I mentioned I'd do a part II to this last time, and here I am. Has it really been 25 days since the device came out? Dang, time flies. Anyway, plenty of time to make the following observations. I'm just going to bullet point all of this for fun:
1. The TL;DR Winner of Handhelds: If you just want cheap gaming on the go and aren't particular, get a Switch. The Switch is still the king of this corner of portable gaming, hands down. But if you want to see your console library unlocked on portable devices, then of course the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally are requisites for you. What you're really choosing is "Linux or Windows" so pick wisely.
2. Battery Life: The Switch is the only device of the three that could probably keep you entertained for a full 2-3 hours before recharging becomes necessary. Both Steam Deck and the Ally are going to require fiddling with the settings to squeeze more than an hour of life out of their batteries. This essentially makes them portable in the sense of "I can plug this in to the hotel when I get there," but not "I can play this on the airplane/bus/tram/fishing boat/subway during commutes." I mean....the Deck and Ally could probably work here, if your commute is an hour or so.
3. Updates: After 25 days and countless updates the Ally is working quite well. But my understanding is the Steam Deck had a similar growing pain phase in its initial release. Just make sure you are updating this thing for Windows 11, the Asus firmware, the bios and the Armory Crate and all will be fine.
4. Heating Issues: I have never had an issue with overheating on the Steam Deck and of course the Switch would need to have a proper flame applied to it to overheat, but the Ally does have some overheating issues. Specifically, it has placed the MicroSD chip slot directly above one of the key heat vents. Asus has apparently released a firmware update that works on better fan output to assist here. Though I have had no issues other than some obvious stuttering in a game I tried playing from the MicroSD card that acted like it was having issues due to overheating,* stories are out there of people getting their microSD cards cooked. How common this is I am uncertain, but the good news is I have not experienced the overheating issue since the latest bios and firmware updates that just came out. But....the placement of the microSD was a poor choice on Asus's part.
MicroSD Formatting PRO TIP: Make sure if you get a MicroSD to format it in NTFS format if you plan to load any Xbox for PC games on it. I popped my 1 TB card in, saw it was preformatted, but did not realize it came formatted in exFAT which my understanding is better for photo storage, while NTFS is better for large files such as games.
Outside of those specific points its been a fine experience. I have spent some time testing out various games, including Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War (and Vanguard), Outriders, XIII, Killer is Dead, Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance, Octopath Traveller, Halls of Torment, Diablo Immortal and Assassin's Creed Origins....all worked great, and to varying degrees each translated well into handheld mode. I have had the most fun with Destiny 2 on the Ally, interestingly.
Honestly.....I would have felt less keen on investing in the Ally if it had been possible to play Destiny 2 and other games I had in my GOG, Battle.net, Xbox and Epic Games libraries on the Steam Deck. You can get some working....I did get a few on Epic to work on the Steam Deck with some painful effort. Xbox games was a bigger pain, and not all would play nice in the linux environment. GOG was a nightmare. Battle.net allegedly would work on the Steam Deck with the right proton downloads but every tutorial showed a completely different process that was often incomprehensible or didn't align with how my Steam Deck was working.
Being able to just load all this stuff on the Asus ROG Ally and play it has been nice. There are some games I have which are especially suited to the "play while wandering around, or at the dinner table, or on break, or on a trip" style, such as incredibly long titles like Assassin's Creed Odyssey which has otherwise been a difficult title to pin down due to the time demand it calls for, so I am loving having it for spot play on the Ally. Destiny 2 is naturally suited for pick up and play like this. Likewise, being able to replay a Call of Duty campaign or load a private game with bots to pass the time is fun. I have not as of yet been brave enough to try live multiplayer, assuming I would get slaughtered. Have not loaded Modern Warfare though I'd like to, but that is a notoriously large download size (215+ GB as I recall). Stuff like Halls of Torment, Diablo and Octopath Traveller are practically made for the Ally. Alas, Torchlight II did not like the control scheme and was a real pain so I pulled it from the Ally. It's Switch version of course works just great.
I've encountered a few games that fall into the "this is fun, but the graphics are too tiny for me to really dig playing this in handheld mode" category. Champions of Alaloth is one, with graphics too dainty and text too precise for my eyes. Outriders borders on it, with text too small to read, but luckily a big chunk of that game is about the shooting, not reading. Torchlight II and III both ran like crap on it, no nice way to put it, though II probably because the PC edition has never been controller optimized, and Torchlight III is a bit janky and broken on anything you play it on, anyway.
FYI Diablo IV is great on the Ally, but I am not playing it on the Ally because I want to enjoy that game for the time being on a nice big screen monitor.
Okay, that's it! I have too many hand-helds, but if someone made me ditch all but one I think I'd probably give serious consideration to making my decision in favor of the Asus ROG Ally. That said....it would be a very close decision between it and the Steam Deck as well as the Switch, which still manages to nail the "carry and play on the go" thing best.
*In the Ally's defense I had been running the device for like 10 hours straight filling up the 1 TB card and doing loads of updates. So by the time I tried out that game it was quite hot. Probably a good sign not to run it for 10 hours straight, maybe. I tested a game located on the C drive for contrast and it ran just fine, and after letting it sit for an hour off to cool down the game (Outriders) then ran without any issues, so it was definitely an overheating issue affecting the MicroSD. Bad form, Asus. Some Youtube videos I've seen suggest that breaking in to it and installing a SSD card larger than 512MB might be the way to go, but we'll see. If you do that, make sure to register and back up your device in the ASUS cloud.
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