Lenovo Legion Go S review: Easier to handle, harder to fall for

There's no better place for me to start when it comes to Lenovo's latest effort to emulate the popularity of handhelds like the Nintendo Switch than to admit that I was wrong about the Steam Deck.

For almost as long as Valve's portable gaming machine has been around, I've been a hater. Initially, my biggest hang-up was the way it looked. The Steam Deck isn't Valve's first foray into hardware but you wouldn't know it given how chunky and unwieldy the slab-like handheld looks.

Even before its slicker OLED sibling arrived on the scene, the design of the Steam Deck screamed first-gen tech to me. As someone used to gaming on a smartphone or Switch Lite, the form factor also seemed enormous by comparison. Throw in the exorbitant price that Aussies were expected to pay to import one at launch and the pace with which other brands looked to roll out new and more powerful takes on the same formula - like the original Lenovo Legion Go - and being a hater seemed like a position that would pay off sooner or later.

Funnily enough, it was the announcement that the Nintendo Switch 2 would cost a hefty $699 that finally pushed me over the edge. If all I wanted Nintendo's new handheld for was the indie games and third-party titles, maybe investing in a Steam Deck made sense after all. I ended up pulling the trigger not long after that, but I very nearly came close to opting for the Legion Go instead. Naturally, when the chance to review one of the Steam Deck's biggest rivals came up a few months later, I couldn't help but be curious about the road less travelled. 

For better or worse though, the final destination at the end of this detour didn't come with a drop of buyer's remorse.

In Australia, the Lenovo Legion Go S starts at $1299. That's a steep sum that puts it well above the starting price for the Steam Deck, though it isn't far off what other PC brands are offering when it comes to this form factor.

You can also save money if you shop around, check out the table below for a round-up of the best deals for the Legion Go S in Australia.

Originally announced at this year’s CES in Las Vegas, the Lenovo Legion Go S is built around a slightly smaller 8-inch WQXGA display than the one found in its predecessor. That screen comes with a lower resolution and a slower 120Hz refresh rate. However, past any of these subtractions when it comes to display specs, it's the stuff surrounding the screen that makes for the starkest contrast.

Where the original Legion Go was a matte-black monstrosity that erred well away from the idea of doing more with less, the sequel is slimmer and more streamlined. It's more curved than the angsty angles found on the ROG Ally but a hell of a lot more lightweight than what Lenovo had going on before and a much closer match for the likes of the Steam Deck when it comes to overall size. 

However, as a direct consequence of this, the Legion Go S lacks the Switch-inspired detachable controllers and built-in kickstand found in its predecessor. As far as bells and whistles go, the best you're going to get is the pair of front-facing speakers that sit below the usual gamepad inputs.

For all that Lenovo has shied away from the inclusions that made its first handheld so memorable, it hasn't forgotten the wisdom of knowing that it isn't worth trying to fix what isn't broken. Accordingly, the top of the Legion Go S is host to exactly the ports and buttons you'd expect. There are two USB-C ports that support up to 65W charging, a headphone jack, and your standard power and volume keys.

Meanwhile, there's a MicroSD slot on the bottom edge that can be used to boost the amount of storage you're working with. Given how big game downloads have gotten in recent years, that's a welcome touch. At the same time, the fact that both of the charging ports are on the top of the unit may limit how nicely it'll play with certain setups.

The last inclusion worth highlighting here is the Legion ColdFront cooling system. This feature made its debut in Lenovo's Legion gaming laptops back in 2024 and while a significant amount of the rear-facing side of the Legion Go is devoted to the necessary ventilation, I rarely found the subsequent airflow enough of a distraction that I noticed.

All this is to say that the Lenovo Legion Go S doesn't stand out from the crowd in the same way that its predecessor did. That's not necessarily going to be a bad thing, but it doesn't lend itself to all that many surprises either. The chunky form factor of the Steam Deck surprised and won me over within a month of buying it, but I can't say the design of the Legion Go S ever really added up to much more than the sum of its parts.

That conformity has its conveniences though. Even if it's still 100g heavier than its biggest competition, the form factor here is a lot more comfortable and ergonomic. Lenovo's latest handheld is still a handful but it's much easier on your arms over longer sessions. 

