Lenovo Legion Go S Review: Comfortable, but Compromised

Lenovo’s Legion Space software, even updated to its latest version, is somehow less responsive than the first Legion Go from 2023. I was consistently struggling with the console changing system settings on me for no reason. My TDP would adapt randomly. The system brightness would change as I sat in a dark room without rhyme or reason. The battery life wasn’t doing me any favors, either. I can’t help but wonder if this device is merely an offshoot of the real prize, the $500 SteamOS version set to release in May.

The Legion Go S is Lenovo’s attempt at designing a handheld for laymen. It’s most comparable to the Steam Deck, a cheaper, lower-powered handheld that remains one of the most popular despite the promised power of devices with laptop-level APUs that can cost over $1,000. Like the Steam Deck, The Legion Go S runs on a custom APU; the AMD Ryzen Z2 Go is specifically designed for this device. Other than basic comfort, the standout feature is its ability to do up to 40 W TDP, though—let’s be honest—you would only ever use that wattage when docked, and this device demands to be held while you lounge back on a long plane flight.

So, is it good for its price? My review unit with 32 GB of RAM cost $730 from Best Buy. That’s not much better than the $800 Asus ROG Ally X or $750 Legion Go now, and those systems can hit better performance targets. The Steam Deck OLED with 1 TB of storage costs $650 MSRP, and then you get that console-like experience with all the extra software and plugins built specifically for Valve’s device.

The Lenovo Legion Go S excites me more for systems slated to come out later this year. First on the list is the Go S running SteamOS. It’s the first system to use Valve’s official operating system without relying on a fork of that software like Bazzite. For the sake of getting a clean, console-like experience, that system and its planned $500 price point with 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage seems like the perfect compromise for as comfortable a system as the Legion Go S. There’s also the Legion Go 2 with a Ryzen Z2 Extreme APU and updated ergonomics. If the next Legion Go is as comfortable as this one, I’ll be a happy camper.

Lenovo Legion Go S Review: Design and Comfort

Considering the poor base ergonomics of the original Lenovo Legion Go, the Go S is a complete 180. As soon as I picked it up, the device slipped into the contours of my fists. At about 1.61 pounds, it’s not a light system compared to its contemporaries, but the grips make it much easier to hold, especially when lying on a couch or bed for a pre-sleep game session.

I’m still not used to Legion Go’s flat-face buttons, but they are clicky without feeling shallow. I also appreciate the trigger redesign. Both the bumpers and triggers angle to the natural curve of the fingers. Those triggers deserve extra kudos, especially adding two switches behind the system to reduce the button travel. These kinds of adaptive triggers are meant to make trigger pulls as shallow as a mouse click, and while it’s not necessary on a gaming handheld when most players shouldn’t use it to get top rank in a shooter, the addition is welcome.

The d-pad has also received a complete redesign with a new shallow bowl around the plus, which was sorely lacking on the original Legion Go. There’s a definitive clickiness to the button, which I found does help for the sake of 2D or fighting games. The one off spot is the infinitesimally small trackpad. By default, pressing this sends the haptics motor fluttering. My palm sometimes pressed it and gave me a jolt to my hand. The rumble in this device seems only to have one speed: hummingbird.

The thumbsticks also received a fair bit of love. They include the RGB lights with more on-theme segmentations to emulate the Legion logo, but they are larger and stiffer than they were on the first Legion. I still may prefer the ROG Ally X or Steam Deck’s sticks, but by such a small margin, it makes little difference to my enjoyment of the device.

Lenovo Legion Go S Review: Display and Sound

The large, 8-inch IPS LCD display on the Legion Go is part of the reason why the device has a cult following. The 8-inch screen on the Go S is no less pretty despite the difference in overall design. It’s a 48-120 HZ VRR display that supports up to 1920 by 1200 resolution. With its bulk, it’s akin to the $900 MSI Claw 8 AI+, though that device was also more powerful and expensive than Lenovo’s latest.

