billabong1985
Published
The game performs perfectly and has excellent controller support, even including quick save/load shortcuts in the pause menu, which I appreciated as I normally end up manually mapping F5/F9 to long presses on other buttons to enable this. Controls are re-mappable in game as well so I was able to make a couple of minor changes to better suit my preferences
Runs flawlessly and controls well on the deck, in game menu navigation takes a little getting used to simply because of how much there is going on but I think is about as well optimised as it can be for controller
Using the 'Laptop' graphics preset and ProtonGE-9.27, performance is very good, 50-60fps at almost all times
Contrast between text and background on some main menu and pause menu options makes it hard to read, otherwise with UI scaling at maximum all other text is readable, although still a little small
One early area had floor textures popping in and out, have not experienced it anywhere else
With the aforementioned settings, the game runs very well, at medium settings it was closer to 30fps and character movement looked a little jittery so would recommend just using the lower setting and ProtonGE to get the higher frame rates
Provided you can tolerate the couple of missions that have performance and texture issues respectively, the rest of the game runs fine
Contrast between text and background on some main menu and pause menu options makes it hard to read, otherwise with UI scaling at maximum all other text is readable, although still a little small
One particular early mission had floor textures popping in and out, did not experience this anywhere else
With the lowest graphics preset (listed as 'Laptop') and using GE Proton, performance vaired from one mission to the next, some would run at almost constant 60fps, others would only run just above 30fps, though being a turn based game this was still perfectly playable. One mission in particular though really struggled, was consistently below 30fps and dipped as low as 15fps at times, I am unsure why this mission struggled so much compared to all the others
Performance was playable on default proton version when I first tried it, but GE Proton improved this noticeably. Since I played the rest of the game with GE Proton, I do not know if the levels that struggled even on GE would be comparable or worse on default Proton. Controller support is good so I never had any problems from that perspective
By default gyro activates while touching the right thumbstick, which confused me as I don't generally use gyro and thought there was something wrong with the right thumbstick controls, so I disabled this
Occasional minor crackling when there is a lot on screen going on at the same time
The game suffers a bug which occasionally causes the frame rate to plummet to the point of virtually crashing the game when a cutscene starts or an in game menu (like the weapon shop or arena menu) is opened. This appears to be random, usually only happens after playing for a while but has also happened to me on 2 separate occasions during one of the opening cutscenes. Simply force closing the game and reloading resolves the issue and it auto saves pretty regularly so never cost me any significant progress
FSR 3.1 with frame generation, medium graphic settings and motion blur disabled results in the game running at 60fps very consistently, feels incredibly smooth and I've not noticed any input lag. I've used frame generation the entire time I've played the game so it's possible that the issues I've noted are related but I haven't been able to prove it one way or there other as they only crop up occasionally
Requires custom control layout and Luxtorpeda to play properly, out of the box experience is flawed
Does not natively support widescreen, need to use the following launch options (edited according to your screen, e.g. FOV whould be 90 for 16:10 or 97 for 16:9) to enforce this. +set r_customwidth 1920 +set r_customheight 1080 +set r_mode -1 +seta cg_fov 90
Using default proton, the game will install and launch fine, but I found that aiming with the right stick mapped to mouse was incredibly twitchy and not playable. Installing Luxtorpeda using protonup-qt and setting this as the launcher will make the game download and launch OpenJK, which has better Linux compatibility and fixes the twitchy mouse movement.
Launch options required to enable widescreen resolution but otherwise performance is great with all settings maxed.
No controller support so a custom steam input profile is required to map keyboard keys to the controller. I found that setting force push/pull to normal press of R1/L1 and force lightning/grip to long press on the same buttons works well to have them all available on individual button presses instead of having to scroll through them, as well as a radial virtual menu activated with a mode shift on one of the face buttons for the remaining force powers. I use this instead of virtual menus on the trackpads so I can replicate the same control scheme to a bluetooth controller for docked play
Performs perfectly and full controller support, I previously played the game on Switch and the experience on Steam Deck is nigh identical
Using the medium graphics preset the game varies between 30-55fps while scrolling around maps but appears locked to 30fps in battles. high settings appears to run a little slower around the map and cause a few drops into the 20s in battles, low settings doesn't appear any better performance wise than medium. I can't really tell much difference in the graphics between medium and high but can between low and medium, so I leave it on medium. For the graphical style and animations, 30fps is more than sufficient, I only leave the frame rate capped higher than 30 to make scrolling around the map a litle smoother
Control scheme took a little getting used to but on the whole works well in game and most menus, pretty well optimised for controller play overall. Trying to get into the community maps menu though, the game appears to open a different window and the controls become unresponsive, so this menu appears to only work properly with M&KB controls
Fully functional out of the box but need to change to Windowed mode to improve frame rates
The frame rate was much lower than expected using default settings
Changing the screen mode to Windowed rather than Fullscreen sigificantly improved the frame rate, with this setting changed the game can run at 55-60fps pretty consistently on a mixture of medium-high graphical settings whereas it was in the 30-40fps range at these settings in Fullscreen
Apparently setting a frame rate limit above 30 in game can cause some gameplay issues, so it is recommended to leave this off and use the steam deck's system level frame rate limiter if need be
On release controller implementation relied primarily on a floating cursor control method, the devs have since improved this with better dpad controls for selecting abilities, making the game much smoother to play on controller
Overall plays well despite some minor issues that do not detract too much from the gameplay
Occasionally the game seems to fail to register a button press, it doesn't happen all the time but often enough to be noticeable
The game randomly hitches when activating cards in battles, you select a card and the game will sometimes freeze, usually only for a fraction of a second but other times for a couple of seconds, before executing the action and carrying on. As a turn based game this doesn't cause an gameplay issues but it happens often enough to be annoying
The random hitching and button press drops are annoying, but in the grand scheme of things the game is still very playable and runs just fine
In game text is quite small and uses a very thin font which does not contrast well with the backgrounds, making it difficult to read. On the steam deck's screen this was not insurmountable thanks to an in game zoom feature for viewing cards, but when docked to a TV the problem was exacerbated and I found it almost impossible to read anything without straining my eyes
The game uses a floating cursor design, which is clunky but workable for the most part, however on a couple of menus the pointer does not seem to properly align with the buttons, E.g. I accidentally clicked the quit button on the main menu and was then unable to click no on the confirmation pop up, it simply wouldn't register the button being clicked
Had some inconsistencies with cross save between Android and Steam, but reached out to the developer through Discord and they were able to resolve this for me
Controller implementation is good and has customisable UI scaling so works well on different screens
Controls did not work on initial launch, used the same method described by others, launch Protontricks, select the game, select default wine prefix, select run winecfg, change the compatibility mode from Windows 10 to Windows 7. Then add a launch parameter of STEAM_COMPAT_CONFIG="" %command%
Used the aforementioned Protontricks fix and launch parameter and controls work fine
On medium settings the game runs mostly at 60fps with a few dips to around 45fps when a lot of particle effects are going on
