Guilty Gear Strive

Update 7/7/2022 – Guilty Gear Strive has been labeled playable by Steam!

Guilty Gear Strive is the newest entry in the long-running fighting series made by the incredible Arc System Works. This game is the culmination of the series in more ways than one with incredible artistic direction, refined and upgraded combat mechanics, and an insane soundtrack. Arc System Works has long been known to be the king of 2D fighters and this game solidifies their position.

While this game has an unsupported rating from Steam/Valve, I am happy to report this game works pretty fantastic on the Steam Deck. The game is playable at the best settings with native resolution, but there are some changes I would make to make it still look great and save some battery. I found the sweet spot to be 1152×720 with the scaling resolution around 80.

Pair this with FSR turned on with sharpness at 3-5 and quality looks fantastic. You can push scaling resolution to 90 and it will look a bit better, but I didn’t see enough of a change to justify higher Watt usage and temps. Changing the overall in-game quality to “high” instead of “best” didn’t change visuals as much, but did save a little battery. I had no issues with the audio during my testing either and Proton GE 7-20 worked like a charm.

I didn’t experience any huge bugs, though there was a couple inconveniences that caught me. There was one instance where my framerate slowed during a battle to 7 FPS for about 2 seconds until bouncing back and I was stuck at a victory screen twice. I believe it was because of my connection to the internet though and closing the game and turning it on worked fine.

And yes, game can be fully played offline. My icons for the controls in-game also changed to keyboard, so I had to go into system settings and change the Button Display Format to “Controller”. The game also doesn’t show Steam Deck controller icons, instead showing Xbox icons. Other than some text being a bit on the small side, the game performed very well with no other bugs appearing.

I did notice two specific stages had a bit more trouble sticking up to the 60 FPS performance mark. L’oro Di Illyria had the worst of it getting close to 50 FPS and 75c at times, while Ajatar Hunting Ground spiked to the same but held close to 56 FPS when it did dip. Of all the stages though, I noticed Council of Three being the easiest to run off of with 12W usage and 68c – 69c temps.

Guilty Gear Strive – Conclusion

Overall though, I would absolutely give this game a playable rating instead of unsupported like Valve says. After some fine-tuning, the game sticks to its 60 FPS cap pretty regularly and still looks wonderful.

Need some help understanding how we got to our score? Check out our Guide to Steam Deck HQ.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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