8bitdo ultimate. Already lasted more than a couple of months, as opposed to the last two Xbox controllers I had. I just wanted hall effect joysticks and Xbox layout.
I have clocked a lot of hours in Slice & Dice both on mobile and on PC well worth the 8 bucks even though I’ve paid it three times now I think. Honorable mention to Suika(Watermelon game) about 3 bucks on the Play store.
I have not played it yet personally, but they have the turok trilogy bundle on the switch. I’ve heard those games are good. The serious Sam collection is also available and that’s a lot of fun
There are a lot of good suggestions here, that you can take advantage of, so I’ll come at it from another perspective.
With mouse and keyboard, positioning is a snippet of what we use when playing and is more of a tactical spacing. With controller, it is a necessity. This means that as you are playing first person shooters (or third person with controller), your characters movement will be 75% of what you’re actually aiming with.
On a mouse and keyboard, if you’re slightly off center with a sniper, it’s a simple adjustment to move to the left. Move 1cm.
On a controller, if you’re slightly off center, suddenly it isn’t as simple, because the joystick is overly sensitive and so to move 1cm is a lighting fast action input, meaning that you’re almost guaranteed to overshoot it, unless your joystick sensitivity is super low. Or, on the opposite end of it, if you try and move the control stick very gently (more on this later), it’s not necessarily a consistent input. This is where aim assist would come in, as aiming down your sights would center it on the enemy, but I think it’s a bunch of bullshit and so we’ll ignore that. Instead of moving the joystick a micron of a second to properly position yourself, moving your characters body (WASD/left analog) is almost always much slower and fine tuned.
What this means is that as you’re playing games, instead of holding W and maneuvering with A, S, D for counter balance or strafing or whatever, the joystick instead is 60% of the time holding forward, 20% of the time slowly moving in a direction to position yourself better for aiming, and 10% staying still (letting go).
Another element here is the concept of analog itself. When you’re holding W, it’s always 100%. When you push forward, (game depending) it ramps up from 0% towards 100%, which means that if you turn left or right, chances are that your character might slow down too, because you may be pulling down as you move. What you can take advantage of here is utilizing slow movement to always keep your character moving, which will help prevent being hit and will get you more used to fine-tuning your aim through your movements.
When I play games on controller, I always try and use gyro, I always keep the gameplay focused on the movement first and foremost, and the analog stick at that point almost purely becomes a look/view stick over a “this is my main form of getting headshots”, where your look inputs are based on getting into the center of the general area you want to aim at as quickly as possible, while letting the gyro and the characters body finish it off.
Finally – PLAY. Not the game, PLAY with it. Feeling weird? Move your character in circles while bunny hopping to get the feeling of the mechanics for the game, then be silly with the aiming and wiggle the joystick around to familiarize yourself with aiming with the movement wobble. Whether it’s Max Payne, Smash Bros, Doom, Vanquish, Fortnite, all of these games can be manipulated by playing with the weird quirks of their engine.
Finally finally – I also have a harder time with FPS games on the Steam Deck compared to other methods. Doom 2016 on my Switch was fine to get used to, but on the Steam Deck some did feel odd about it. I don’t have the other modern consoles and their joysticks aren’t super familiar to me, but I think it may be that the Steam Deck’s analog sticks feel like they have a larger travel distance (particularly compared to the Switch of course). Something you might consider trying is the Flick Stick input for the Trackpads, although I personally really, really enjoy low-friction trackball mouse input. Swipe+Tap to aim is just so good and being able to move the view, let go and have it keep moving based on the intertia I input is just perfect.
On a controller, if you’re slightly off center, suddenly it isn’t as simple, because the joystick is overly sensitive and so to move 1cm is a lighting fast action input, meaning that you’re almost guaranteed to overshoot it, unless your joystick sensitivity is super low.
This has been the biggest problem for me. I can’t aim at the enemies when are very far (small hitbox). I have been trying to strafe and put them on my crosshair but it needs a very different skill. I have been hearing a lot of people talking about FlickStick. I have to look it up.
