Lenovo Legion Go Review: A Great Handheld Windows Gaming PC
Lenovo Legion Go Review: Controllers, Experience And Gaming Tests
Controlling the Lenovo Legion Go
A critical component of the gaming experience on a handheld PC is how the controllers feel. The Legion Go's controllers, overall, are pretty good. They're obviously built for modern games as opposed to a retro experience, considering their Xbox-style layout that focuses on the left analog stick and the analog triggers on the back, but the system is at home in games both young and old.
The left controller has an analog stick at the top and a directional pad underneath it, just like most modern controllers including the Xbox and Switch, which is only different from Sony's stubborn Dual Sense controller. We also find the typical Xbox-style shoulder button LB and shoulder trigger LT. Beyond that, we have the View and Menu buttons below the D-Pad, a Legion logo button that invokes the Lenovo Legion Space app, and a pair of programmable buttons labeled Y1 and Y2.
There's some real innovation happening in the right controller. First of all, it mimics modern gamepad controller layouts. ABXY face buttons, a second analogue stick, RB and RT all reside exactly where you'd expect them. There's also a third programmable button labeled Y3 on the back, and like the Steam Deck, there's a touchpad below the right stick that moves the mouse and responds to taps as clicks. But then things take a bit of a turn on the bottom, where we find a toggle switch and an optical mouse sensor. When combined with the included magnetic base, the right controller's switch can turn the unit into a mouse.
FPS Mode turns the right controller into a mouse and the left controller is enough keyboard to work
Your hand is rotated 90 degrees, which is inarguably more comfortable than a flat, horizontal mouse, and the left and right mouse buttons are found on the side of the controller. Grip the controller like a joystick, slide it around on the desk, and click with the index and middle fingers, just like a mouse. There's also a scroll wheel and a separate third mouse button that can be hit easily with the thumb. It's a little awkward in the right hand because the right stick was against my palm, and the left hand has limited utility because the M3 button and scroll wheel are kind of tough to reach.
The good news is that in mouse mode, all the Xbox controller buttons are disabled, so you won't press them accidentally. And in this mode, the left controller doubles as the left side of a keyboard. The left stick is mapped to WSAD for directions, the D-pad is mapped to 1-4 on the number row, and other buttons are mapped to still more common keyboard functions. On the go, and at a table, you can then prop the main tablet up on its kickstand and play shooters or point-and-click-friendly titles like Baldur's Gate 3 with a bit more precision. It takes some getting used to, but after 10-15 minutes of adjustment, it got much easier.
That's quite a wide array of buttons and controls, but what you won't find here is an Xbox Guide button, which is useful in Steam Big Picture Mode to invoke Steam's overlay. And annoyingly, while there are programmable buttons, they cannot be programmed to replicate the Guide button in Lenovo's app. Instead, a recent Legion Space update mapped the Xbox Guide button to the Legion logo button on the left controller plus clicking the right analog stick. That's clunky, but at least it's there. Lenovo says more remapping features are on the way.
I found that the controllers are comfortable for my medium-sized hands. If you've ever played a Nintendo Switch in handheld mode for any period of time, you've undoubtedly experienced hand cramps thanks to the Joy Cons (or Switch Lite for that matter) all being so thin, and that's just not a problem here. Lenovo knocked ergonomics on this controller out of the park. Incidentally, being wireless controllers, there are batteries in each, 900 mAh in size. We got about 12-15 hours of gameplay before needing to charge, which is pretty decent. There are some RGB LEDs in the rings around the analog sticks, too, and they will use some of the battery. Fortunately, they can be turned off easily within Lenovo Legion Space.
The only real gripe we really have with the Legion Go's controllers is the D-pad. We found it easy to accidentally press rear buttons while using it, and it's very flat with minimal travel distance and a stiff and clicky feel. If you've used an Xbox One-era controller (as opposed to the current circular D-pad of the Xbox Series controller), it's similar to that controller's D-pad, but even more shallow. It's hard to press a diagonal, which makes this D-pad a point of frustration in 2D fighting games like Street Fighter Anniversary Collection or King of Fighters 2002, and it's difficult to use in precision platformers like Celeste. Anything with a more modern or stick-focused gameplay style is just fine; this might just be my very favorite way to play Hades.
Game Performance on the Legion Go
All of the hardware features, including the comfortable controllers and big display, are worthless if it can't run the games you want to play, right? So, let's dive in. The closest match to this device, of course, is ASUS' ROG Ally, which shares the same Ryzen Z1 Extreme processor with Radeon 780M graphics and handheld form factor. Some time has passed since that review, though, and AMD has been hard at work improving graphics and power performance.
