Lenovo Legion Go S review: feels good, plays bad Canada reviews

The Lenovo Legion Go S was supposed to change things. It was poised to show Valve isn’t the only one that can build an affordable, portable, potent handheld gaming PC — you just need the right design and the right OS.

I was intrigued when Valve’s own Steam Deck designers told me this Windows handheld would double as the first authorized third-party SteamOS handheld this May. When I heard Lenovo had procured an exclusive AMD chip that would help that SteamOS version hit $499, I got excited for a true Steam Deck competitor.

But I’m afraid that chip ain’t it.

I’ve spent weeks living with a Legion Go S powered by AMD’s Z2 Go, the same chip slated to appear in that $499 handheld. I’ve used it with both Windows and Bazzite, a SteamOS-like Linux distro that eliminates many of Windows’ most annoying quirks. I tested both directly against a Steam Deck OLED and the original Legion Go, expecting to find it between the two in terms of performance and battery life. But that’s not what I found.

Watt for watt, its Z2 Go chip simply can’t compete with the Steam Deck, and it’s far weaker than the Z1 Extreme in last year’s handhelds. That’s inexcusable at the $730 price you’ll currently pay for the Windows version, and I won’t be the first reviewer to say so. But with this less efficient chip and a mere 55 watt-hour battery, I worry the Legion Go S isn’t a good choice at all.

I want to say that the Legion Go S “makes a great first impression,” but Windows 11 still features a terrible out-of-box experience. I spent nearly 45 minutes waiting for mandatory updates to install and dismissing dark-patterned offers for Microsoft products that have no business being on my handheld gaming machine.

Still, the Go S is built far better than the original Legion Go, whose flat-faced controllers felt awkward in my hands. The new portable has some of the best-sculpted grips I’ve felt on a handheld, though their smooth texture can feel a little slippery. I’d have gone with more aggressive stippling to help me hold its 1.61-pound weight.

But its buttons all feel precise and secure, if the triggers are longer than I’d like, and its concave-topped, drift-resistant Hall effect joysticks feel comfy and wonderfully smooth to spin. The only weak control is the touchpad, which is so tiny I flick repeatedly to move the cursor an inch at a time.

Audio is much improved from front-facing speakers, and a larger fan moves more air while staying quieter than before. And it’s one of the fastest-charging handhelds yet — I clocked each of its top-mounted USB 4 ports drawing a full 100 watts of USB-C PD power during actual use. The cooling and charging are so good, Lenovo lets you crank the chip up to 40-watt TDP while it’s plugged in or 33 watts on battery alone.

But as you’ll see in my benchmark charts, the Z2 Go simply isn’t in the same ballpark as the Steam Deck OLED’s “Sephiroth” chip. In some games, it can’t beat the Steam Deck at all, even if you plug it in and crank it all the way up.

Take Cyberpunk 2077. With the Steam Deck, which runs at 15-watt TDP, I can average 52 frames per second at an upscaled 720p resolution and low settings on battery power alone. But even if I feed the Legion Go S with 40 watts and plug it into a wall, the open-world game runs slower at 49fps. And that’s after a new set of drivers; the shipping ones were much worse.

In other games, cranking up Lenovo’s TDP by five, 10, or 15 watts can give it a comfortable lead over the Deck. But that significantly impacts battery. In Lenovo’s default 25W “Performance” mode, I saw some games run just as smoothly as on the Deck — but with total system power consumption of around 36 watts, draining the handheld’s 55 watt-hour battery in about an hour and a half. The Steam Deck, which drains at around 22 to 24 watts at full bore, lasts two hours at the same smoothness.

I have possible good news about SteamOS: when I installed Bazzite, which can serve as a decent preview of what SteamOS might look and feel like, I saw frame rates improve by an average of 16 percent in early tests (minus Returnal, which seems to hate Linux for some reason), and Bazzite is such a breath of fresh air after attempting to use Windows. But it still didn’t reach Steam Deck performance unless I sacrificed more battery to get it. That works with a handheld like the Asus ROG Ally X with a big 80 watt-hour battery, but not so much here.

Even if you crank up the Z2 Go, its “turbo” modes are never anywhere near as effective as the Z1 Extreme in last year’s portables. In my tests, the original Legion Go with Z1E runs anywhere from 15 percent to 40 percent faster comparing Windows to Windows — a lot for a handheld, where modern games struggle to reach smooth frame rates at all.

The Legion Go S does have an ace up its sleeve: its crisp, colorful 1920 x 1200 IPS screen looks better at lower resolutions than its predecessor’s 2560 x 1600 panel, and it runs more smoothly at lower frame rates now that it has VRR to adjust its refresh rate anywhere between 48Hz and 120Hz on the fly. I would not buy a Legion Go over a Legion Go S for this reason alone.

And if you primarily play games that don’t require performance, the Legion Go S is a bit more efficient at lower wattage: by setting TDP, brightness, and refresh rate low, I was able to achieve a total of just 7.5W battery drain in Windows and 7W in Bazzite while playing magic math poker game Balatro. That should net me seven to eight hours of battery life, and you should be able to hit the four-hour mark without those tricks just by setting the Legion Go S to its 8-watt TDP “Quiet” mode. When I played the similarly easy to run Slay the Spire on the original Legion Go, pulling out all the stops, I couldn’t even reach five hours.

But again, the Steam Deck does efficiency better. Simply limiting frame rate to 25fps and brightness to 40 percent can yield over eight hours of Balatro on the Deck, and I’ve gotten four hours, 42 minutes in Dave the Diver there. With the Legion Go S, my Dave only got 2.5 hours to hunt those sushi ingredients and blow up fake environmentalists!

I am comfortable saying no one should buy the Windows version of the Lenovo Legion Go S, which costs $730 at Best Buy. Even if the performance, battery life, and price weren’t disqualifiers, Windows is a stain on this machine. And like other recent Windows handhelds I’ve tested, it does not reliably go to sleep and wake up again: I woke several mornings to find the system hot with fans spinning, even though I’d pressed the power button the previous evening. I found it uncomfortably warm pulling it out of my bag the other day.

Even if you prefer Windows to SteamOS, you can get notably better performance and far better battery life from the $800 Asus ROG Ally X, which is worth every extra penny, particularly since it doubles as the best Bazzite machine you can buy.

But even if you add Bazzite to the Legion Go S, it’s no Steam Deck, and I’m not sure that’ll change by May. If you’re waiting for a $499 Legion Go S with SteamOS, here’s my advice: just buy a $530 Steam Deck OLED instead.