After a year, the Epic exclusivity is over: from now on you can Dead Island 2 on too Steam Buy it and plunge into Hell-A, which is overrun by the undead, without any major performance problems. Does that also apply to this? Steam Deck?
Advertisement
After all, Valve's handheld PC has now become a constant companion for some, and what could be better than chopping up a few zombies just before going to sleep? According to Valve, Dead Island 2 will be on the Steam Deck at least be playable, i.e. there are just a few little things that aren't perfectly adjusted. We took a closer look at it.
Dead Island 2: How is it going on the Steam Deck?
Gem of the yellow indicator on the Steam product page Dead Island 2 is supposed to be purely playful problem-free work, but some texts may be displayed too small or “foreign controller glyphs” are displayed, i.e. sometimes a keyboard command is shown instead of the correct controller button.
It's time to free Los Angeles from zombies – in Dead Island 2 you can even do it on the Steam Deck.
We can fundamentally agree with this assessment. After playing Dead Island 2 on a Steam Deck OLED With 512 gigabytes of memory installed, the zombie action started without any problems – with one exception: The Epic Online Services must be installed. This happens automatically, but you may be asked to log in with your Epic account. This is particularly the case if you want to use the crossplay function to play together with players on other platforms that are not Steam.
Advertisement
Apart from this small interruption, Dead Island 2 works almost flawlessly on the Steam Deck. What is striking, however, is that every time you start it Pre-caching the shaders is restarted. After all, the process usually takes less than ten seconds, so it is hardly significant.
Performance on the Steam Deck: The best settings for Dead Island 2
It can be started, but… How well does Dead Island 2 work?, once you've taken the leap to Hell-A? surprisingly liquid. Although the zombie carving isn't a graphical smash, it's anything but an ugly duckling and runs really well right from the start on the Steam Deck without us having to change anything in the settings. Even with the options set by the game, mostly everything on high, we are already almost there 30 frames per second throughout at a resolution of 1280×800.
But it also works a lot more smoothly: After experimenting a bit with the settings, we are in for a surprise stable 45 to 50 frames per second came without having to sacrifice much of the image quality. In rare cases there are crashes to 30 FPS, but these are only short-lived and are therefore only slightly annoying. In some buildings we even get up to 60 images per second, which is quite impressive.
With these settings you are guaranteed to experience Dead Island 2 smoothly on the go.
In order to achieve this performance, here are what we think we can do for you Best settings for Dead Island 2 on the Steam Deck summarized:
- Resolution: 1280×800
- Motion Blur: 0
- Anti-Aliasing: Temporal anti-aliasing High
- Visibility: High
- Post Processing: High
- Shadow: Low
- Textures: Medium
- Effects: Medium
- Foliage quality: Medium (high is also possible)
- SSAO: Low
- Indirect Shadows: Medium
- Screen Space Reflections: Medium
- Shade Quality: Medium
- AMD FSR 2: Quality
If you want, you can of course go one level lower with FSR 2, i.e. this Performance setting choose. Then you can squeeze a few more FPS out of the Steam Deck, but at the same time you have to live with the fact that the visual quality noticeably suffers. But this is definitely manageable on the relatively small screen.
You can then move smoothly through the world of Dead Island 2 – with the… Battery life On average, the Steam Deck OLED is limited to around two and a half hours. Whether killing zombies is now worth playing, You can find out more in our detailed test of Dead Island 2.