Honestly, I would recommend just giving it a go. You can always save your current controller config and then go right back to it. I only say try it cause when I looked up videos I didn’t quite understand, like I got the idea but it seemed weird. Actually trying it makes a lot more sense.
Its major issue though is I felt like I was tweaking it more than I was playing, and I have found myself a very good set of controls with the Steam Controller which translated to the Deck, so I know exactly what to set for each game even on the first time. For the Flick Stick setting, I feel like one game would be fine standard settings and another game would need to change, sometimes not even getting it working. So YMMV there.
P.S. set a binding for toggling an auto-sprint on the back paddle. Auto walking is a default for any game I play!
A Dance of Fire and Ice is an incredible rhythm game that you buy once and that’s it. I think there’s an expansion pack but it’s a single purchase. Whether that’s your idea of “casual” really depends on what you like. You can always play chill low difficulty levels when you need to zone out, and high difficulty levels when you want a challenge. It can get stupidly hard.
You can try a demo online at that link. It told me webgl wasn’t supported on mobile, but it worked pretty well for me just now on firefox, even if it was a bit laggy. It should work fine on PC.
I pirated it on PC after my kids told me about it and ended up buying it three times on Steam and twice on mobile. It’s just that good. I’ve built a custom digital drum to play it and I’m now making a custom MIDI controller, so we’ll see if that does better when connected to the game.
The game works as well on mobile, if not better because the touchscreen is so responsive.
Probably my favourite ARPG. You play as a peasant with no skill, and that actually translates in game. If you’ve ever rolled your eyes at games where you effortless smash waves upon waves of enemies, this game is for you. Beating even the lowliest grunt can be quite challenging, forcing you to play in ways other than “beat everything up”.
The neat thing is the story is not only based on real life events, but all the towns exist (still to this day in the Czech Republic), the geography is super accurate (relative distnace, rivers, ridges, etc) and even the buildings are modelled off the real things (some are still standing, or you can still see their ruins).
This game ticked so many boxes for me, and is a steal at $8
BPM: Bullets Per Minute. A boomer shooter had an affair with he rhythm game genre and this was the outcome. Amazing game, assuming you don’t mind rhythm games, and an immaculate one if you actively like rhythm games.
Neon White is technically a shooter, but in most ways does not play or feel like one. It’s better described as a first person puzzle/platformer, but I would still recommend it, as it is an incredible game.
Both of the Doom ports run insanely well on the Switch. Seemingly impossibly well considering how dated the console is.
Warframe is good, free and playing surprisingly well on Switch.
This might not be exactly what you're looking for, but Neon White is one of my favorite games of the last few years, and it's on the Switch. I played on PC, but I haven't seen any complaints about the Switch version.
I don't really know if I'd call if a first person shooter. It's more like a first person platformer and you have to shoot some targets before completing the level. Levels are very, very short, and you'll replay them many times to shave a fraction of a second off of your time.
I liked egg inc for a while, if you’re looking for clicker type games.
Other than that I can recommend
Stardew Valley
Peglin
Sudoku
Nanograms
Dungeon Village 1 & 2
Multiple of these are paid, but I’m 100% on board with paying a small amount for an app rather than paying a multiple of that for in-game Battlepasses and whatevers.
It annoys me a lot to say this, but Netflix has some excellent games in their roster. So if you have a Netflix subscription, check those out. I personally very much enjoyed
Storyteller
Into the Breach
But they also have ports of some very good PC games like Spiritfarer, Terra Nil or World of Goo.
Any little casual simulators by Kairosoft, the pay to play “full versions” are pretty cheap. Manage a lil apartment building, manage a tiny sushi restaurant, manage a little Japanese village. 8 bit style, very soothing. The free versions are quite limited in scope and cut you off from further progression after a few levels, but no microtransaction reminders, either. The mention of “Dungeon Village” reminded me, is that Kairosoft?
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