BobDendry

In What A Deck, I wax lyrical (or perhaps rant) about a game I've recently played on my Lenovo Legion Go.

If you know me, you'll know I'm terrible with finishing games I start. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was one of those games I picked up pretty much on launch, played for maybe 2-3 hours, then forgot about.

The great thing about having a gaming portable is that I can sit on the couch and watch a bit of TV or just hang out with the wife and dogs while I play an hour or two of a game in the evening. I've been able to finish way more games over the last year and a bit since I picked up the Legion Go then I have for years – it's great!

The Performance: Decent With a Few Stutters

When I first started up the game on my Legion Go, it actually performed terribly – I was a little worried the game just wasn't going to perform (despite what ProtonDB told me). However, once I'd updated and restarted Bazzite, it ran smooth as butter at 800p, topping out at the 36 FPS frame limit I have on my handheld.

Through the playthrough I continued to tinker with the settings and eventually settled on high settings. On high, the game still stayed glued to 36 FPS most of the time, with a few occasional stutters down to high-20s in particularly busy or particle-heavy scenes.

The thing certainly eats through battery though. I don't often play unplugged, but I gave the game a brief go unplugged and I think it wouldn't last much more than an hour on high settings with the second-highest default TDP settings. I'm sure you'd get a bit more time if you reduced the TDP and quality settings, but half-rate shading caused some weirdness so probably isn't an option.

The Game: Just the Right Length

There's nothing particularly unique or novel about the premise of the game. We have another story about a Jedi Purge survivor trying to make good on their former oath in a changed and dangerous galaxy.

As Cal Kestis, you start off working as a scrapper dismantling Old Republic vessels like Venators, just trying to live a quiet life and avoid detection. After having to use your powers to save a coworker, you're faced with a visit from the Inquisitors, and barely escape with your life.

From there it's a journey spanning multiple planets, from familiar ones like Ilum and Dathomir, to new ones like Bogano and Zeffo, as Cal searches for an important Jedi Holocron before the Empire can find it. You'll find yourself going back and forth between the different planets as you unlock new abilities and work towards your ultimate goal.

I'd describe the game as Souls-lite. It takes a whole lot of cues from the Souls series, from the level up mechanics, bonfire-like meditation system, and combat which can be punishing when you make a mistake or get too greedy for that one last attack. But it's an order of magnitude less difficult than the Souls series, making it a hell of a lot more accessible to the more casual player.

It should take you around 20 hours to get through the story, which I feel is just about right, though the final location of the game feels a little rushed and could have been fleshed out a little more.

Overall: Worth a Play

If you're wondering whether Jedi: Fallen Order is worth a play on your gaming handheld – my answer is a resounding yes! It plays beautifully on Linux, it still looks great, and you'll have a lot of fun working your way though a well written, if formulaic, Star Wars tale.

Bob Dendry is the owner and administrator of Fediverse.Games. You can find him on Mastodon and Peertube.

My first experience using Linux was probably around twenty years ago, when I installed Ubuntu on my laptop (thanks to the people over on the Transport Tycoon IRC channel waaaaaayy back in the day).

Using Linux was a very different experience back then to how it is now. It didn't look the best, and getting non-native games to work was a pain. Of course Wine was still a thing back then and WineHQ's AppDB provided the same resources and reviews as it does today, but compatibility was far more limited then it is today. So it was an interesting experience trying it for the first time, but I fairly quickly switched back to Windows.

Over the years I've switched back and forth between various Linux distros, Windows versions and even a short period running with OSX on a Mac mini.

Regardless, I've still used at least one Linux-based PC consistently through the years – usually a lightweight laptop I use sitting on the couch in front of the TV of an evening (like I'm doing right now, in fact).

But over the years the proposition of Linux as the basis of a gaming PC has changed markedly. Wine's capabilities have continued to grow. Valve's contribution to the Linux gaming ecosystem through Proton (and the follow on upstreaming of a fair amount of their work into Wine itself) has allowed the ecosystem to develop in leaps and bounds.

When the current generation of gaming handhelds hit the market, I was immediately interested. The AMD chips that power these devices are pretty amazing – plenty of CPU cores and very capable iGPUs as well! I decided on the Lenovo Legion Go – it seemed to me like the best balance of price, performance, features and availability in Australia at the time.

But despite the device coming loaded with Windows 11 by default, it never even entered by head to run with Windows on the device. In fact, I never even booted to Windows. Straight away I decided to go with a Linux install, using Bazzite.

If you're unfamiliar with Bazzite, it comes from a broad family of community developed immutable Fedora flavours under the banner of Universal Blue. I'll talk about why I love Universal Blue in more detail in a future post, but to put it simply, it provides simple desktop images that make managing your install simple, regardless of whether you're a newbie or an expert. I firmly believe they're the future of increasing mainstream Linux adoption.

Bazzite was originally a bit weedy on the Lenovo Legion Go (as can be expected on a new piece of hardware, running an OS it wasn't specifically designed for). But over the last 18 months it's grown into a first class device, support wise.

And for a while I watched my last Windows device, my desktop gaming computer, continuing to grind slower and slower starting up and running, despite being (both when I put it together and still today) a fairly top end piece of tech. It's frustrating watching a device get slower and slower for seemingly no reason, so I thought why not, let's give Linux a go.

For the most part, using Linux (via Bluefin, Aurora and finally onto Bazzite) on my gaming computer has been almost entirely a pain-free experience. The vast majority of the games run with fairly similar (or better) performance, and as a whole it's a pretty set-and-forget experience, in comparison to how it was all those years ago when I first gave Ubuntu a try.

Don't like Steam? Use Lutris to integrate all of your other gaming services into your PC. There's Heroic Game Launcher for managing your GOG, EGS or Amazon libraries. There a whole ecosystem of (mostly) open source software to do pretty much anything you want to do with your games.

But there's the one thing that prevents Linux from being the perfect gaming operating system. If you guessed I'm referred to Kernel-level anti cheat, you'd be absolutely correct. And unfortunately, the big publishers are relying on it more and more. That's another conversation for another day, but there's a great resource available at Are We Anti-Cheat Yet to tell you if a game in your library (or one you're considering purchasing) is supported from an anti-cheat point of view in Linux.

So, as a whole, I'm pretty happy with my experience switching to Linux as a gamer. There's limitations of course, but overall I think Linux provides a very well designed and performant experience for the gamer these days.

Bob Dendry is the owner and administrator of Fediverse.Games. You can find him on Mastodon and Peertube.