The Steam Deck makes PlayStation’s biggest games portable - The Verge
Valve’s Steam Deck is quickly becoming an excellent way to play PlayStation games on the go. Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered is one of my favorite examples yet.
Sony may have stopped making portable gaming devices years ago, but Valve’s Steam Deck is quickly becoming an excellent way to play PlayStation games on the go. Big first-party titles like God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Days Gone are now available on PC and have been verified for Steam Deck. PlayStation hits like Death Stranding and Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade are verified, too. Now Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, out this week, is one of the best examples yet of how the Steam Deck is becoming the new portable PlayStation.
I’ve only played a few hours, but as far as I can tell, everything that made Spider-Man one of the best superhero games ever when it first came out in 2018 on the PS4 is still here. The swinging is still exhilarating, letting you easily traverse New York City by webbing from rooftop to rooftop. The city is still packed with secrets to find and petty criminals to take out. I was even surprised to find myself engaged in the story once again.
When I first zipped through Spider-Man on PS4, I largely stuck to completing the story as fast as I could. I wanted to see what happened next! But on Steam Deck, I’m swinging down every alleyway and scaling every building to find all the secrets hidden in New York City. Sure, maybe that’s because I largely already know what happens in the main story. (Though Remastered does pack in all the Spider-Man DLC packs, which include some new story scenarios.) But making a game portable means I’m more likely to play it in bite-sized chunks, and so I’ve found myself using a few minutes here and there to fix police antennas and unlock more of the map.
I remember feeling something similar while playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild; that game’s portability made it a more personal experience and a lot easier to chip away at. Instead of feeling like I’m wasting valuable TV time searching the farthest corner of the map for a hidden secret, it’s easier to go on unexpected expeditions and forge my own path on a portable device. In Zelda, that meant tracking down every single shrine. In Spider-Man, it means scaling yet another building to find backpacks that unlock new collectibles.
On medium settings on my Steam Deck, I feel like Spider-Man looks a little worse than I remember it did on PS4. There’s no ray tracing on Steam Deck, either; the option is grayed out for me, even on very high settings. The frame rate generally varies between 30 and 60fps — though definitely near the lower end of that range while swinging around New York City. None of those are big issues for me, but the game does kick on the Steam Deck’s noisy fan, which can get annoying.
Rating: 5