We tested with the Balanced (15 Watt sustained power draw) profile to start, and if the game demands it or can benefit, we also tested in Performance mode (27 Watts sustained). And if a game is lightweight, we at least attempted the Quiet (9 Watts sustained) setting. Each setting started with higher turbo values, at least while plugged in, but settled down into those three categories after a few minutes. We're not reporting initial performance, either; we waited for the Legion Go to settle into its assigned profile before reporting performance, so this isn't a short burst kind of thing, showing the best case scenario.
By and large, triple-A titles that demand high-performance graphics do run, and run relatively well, on reduced settings. Unfortunately, that also means that resolutions aren't always going to take full advantage of that gorgeous 2,560 x 1,600 display. Fortunately, Lenovo's Legion Space software has a global toggle to enable Radeon Super Resolution, which will automatically upscale whatever resolution we choose for a game to the native resolution using something akin to FSR 2. So, when you look at the resolution and settings listed below, keep in mind that the games should look a fair bit better than the settings might imply.
Just like the ROG Ally, the handheld performance of the Legion Go is a little compromised at 15 Watts, but everything we threw at it was playable. And with RSR, they all looked pretty darn great. We prefer the 15 Watt setting because it offers a great mix of battery life and performance. At the 15 Watt TDP setting (which is also the default Balanced TDP option in Legion Space) we could get between 2.5 and 4 hours of gameplay, depending on the game, out of the 49.2 Wh battery in the Legion Go. Some games, like Hades, didn't really need the full 15 Watts to maintain a steady frame rate, and so it bumped battery up beyond where you might expect.
The only downside is that we're still not really taking advantage of the 2,560 x 1,600 display or its 144 Hz refresh rate. While the high DPI is great, a native 1,920 x 1,200 display might have been a better use of the 8.8 inch (diagonal) real estate. RSR helps, of course, and we're certainly not complaining because it's so nice to look at.
There's not really room or time to talk about every single game we tested, but let's talk about a few games that really surprised us with how they performed.
Doom Eternal
Doom Eternal is a highly-optimized title that looks fantastic and runs smoothly on even the most basic, modern hardware. Even with that in mind, running at 15 Watts and hitting a frame rate target of 60 fps at a resolution of 1920x1200 is pretty outstanding. With a little more casual testing, we found it actually runs relatively well at 9 Watts if you don't mind 1280x800 and lower settings. It's not the best looking or smoothest at a very low TDP, but we were surprised with how it handled.
It's when we turned the power up, though, that we could see a game that really starts to take advantage of the Legion Go's display. The full 2560x1600 is available on Medium settings and the frame rate exceeds 70 fps often enough that we felt comfortable turning on Vsync and locking in a frame rate of 72 fps. Note that none of the latest ray tracing features that were added to Doom Eternal a while back were enabled, but it did nicely.
Dragon Ball Fighter Z
Arc System Works is probably best known for the Guilty Gear series, but Dragon Ball Fighter Z is an excellent title with (as you can see above) some seriously flashy graphics and tons of effects. Being able to play this at 1920x1200 with all the default settings enabled at a TDP of 15 Watts was a bit of a surprise. We couldn't really use Performance and bump it up to the display's native resolution, however, because when the game gets hectic, it'll dip below 60 fps, and at that point it slowed down on occasion. That's frustrating, but it affects basically every fighting game we tested. That forced us to be relatively conservative with this genre.
Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade
Some call the original the best RPG to ever come out of Japan, but that would ignore some really top tier games. At any rate, Final Fantasy VII has a huge and loyal fanbase who have eagerly anticipated the full remake of the game. Spanning across multiple titles, Square Enix will be at it for a while. After being locked to the PlayStation 4 for a long stretch, Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade made its way to the PC last year.
Perhaps owing to its PlayStation 4 roots, the game runs really quite well on the Legion Go. Hitting a full 1080p (letterboxed with the display set to 1920x1200) and using the High detail settings, the game ran really well in the 15 Watt Balanced mode. 30 fps is plenty for this title, especially if you choose the turn-based battle options found in the latest iteration. Playing on the 27 Watt Performance mode is an improvement, but we couldn't really get up to 2560x1440 smoothly. However, the frame rate increased dramatically.
On the next page, we'll dive into some more examples and take a look at a few other benchmarks.
