they’re easy to use, and I never had a problem with sticky or mushy inputs.
Now for some Legion Go feng shui.
Coming from a Steam Deck, you’ll notice a few extra buttons on the detachable, Nintendo Switch-esque controllers. While I appreciate the extra range of use, I can’t help but feel they’re awkwardly placed and just end up getting in the way. They’re also asymmetrical, with the right controller featuring M1 and M2 buttons along the side where your index finger rests, and the left controller being bare.
Moving to the back side of each controller, there are two programmable buttons on either side. However, the left controller has these buttons arranged in a vertical pattern, whereas the right side is setup in a horizontal fashion. This is due in part to the right controller acting as a mouse when detached from the screen, but I never fell into the groove of using them consistently due to their seemingly sporadic layout.
At the bottom of each controller’s backside is a small button that, when pressed, allows you to pull each controller away from the screen Switch style. This is a fun concept, and it was enjoyable to play without having to hold up the entire weight of the Legion Go, but it made up a small fraction of my playtime.
Lastly, at the top of the right-hand controller is a small scroll wheel for navigating through the Windows OS. This is a nice touch as the trackpad doesn’t get the job done when it comes to scrollbars, and I try to avoid using the touchscreen where possible to avoid dirtying the screen with fingerprints.
In all, the Lenovo Legion Go’s controls have some ups and downs. It’s bulky and a little confusing in layout, but the controls themselves feel satisfying to use. I would still opt for a Bluetooth mouse for navigating through launchers and browsing media, but controller inputs in games are more than passable.
A Gorgeous Display of Handheld Gaming
The Legion Go’s stunning 8.8-inch, 144hz QHD Display is, in my opinion, the best aspect of the handheld. It’s vibrant, snappy, and big enough to enjoy your favorite titles without squinting your eyes to read small text.
I do have a qualm with the 144Hz refresh rate, as when I discuss performance later on, you’ll see that you’re actually limited to 60Hz in most cases. It just doesn’t have the hardware to keep up. It will also drain the battery pretty quickly if you have the brightness and refresh rate on the higher end.
However, if you’re after vivid handheld graphics, the Legion Go knocks it out of the park.
Lenovo Hooks You Up With Connectivity
As far as connectivity is concerned, the Legion Go offers everything you need. Two USB-C ports (both rated for PD 3.0, DP 1.4) for hooking up peripherals, displays, or USB-C hubs, a microSD card reader for storage expansion, and a 3.5mm audio combo jack for headphones. I didn’t have a problem with any of these. Everything worked as intended and didn’t cause any headaches.
If you’d rather use a mouse than the trackpad or touchscreen (I don’t think anyone would blame you), just hook one up to a USB-C port and browse away.
Is This Really the Performance It Offers?
When it comes to in-game performance, I must admit to being let down by the Lenovo Legion Go. First things first, I decided to test the limits by booting up Bethesda’s Starfield. This was a long shot, but I figured I’d give it a try. The game started up, but that’s about as far as you can get on the Legion Go.
I looked around for a few jagged frames before Starfield closed without an error message. After a few more attempts at restarting the game with the same outcome, I consigned it to an impossibility. “Fair enough,” I thought, many standalone tower PCs aren’t even capable of running a demanding title like Starfield.
I figured the 2015-released Fallout 4 would be more the Legion Go’s speed, so I launched it through Steam, only to be taken aback at how poorly it ran on gaming hardware released in late 2023. When you boot up Fallout 4, it automatically detects your device’s hardware and adjusts the in-game settings accordingly. The Legion Go earned a “Low Quality” startup setting. Not promising, but I jumped in anyway.
Immediately upon loading in, I could tell the Legion Go was struggling to keep up. At a 1200x800 resolution, Low graphics settings, and the Legion Go in Performance mode (as opposed to Power-saving mode), Lenovo’s handheld wasn’t able to eke out anywhere near 60FPS. This could be attributed to Windows applying a console VSYNC cap on Fallout 4’s FPS, but attempting to play other AAA games on low to medium quality, like Lies of P, yielded similar results of struggling, hot hardware.
What about Steam Deck favorites that are less graphically intensive, like Travellers Rest or Dave the Diver? Thankfully, these ran beautifully on the Legion Go, and I had a blast caring for patrons and diving for sea creatures in 60FPS on Lenovo’s gaming handheld.
When all is said and done, I would trust the Legion Go with cloud gaming endeavors and smaller indie titles, but I wouldn’t attempt to run the latest AAA titles with any respectable performance. This makes it a blast for casual games on plane rides and lying back to relax, but a letdown for gamers looking to enjoy graphics-heavy titles like Cyberpunk 2077.
Windows with a Touch of LegionSpace
The Lenovo Legion Go runs Windows 11 Home edition, which is good news as far as compatibility goes. A quick search on Steam revealed 66,292 available titles for Windows, compared to just 13,610 games for macOS and 9,690 for SteamOS and Linux.
For the most part, the Legion Go offers your typical Windows-based PC experience, with a familiar desktop, taskbar, settings, and navigation scheme. There’s one issue that rubs me the wrong way, though: Lenovo’s LegionSpace.
This annoying overlay pops up as soon as you sign in, and oftentimes at random to shove firmware updates in your face unprompted. It attempts to act as a hub for all of your games and settings in one place, and to its credit, it is fine for that. The issue lies in how slowly it operates and the inability to easily circumvent it. Just let me get to my desktop for crying out loud!
The only way I’ve been able to exit LegionSpace is by physically swiping up from the bottom of the screen using the touchscreen feature. No amount of trackpad inputs or B-button presses will allow you to leave. Once you get around LegionSpace, operating the Legion Go is a walk in the park as long as you know your way around Windows.
Solid Battery, Slow Charging
Battery life is a key component of handheld gaming PCs. You want enough juice to get you through a game session without being glued to a wall outlet, as that more or less defeats the purpose of a portable PC. The Legion Go delivers in this area, routinely holding up to around two to three hours of in-game playtime without having me reach for the charger.
Charging up, on the other hand, could do with a bit of a bump. It takes around one hour and 45 minutes to go from 0% to 100% without using the Legion Go for gaming. That’s a hefty chunk of time just for the handheld to burn out in one to three hours.
However, it is passable, and as long as you have a charger and an outlet orportable battery bank, you’ll be good to go for hours on end.
Should You Purchase the Lenovo Legion Go?
I cannot recommend theLenovo Legion Goover other handheld gaming PCs, especially the Steam Deck OLED. While the Legion Go has some truly redeeming qualities like a vibrant display, satisfying controller inputs, and welcome connectivity options, its stunted performance holds it back in a big way.
If you’re not a fan of Valve, and you want something a little bigger than the ROG Ally, the Legion Go is fit for cloud gaming and less graphically-intensive titles. That said, you have better options in the handheld gaming PC space, especially for the asking price of $650.
