Recent reviews by Phane

Edit: I have now played through the whole game. It is annoying to have to wait for it to rebuild shaders quite often when there is a patch or driver update. Otherwise I've had a few crashes and a couple of cutscenes got out of sync, and a few graphical artifacts, none of which were game breaking. The game is definitely sluggish on the Steam Deck, but still playable. I found it far more enjoyable on my PC, though, since it ran much smoother.

I'm not sure why other people are having such massive problems, but I'd say this is far from the worst PC port.

Original Review:

I've only had the game crash on me once and that was on my Steam Deck when I tried to play while it was still loading shaders (the game warns you that doing so will cause performance issues). Aside from that, I've yet to see any crashes playing through the prologue on both my gaming PC (5600X, 32GB DDR4@3833, RTX 3080 FE) or my Steam Deck. The shader loading was annoying but I left it running while I went to do other things and it finished on both machines without crashing for me (aside from the above situation where I tried to play at the same time).

Steam Deck with default settings (that seemed to be customized for the Steam Deck) mostly stays in the 30-40 FPS range with some drops to around 14 FPS. Definitely playable, but could be better with tweaks.

The High settings that my main rig defaulted to seemed fine and was consistently 70+ FPS, sometimes as high as 140.

I did notice some cutscene hitching on the Steam Deck and have seen videos on social media where that hitching can cause some hilarious synchronization issues, but didn't notice any here.

Stick to Enemy Within or Enemy Unknown. This game is bug ridden garbage. If they haven't fixed any of the numerous "Stuck under the Avenger", "Pink/Green flickering", or "keyboard/mouse not working in mission" bugs that were prevalent at launch by now, they aren't going to.

As it is, you have to exit and restart the game every other mission on average, sometimes half a dozen or more times just to fight through the bugs enough to get past one mission

I'd only recommend this game to hardcore fans of Xcom who wouldn't mind dealing with all of the above to play through something fresh. Absent the bugs, the core game has some nice changes and updates.