One of the main reasons you might consider the Legion Go S over the likes of the Steam Deck (or even the Nintendo Switch 2) is that you're getting the benefits of more recent and powerful hardware. The mileage on that approach can vary but given how much investment has gone into this corner of the PC market and just how much further you can get with even modest performance gains nowadays, there's a case to be made for it.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the version of the Legion Go S available in Australia, that argument proved harder to make than I expected. Under the hood, the Legion Go S runs on AMD’s Z2 Go processor, 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 512GB of SSD storage.

That configuration is comparable to the Steam Deck at a glance but the aforementioned is the cheapest of the three Ryzen Z2 mobile processors that AMD has custom-built for this particular form factor. It's only got 4 CPU cores, with speeds of up to 4.3Ghz and a cache that’s less than half the size of the other options. It might be more power efficient than the silicon inside the Steam Deck, but I suspect most users will be hard-pressed to notice the difference.

Whatever you're getting in terms of performance gains here, it rarely feels worth the price. For as much as the upgrade in terms of screen size, resolution and refresh rate here made the Legion Go S more compelling to use, the kind of games I could realistically use this to play weren't all that different to those I'm playing on Valve's handheld nowadays. Less-demanding indie games like Hades 2 ran like a dream, but the same can be said of Valve's handheld, which comes in at a cheaper asking price.

Likewise, Legion Go S largely struggled to play the same games that Valve's handheld also struggles with. More recent releases like Helldivers 2 or The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered were a lot messier to run, both in terms of how they looked and how they ran on the hardware here.

It's hard to know how much of this is down to the hardware or software here though, as most games likely haven't yet been optimised for the specific low-power, high-permanence chipset powering the Legion Go S. The same can't be said for the Steam Deck. While sticking to a single hardware configuration has its downsides, the long-term benefits of SteamOS continue to add up in Valve's favour.

Interestingly, the Lenovo Legion Go S is the first third-party handheld available with SteamOS out of the box. That version of the device is about $70 cheaper than its Windows counterpart. Unfortunately, this version of the device was not the model I was sent to review.

As a result, I can't speak to how that version of the device compares to either this one or the Steam Deck) when it comes to moment-to-moment performance, battery life or even setup. Instead, I can only confirm that the process of setting up Windows 11 on a device without a keyboard remains a headache and a definite downgrade on the more bespoke experience you get with the likes of the Steam Deck.

I'm someone who has reviewed more than a few Windows-powered handhelds at this point, so it's really frustrating to see the same shortcomings stick even as the overall form factor improves. This complaint extended well past the setup for the Legion Go S. Apps often were slow to load and sometimes loaded in the wrong resolution. Even the Windows login experience felt clunky and mismatched for the form factor here. 

It's hard to know exactly how much of the potential performance gains here are being soaked up by the choice of operating system but the streamlined and responsive interface on offer from Valve's handheld is a frequent reminder that's hard to ignore. In ways both big and small, much of the effort that Lenovo has made here to make the Legion Go S feel like a more seamless experience feels constrained by the underlying limits of Windows 11. The fact that there is a version of this device that runs SteamOS instead only exacerbates the sensation that you're not getting the experience you could from the money you're spending here.

Even if the trade-offs here are as same as they've always been, the chance to take advantage of the perks that Steam Deck users have enjoyed exclusively to date feels closer than it's ever been. For instance, as someone who recently bought a Steam Deck, I massively underrated the value that the community around the device adds to the experience of using it. Whenever I boot up a game with iffy controller support, it takes two seconds to fix that problem by loading in a community profile.

Likewise, if a game isn't working on the Steam Deck for an unknown reason then there's a good chance that someone has put together a guide to help you find answers. Getting The Bazaar to run on the Steam Deck was more complicated than I'd like. Finding a guide or a video that could break that process into simple steps was anything but. 

Even if I'm much less likely to run into Linux-related issues with the Windows 11 version of the Legion Go S, the absence of comprehensive community support really is one of the biggest strikes against it as a Steam Deck competitor. Games may have looked better on the screen of the Legion Go S than they did on Valve's handheld but the clunky Windows-powered interface and the lack of access to community tools frequently made playing them more of a hassle.