Lenovo Legion Go 2 Review

Design

• Much larger than competing handhelds
• Nearly a kilo in weight
• Good port selection, but odd layout

The fact that the Legion Go 2 comes with a larger 8.8-inch screen is one of the biggest contributors to it being quite a bit larger than both Asus and MSI’s competing handhelds.

It tips the scales at 920g, making it over 200g heavier than the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X and around 150g heftier than the MSI Claw A8 BZ2EM, which is quite noticeable, especially when you’re using this device for extended periods. Thankfully, the combination of a sturdy integrated kickstand and detachable controllers means you can use a table to at least take the weight for some of the time.

The Legion Go 2 is predominantly black, and isn’t available in any other colour – you do get a splash of colour with the RGB light rings around the thumbsticks, but that’s about it.

The control layout is identical to an Xbox controller, with a pair of diagonally opposing thumbsticks on either side of the screen, plus a D-Pad on the left and ABXY buttons on the right. You also get a large touchpad below the right thumbstick, as you do with a Steam Deck, which makes a noticeable difference in how easy it is to navigate through desktop Windows 11 if you need to.

The two USB4 Type-C ports are split across the top and bottom of the Legion Go 2, with one on the top and the other on the bottom. You also get a 3.5mm headphone jack and a microSD card slot on the underside. 

I don’t hate this decision, but it means if you’re using the top USB-C port to charge the Legion Go 2, and then plugging in something like a storage drive on the other port while the device is on its kickstand, it can be quite difficult to keep the handheld level.

Controls

• Familiar Xbox controller layout
• Lots of extra buttons
• Controllers are detachable if you’d like

The general feel of the Legion Go 2’s controls is familiar if you’ve used an Xbox controller for even a femtosecond, as it splits a standard controller in half between the 8.8-inch screen, providing all the controls you need. ABXY buttons, thumbsticks and a D-Pad are all here. 

The thumbsticks feel stubbier than on a standard Xbox Wireless Controller when compared, while the main buttons have a snappy feel. On the top side, there are shoulder buttons and triggers, which aren’t Hall effect, unlike the ROG Xbox Ally X. Saying that, the thumbsticks are Hall effect, bringing heightened accuracy and durability over standard mechanisms. 

As mentioned previously, you also get the convenience of a trackpad, plus two buttons on either side of the screen that call up settings menus, Lenovo’s own Legion Space launcher, a pause button and one that brings up a window switcher.

On the rear of the Legion Go 2, there are paddle buttons, although they aren’t identical in placement on each side, weirdly. The left side has two square buttons, while the right has a square button with a wider one below it. Further up on the right side is a neat scroll wheel, and actually on the side of the right controller there are two more buttons that even I didn’t notice at first.

The controllers on this second-gen model remain detachable, meaning you can turn this PC handheld into more of a Nintendo Switch-style device if you’d like. You remove them with a toggle switch on the rear of the unit and reattach them by lining up the pogo pins on the side of the main unit that also keep them charged – it’s a little finicky, but nonetheless works.

There is also an adapter included in the box that you can plonk one of the controllers in and turn it into a mouse in a similar vein to the Nintendo Switch 2‘s mouse mode with its Joy-Con 2 controllers if that’s something you want.

My general impressions when running through some Hitman World of Assassination over the cloud or with Forza Horizon 5 natively on the unit are positive, and I had no issues with how the controls felt. I also feel obliged to say there is some good rumble, and the pair of 2W speakers are generally fine for basic use.

Display

• More sensible Full HD resolution
• Punchy brightness and responsive with 144Hz refresh rate
• Deep blacks and lovely dynamic range as an OLED

It’s on the front of the screen where the Legion Go 2 is a big improvement over its rival choices, as Lenovo has kitted it out with an OLED screen, rather than a standard IPS one.

