Suicide Machine
Published
The game's bad optimisations really shows on Steam Deck, which struggles to keep it running above 30 fps.
Capped to 30 fps.
While the performance was really bad, with Deck often draining 25WATs, this isn't exactly surprising - this game struggles heavily on my Ryzen 7 3700X, 32GB RAM, RTX 3070 PC, often dropping below 60 fps, so if anything - seeing Deck still managing to keep FPS close to 30 most times is still surprising. It's not very enjoyable in this state, though - but that's not Proton's or Deck's fault.
Tried various potential fixes, installing .NET 4.5.2 (which apparently the game requires) - nothing worked.
This is likely not the issue with the game itself, but with Kalypso Launcher as it is suppose to show itself on first launch. Will try to revist this issue at later date.
Cinematics don't play with default Proton version. Proton 8.0-2 or newer fixes the problem.
Proton 8.0-2 or newer has to be used for in-game cinematics to be displayed correctly. Othar than that - runs fine. It does however run at 25 fps (by design) which makes the entire experience somewhat uncomfrotable with touchpad and joystick input. And it doesn't have native support for gamepad, but community layouts seems to be working quite well.
Enforced 1920x1080 resolution.
Splash screen is scaled incorrectly. Nothing aside from that.
It's a bit sad honestly, that a solution turned out to be something so simple as enforcing 1920x1080 resolution and I guess it's unlikely a config could be made that sets it by default, with Deck's native resolution being just 1280x800 (and crashing without making changes) - this game would otherwise be perfect for Deck.
The biggest problem is the controls. The game is essentially a platformer with tank controls designed around keyboard input. These really don't translate well to Steam Deck controls, although the game is still playable - it's just not very comfortable to play this way.
At times when driving through the city, the game fails to maintain 60fps droping slightly below it.
The game is obviously designed around the keyboard and mouse and can be challenging at times, but with gyro enabled it seems to be fully playable with Steam Deck's controls. At times, when driving through the city it can fail to maintain 60 fps, but these drops are generally nothing that affects the enjoyment from the game.
From the looks of it, it seems that all of mentioned problems also occur natively on Windows, and are a the result of a poor PC port.
Sound volume is rather low - this seems to be an overall issue with the PC port, though.
Occasionally the game softlocks on cutscene fadeout - this might be PC issue however (I wasn't able to even run this game Windows lately, so the fact it runs out of the box in Proton is surprising).
I think an common user should at this point (using Proton 7.0-6) an decent experience without having to do much tinkering.
Controller needed to be enabled manually in game settings using Steam Button and touch pad and the game had to be fully restarted afterwards.
FPS seems to drop when treversing the world down to 30s due to SMTs (which is likely to get fixed with the upcoming Steam OS update). For shooting it seems fairly smooth, though.
Rage was one of the first games I have tried on Steam Deck (then using Proton 7.0-4) and at that point it was unplayable. I am happy to see that with 7.0-6 this changed and the game seems to be fully playable without any noticable graphical corruption visible. It's only a shame that gamepad has to be manually enabled, as otherwise this would be one of the games best fit for Steam Deck.
Assuming that game starts by default with a gamepad instead of mouse and keyboard or the user is lucky to visit options at the start.
I set screen refresh rate to 40 Hz. There isn't much of a benefit in higher refresh rate in this game.
Some particles in XCOM base defence section (that was added in Enemy Within) were rendering as black faces. They were very hard to notice though and would likely be missed by the first time gamer.
The game doesn't automatically swap to the controller and it isn't very obvious that a user has to go to options to set controller to be able to play with gamepad layout. This might be a non-issue for the user that has never started the game, though, as it's possible that it was something that got carried over with my cloud saves from PC and the game's fresh start sets the game to gamepad, but it is a problem nevertheless.
