Review: Asus ROG Ally

Ever since the Nintendo Switch arrived in 2017, it's been plausible to dream about carrying your entire gaming library with you. Valve’s Steam Deck comes the closest—after a buggy start, it’s become a surprisingly impressive piece of hardware. Now Asus hopes to dethrone it with the ROG Ally, a Windows-based device that promises to bring every PC game to a handheld.

It’s a bold promise, and one I was excited to see in action. I had been skeptical of the Steam Deck, but I wanted to believe, and that open-mindedness paid off. Unfortunately, after using the ROG Ally, I’m not convinced that Asus can compete with Valve’s handheld, much less Nintendo's. Basically, the ROG Ally is for those willing to sacrifice a lot of usability to play Fallout: New Vegas on the toilet.

The ROG Ally isn’t so much a Windows-based handheld gaming console as it’s just a Windows PC built inside a large controller with a screen. This is great for game compatibility and terrible for just about everything else. The very first time I tried to launch Steam from the Armoury launcher, the app crashed because I didn’t yet have an internet connection (which the device never prompted me to set up), popping up a standard, albeit tiny Windows error box.

Connecting to Wi-Fi, I found a UI problem that gave me a bad premonition of things to come: The onscreen keyboard I needed to enter my (rather long) Wi-Fi password covered half the password box. It was also finicky and failed to register several letters. To correct those mistakes, I had to hold down the “Show password” icon while stretching my fingers to tap the onscreen arrow keys.

It sounds minor, but connecting to Wi-Fi is one of the first, most basic aspects of setting up a device, and I was already annoyed. This was a theme that popped up constantly. I felt myself struggling against the form factor of the Ally. Once, while playing Doom Eternal, I was suddenly snapped out of the game to the Windows desktop, with a large black box filling half the screen. What merited such an interruption? “Your battery is running low. You might want to plug in your PC.”

Most of the UI work is offloaded to Windows-based game stores, and of those only Steam is really prepared for a handheld interface. Steam’s Big Picture mode is designed for everything from handhelds to TVs, and it's the default interface for the Steam Deck. It’s also what you’ll find when launching Steam on the Ally, but other stores like Xbox and Epic are just scaled-down versions of their desktop app.

Photograph: Asus

When you install a game on the Steam Deck, you see a pop-up that lets you know what may or may not work in a handheld format—whether the game’s designed for a controller, text scaling, etc. The ROG Ally has none of that on its own. Steam will sometimes pick a controller profile for you, but when downloading games from the major stores, you’re taking a gamble on whether it will work.

The Armoury Crate app is meant to solve this problem, but it often failed. A button to the left of the screen brings up an overlay that, among other things, lets you swap between Gamepad, Desktop, or Auto modes. However, in 20-plus hours of testing over the past week, I often found that games thought I was using a keyboard when I was in Gamepad mode. Once a game figured out what control method I was using, it worked well enough, but I started assuming that it would take time to figure out how to control each new game I played.

The Ally has one very important distinction from other handhelds: Since it runs Windows, there’s no compatibility layer to go through. Games just install like they would on your PC. Running the games, however, is another matter entirely. To stress-test the system, I played Doom Eternal at 1080p—the native resolution of the Ally’s screen—in the Armoury app’s Turbo mode. It struggled to reach 30 frames per second, usually dropping down to a borderline unplayable 15 to 20 fps during fights.

After a lot of fiddling, I managed to lower both the system and the game’s settings enough to get decent performance. This included, among other things:

• Reducing the system’s display setting to 720p using the Armoury overlay toggle
• Reducing Doom Eternal’s game resolution to 1280 x 720, because not all games will respect the Armoury’s settings (Asus says it’s considering removing this toggle entirely to avoid confusion)
• Downgrading Doom Eternal’s graphics settings to the absolute lowest possible options
• Limiting the ROG Ally’s display to 60 Hz using the Armory overlay toggle

Once I’d made every one of the above changes, I was finally able to reach 60 fps in Doom Eternal, dropping down to around 40-50 fps during fights. That isn’t mind-blowing performance, but it’s at least playable. However, if any of those changes weren’t made, performance plummeted. 720p on Medium graphics settings, or 1080p on Low settings still struggled to maintain 30 fps.

The UI jank also showed its face while I was fiddling to find workable settings. I tried to switch the screen from 120 Hz to 60 Hz using the Armoury overlay toggle, and this broke Doom Eternal’s graphics settings. The game reset to a 4:3 aspect ratio and 640 x 480 resolution. On the tiny screen, reading the menus to fix this strained my eyes. This is obviously not as much of an issue for lower-load games like, say, Stardew Valley. But Asus touts the Ally’s ability to play AAA games specifically because other handhelds can’t, not without huge compromises.

Even playing simpler games, though, wasn’t so simple. AMD’s new Ryzen Z1 Extreme processor is theoretically far more powerful than the Steam Deck's. However, running Windows seems to bog it down to the point of rendering the advantage moot. This is most apparent when it comes to the battery problem.

The Rog Ally has the same 40-Wh battery as the Steam Deck. To dramatically oversimplify, that means it can run a game that draws 40 watts for one hour, or 5 watts for eight hours. Normally, you wouldn’t have to think about the wattage draw of your system, but most PC games weren’t designed to account for hardware like the Ally.

At 1080p, and in the Ally’s Turbo mode, Doom Eternal burned through my battery in less than an hour, not long enough to get through a single campaign mission. Using the real-time info monitor, I could see that the game was routinely pushing past 40 watts, draining the battery at a breakneck pace. Even after downgrading the performance as much as I could, the lowest I could get the power draw to was around 25 watts, which is maybe enough for an hour and a half of gameplay.

More shockingly, I was only able to get about 2.5 hours of battery while playing Stardew Valley, a 2D farming simulator from 2016. I've gotten around six hours from the Switch and close to seven hours from the Steam Deck for the same game. When I checked the performance monitor, I found my answer. Even when set to 720p and capped at 60 fps, the Ally was drawing a baffling 16 to 17 watts, even peaking at 20 watts of power at times, while playing Stardew Valley. For comparison, the Steam Deck at roughly the same settings drew around 6 watts.

Aat least some of this drain was coming from other apps on the device. The Ally comes bundled with the type of bloatware you’d expect from a laptop, including the MyAsus suite of apps, as well as Microsoft Teams, some of which was running in the background. Once I’d closed all the junk—plus some of the other game stores I’d downloaded, like Epic, which also keeps running when you’re not using it—I was able to cut down some of the excess power draw, but the Ally was still drawing around 6 watts while idling in the Armoury launcher with no games playing at all. Launching Stardew Valley nearly doubled the power draw, and it shot even higher while I played.

No matter what I did, there was a weight hanging around the neck of the Ally’s battery life. Even under the best of circumstances—which takes no small amount of effort to configure—I never reached even three hours of battery life.

Given the $700 price tag for the Ryzen Z1 Extreme version of the handheld, I expected a lot of power from the Asus ROG Ally. I just didn’t realize how much of it I would have to provide myself. While plugged into a wall, the handheld performed adequately, but as a portable console, it required so much work to get many games working that I burned through a substantial amount of my extremely limited battery life just to get started.

I’d like to say that the Ally is worth the pain. And if you have to play games that aren’t on Steam, then it might be, simply because it’s your only option. But the Ally feels half-baked, even compared to the Steam Deck when it came out. Perhaps future software updates can remove some of the Ally’s jank, but you can’t patch out Windows.