The screen can get very bright, much more so than the competition from Asus and Valve. The brightness and small bezels add to the sense that the display is doing more than its specs imply. Of course, I prefer OLED on the latest Steam Deck. Still, I didn’t feel like I was missing out while I was gaming on the Legion Go S. The only issue you may run into is some games don’t support 1920 by 1200 resolution natively, so without fiddling with settings, some games can look squished than they should.

The Go S speakers held back the experience. The dual 2W stereo speakers facing the user don’t supply the sound needed to immerse oneself in some of my favorite soundtracks. While replaying Wolfenstein: The New Order, I felt like I was listening to a Tamagotchi rendition by a heavy metal band. Unlike the Claw and Steam Deck, which both have above-average on-device speakers, the Go S requires you to plug in your earbuds or headphones to listen to your games.

Lenovo Legion Go S Review: Performance

Performance is going to be the major sticking point for anybody considering the Legion Go S. While most Windows handhelds are running on available APUs from both AMD and Intel, Lenovo’s new handheld sports a device-specific processor, the AMD Ryzen Z2 Go. It uses the Zen 3 architecture with a 4-core, 8-thread configuration, a 3.0 GHz clock speed, and a 4.3 Ghz max boost. The APU includes RDNA 2 AMD Radeon graphics, but by design, it’s not blow-the-lid-off-your-handheld powerful. It seems particularly paltry compared to the 8-core,16-thread Ryzen Z2 Extreme.

The point of the specific CPU is to make the entire handheld cheaper than its contemporaries, though $730 doesn’t seem cheap by most standards. The Windows-based Legion Go S also includes 32 GB of LPDDR5x-6400 RAM and a 1 TB SSD. It’s not to say the extra memory isn’t appreciated. Still, with the limited cores on the APU, you’re potentially limited by which games you can play where extra memory makes a difference.

In 3D Mark benchmarks, the Legion Go S scored 2,489 in Time Spy and 2,336 in Steel Nomad Light. It seems especially poor compared to the Z1 Extreme-based handhelds. The original Legion Go went up to 3,279 in Time Spy, while the Asus ROG Ally X hit 3,491. The MSI Claw 8 AI+ with its Intel Core Ultra 7 258V chip managed 4,437 in our tests.

In Geekbench 6, the measly 4-cores hurt the CPU’s chances of competing with the big dogs. If the Legion Go S can do 1,690 in single-core and 5,369 in multi-core, the Ally X can do 1840 in single-core and 10,343 in multi-core settings. That means for CPU-centric games, the Legion Go S will be at a serious disadvantage.

The story doesn’t end there. If you keep the device on AC power and set it to 30 or 40 TDP, you won’t meet the performance of other handhelds above $700, though it occasionally comes close. Hiking up the TDP on AC power at 120 Hz refresh rate in a game like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and medium settings, the Ally X will do 38 FPS on max TDP, while the Legion Go S under the same settings and 30W TDP hit 36 average FPS.

Any game that has more CPU requirements will suffer in comparative performance. The Legion Go S in 30W TDP, 60 Hz refresh rate, and 1900 by 1080 resolution can hit 33 FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 benchmarks compared to 42 FPS on the Ally X. The Legion Go S will hit 22 FPS at 1900 by 1080 resolution in a game like Horizon Zero Dawn: Remastered on medium settings. Changing the settings to low doesn’t help much, either. The original Legion Go will do close to 28 FPS in the same game, while the Ally X managed similar framerates under those same settings.

On AC power and 15W TDP with 1280 by 800 resolution, 60 Hz refresh rate with Steam Deck settings in Cyberpunk 2077, the Legion Go S hit 37 average FPS compared to the Steam Deck OLED’s uncapped 47 FPS. At 30W TDP, the Legion Go S did nearly 50 average FPS under the same game settings. Lenovo recommended that for review purposes, I turn down the resolution for the sake of performance, but with that bright, beautiful large display at 1900 by 1200 resolution, and by any metric, I’d prefer playing at the max of what it has to offer.

