LENOVO LEGION GO S

LENOVO LEGION GO S

I
wanted a Lenovo Legion Go S for some time and kept checking Amazon,
however by the time I was willing to buy the price had gone up and I
wasn't willing to pay the higher price but then came the time for
Amazon to have a sale and the price came down again which signalled
my time to buy, as I couldn't really afford a Valve SteamDeck whose
prices have been going up and up. This allowed me access to
officially licensed hardware running Valves SteamOS.


I
was looking forward to opening this rather large brown box emblazoned
with the Legion Go branding, setting it up and diving straight into a
SteamOS experience. I don't know a great deal about the Legion Go S
apart from it being an officially licensed SteamOS handheld which
will allow me access to my reasonably new Steam account and games
which includes my newly purchased Alien Breed games and Defender of
the Crown.


Below
are three high end machines running three different operating systems:

 Lenovo    
 Ayn 
 ROG 
 Model 
 Legion Go S 
 Odin 3
 Xbox Ally 
 OS
 SteamOS
 Android 15
 Windows 11
 CPU
 AMD Ryzen Z2 Go 
 Snapdragon 8 Elite 
 AMD Ryzen Z2 
 GPU 
 AMD Radeon RDNA 
 Adreno 830
 AMD Radeon 
 RAM
 32GB 
 24GB
 16GB
 Storage
 1TB
 1TB
 512GB
 Dislpay
 8" WUXGA
 6" AMOLED
 7"
 Resolution 
 1920x1200
 1920x1080
 1920x1080
 Refresh 
 120Hz
 120Hz
 120Hz
 SD Slot
 microSD
 microSD
 microSD
 Wi-Fi
 6E
 7
 6E
 Bluetooth
 5.3
 5.4
 5.4
 Battery
 55Wh
 8000mAh
 60Wh

Having wrestled for a couple of minutes with the sticky label keeping the box sealed I finally took a pair of scissors to it. Finally opening the box and getting the machine out of the foam packaging I am presented with a lovely machine in a very beautiful shade of the darkest blue. I am not in the least surprised at the weightiness of the machine, similar to Windows machines, I get straight ahead and plug it into the mains to charge.

On first boot I am presented with the “LEGION” logo splash screen followed shortly by the not too surprising setup, language, time zone, internet & password, update, a restart and into the Steam login which took all of 6 minutes, another couple of minutes logging in and tapping the screen half a dozen times and I'm into the SteamOS dashboard, this has been one of the quickest setups going, partially thanks to the large screen and on screen keyboard.

Looking at the top of the screen I can see the setting icon is telling me that I need to check it, going up to it shows me that there is an update available and it happens to be a firmware update so I stat installing and after only 1 minute my Legion Go S restarts and I'm back into the SteamOS dashboard, so a rather quick update.

It's at this point I'm going to try a few of my games to see if I need to install anything specific to those games, see how they play and if my save states are usable. The first game I tried was “Project X” which looks great, only problem the controls don't work, this is not a good start as, surely, they should work out of the box. Let's try a few other games. I have installed and tried many other games and they all work according to plan and with their save states intact and they are a joy to play.

I must say the controls are smooth and a joy to use, the d-pad is a circular all in one which I am not used to but don't find it awkward or uncomfortable to use, just different. The triggers are a little on the large side, possibly larger than is necessary but my issue with them is purely cosmetic as they do the job perfectly well.

Apart from playing my Steam games what exactly can the Legion Go S do?
Over time I will probably add my GOG, Epic, UbiSoft libraries.
There is also the ability to upgrade the storage from 1TB to 4TB but at a cost.

Would I recommend the Lenovo Legion Go S?
It can be a bit of a minefield when trying to find the right Legion Go S for you, there are 4 SKUs in the range that I bought, 2 Windows machines and 2 SteamOS machines a Z1 Windows, a Z1 Steam, a Z2 Windows and a Z2 SteamOS machine. At the end of the day the one I purchased, the SteamOS Z2, I would highly recommend, possibly wait until you can them on sale somewhere.

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Michael