Out-of-Box Experience

While the game isn't officially supported on Steam Deck, it installs and runs without issues. You might encounter a crash or two on startup, but overall, the game's stable and doesn't crash. Space Marine 2 also doesn't suffer from shader or traversal stutter, with Steam downloading more than 1 GB of shader pre-cache files before downloading the game itself.


Yet again, Steam Deck is in a rough spot performance-wise. Saber Interactive's "Swarm" engine can render impressively massive Tyranid hordes, but that also means the game is very CPU-intensive, and it pulls no punches when faced against Steam Deck's puny 4-core Zen 2 CPU.


That said, the iGPU is equally beaten up, meaning you'll have to set everything aside from textures to "low," enable upscaling and set it to "Performance" to get an unstable 30 FPS average, with frequent drops to the mid-20s and even some sub-20 FPS drops.


The ROG Ally fares much better. You can enable SSAO, which makes the game much better-looking than with the setting disabled, use 900p resolution, and play with textures set to "Medium." You'll still have to set FSR 2 to either "Balanced" or "Performance" to avoid frame drops below 30 frames per second.


You might also set VRAM allocation to 5 GB or 6 GB if you encounter stutters or low-quality textures loading due to insufficient VRAM with the default 4 GB option. We haven't experienced any issues with the 4 GB VRAM setting, but our longest play session on the ROG Ally was just under one hour.


The game will compile shaders the first time you launch it, which takes only a few minutes. As with Steam Deck, you won't notice any form of stuttering.

The inbuilt controls work fine, and the game plays rather well on a controller.