Of course, this device is great for any less-intensive 2D games. The Legion Go S was great in Hades II and Pyre, where I could turn up the refresh rate and lounge back with the 1080p, 8-inch goodness. At this price, however, that should be expected.

Lenovo Legion Go S Review: Battery Life

As with most handhelds, the Legion Go S’s battery life isn’t enough to last a full afternoon. The device houses a 55.5 Whr battery, standard among handhelds in this price range, except for the 80 Whr on the Ally X or MSI Claw 8. It’s the kind of device you want to play with the brightness up, but then you’ll run into very short play times.

Running Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam Deck settings and a lower-than-native resolution at a 120 Hz refresh rate, I clocked in just under 1 hour and 30 minutes before it was all but dead. If you play with more conservative settings, I could do more than two hours on demanding games before needing to put the device down. Even with game streaming from a nearby PC over Razer Cortex—on power savings mode though with high brightness and refresh rate—I was only finding I could make it under three hours before my device was begging me for a refill.

The device’s benefit is its support for rapid charging. I used the power brick with the device and charged it to just under 90% in a little more than an hour and 20 minutes.

Lenovo Legion Go S Review: Software

Lenovo’s Legion Space software has been a full trek around the sun since it first debuted on handhelds, and it still needs work. After booting up, the device automatically loads into Legion Space, but launching games from it is not much faster than swiping your grubby fingers on the touchscreen on the Windows home screen to access any of your various launchers.

Legion Space was surprisingly slow at times. Loading the setting tabs caused occasions of lag that I don’t see much on the 2023 Legion Go. It’s worse when you try to access the quick settings. Just jumping to brightness settings takes three or four laggy inputs, and it’s worse when a game runs in the background. I would also prefer if Legion Space didn’t open directly to the store page whenever you load in.

Windows 11 makes handhelds feel like beta products, and it hasn’t improved despite years of players pleading with Microsoft for a mode that works better for small screens. You can’t easily turn the device to sleep and then load it back into your game. You can’t change system settings without slapping your massive forefinger into the screen. Sometimes, the keyboard refuses to appear no matter how many desperate times you press on a text box.

Without Microsoft’s input, these issues will continue to plague these kinds of handheld PCs. There’s a reason many players prefer this type of console to a Steam Deck. The benefit is you can use any launcher you may desire, install any kind of Windows-friendly emulator, and avoid any difficulties using non-Valve products with SteamOS. It all sounds like a good deal until, randomly, Windows asks you to log in with a Microsoft account to try to get you to use Dropbox. It’s not Lenovo’s fault, but it’s a major reason the eventual SteamOS version seems so much more appealing.

Lenovo Legion Go S Review: Verdict

The $730 Lenovo Legion Go S with these specs seems overcosted. Performance-wise, it reminds me of how the MSI Claw A1M struggled to match up. However, that handheld’s ergonomics were many times worse than the Legion Go S. I would consider this device more with less RAM and storage at $600, but even that’s a stretch when it’s bundled with the headaches from Windows. It’s easier to look beyond Windows for the MSI Claw 8 and ROG Ally X with their respective performance, but the Go S seems like it isn’t built with Windows in mind.

However, at $500, the Legion Go S seems like a far, far more tempting device. At that point, you’re paying for a Steam Deck with an 8-inch screen and still saving $50 on the 512 GB Steam Deck OLED. It means we’ll have to wait until May for a deeper look at how Lenovo and SteamOS massage the rough edges of this device. The bones are good, save for a pointless trackpad. That still leaves me excited. Lenovo also plans configurations with an AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme chip if you’re looking for better performance from a well-worn chip.

We do not know what kind of performance the same device with 16 GB of RAM and SteamOS will provide, especially since Valve claims SteamOS verified will work just as well as it does with the Steam Deck. But with that promised price and the performance I’ve already gotten from this system, the Go S could eventually be one of the best values for handheld gaming.