It has been more sensible against the option fitted to the original Legion Go, which was a 2560×1600 resolution panel that the Ryzen Z1 Extreme SoC inside couldn’t drive. Instead, this is a more manageable 1920×1200 resolution screen that’s on par in terms of detail with Asus and MSI, plus it’s got a 144Hz refresh rate and variable refresh rate to prevent screen tearing and juddering.

With a colorimeter in tow, I found the Legion Go 2’s screen to be bright and sharp, with a measured peak brightness of 435.6 nits alongside deep blacks and excellent dynamic range afforded by the 0.03 black level and 15740:1 contrast ratio I measured.

As an OLED, this panel also offers some excellent colours, with perfect 100% coverage of both the sRGB and DCI-P3 gamuts, plus 93% Adobe RGB. This makes this a suitable screen for gaming and productivity, and means you could use it for more colour-sensitive tasks if you wanted.

The 144Hz refresh rate is a bump over the 120Hz on the other Z2E handhelds, and a bigger jump up from the 90Hz you’ll find on the Steam Deck OLED, as is the Full HD resolution, which is a sensible choice given the power level on offer with the Z2 Extreme. I found the panel to offer solid detail and smoother motion in titles that could take advantage of it, although it is nonetheless present for aiding a slicker feel in navigating menus in and out of games.

Performance

• Potent results at full 35W TDP in Performance mode
• Gaming numbers similar to rivals when in 15W Balanced mode
• Capacious SSD and good RAM headroom

The Legion Go 2 isn’t lacking in grunt against its contemporaries, coming packed with the same Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip as its rivals, although it lacks the dedicated NPU you’ll find in Asus and MSI’s options for AI tasks if you wanted it.

Even without the NPU, the basic formation of the chip is the same –  eight Zen 5 cores and 16 threads, plus a 16-core RDNA 3.5-based GPU that’s the same Radeon 890M integrated graphics found in AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 laptop processor. It is a small, but important, step up from the Ryzen Z1 Extreme found in the Asus ROG Ally X, too. 

Alongside this grunt in a processing sense, Lenovo has opted to go for 32GB of fast LPDDR5X RAM running at 8000MT/s in this handheld, plus a 1TB internal SSD for storage. In theory, this might seem like enough storage, but with a couple of bigger games installed, that’s a fair amount of storage eaten up.

As with the other two, I ran the Legion Go 2 through our usual suite of computing benchmarks to provide some quantifiable idea of how well this handheld performs in both games and a range of synthetic tests.

In the likes of Geekbench 6, I noted the scores achieved by the Ryzen Z2 Extreme to be quite similar to those on the laptop-class Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, especially when this handheld was allowed to run at its full Performance mode between 30W and 35W.

The Radeon 890M integrated graphics posted a reasonable score in 3DMark Time Spy, although the result there and the associated gaming benchmarks go to prove that even this new Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip is far behind the newer Strix Halo APUs found in the likes of the Asus ROG Flow Z13 (2025), and the Arc B390 iGPU I’ve tested in the latest Intel Panther Lake laptops, such as the Asus Zenbook Duo (2026).

For reference, the Radeon 8050S in the ROG Flow Z13 (2025) has double the compute units and much more bandwidth for a lot of added grunt.

In terms of actual games, I ran these both plugged in with the Legion Go 2 in its Performance preset, and unplugged in Balanced mode, which pegs things back to 15W. Results here were similar to the other two handhelds – when plugged in, I saw Cyberpunk 2077 hit 27.09fps at 1080p in its Ultra preset. In Returnal, it was 24fps. They’re a little lower than both Asus and MSI, but still within the margin of error.

These aren’t groundbreaking numbers, admittedly, and balancing settings and some upscaling will take numbers higher. Cyberpunk pushed all the way up to 42.06fps with FSR 2.1 in Performance mode at 1080p, while Returnal pushed up to 35fps.

When unplugged, the Legion Go 2 posted results in the mid-20fps range at top settings in both games that are within the margin of error for each other against the other two choices.

For less demanding and more competitive eSports titles such as Rainbow Six Extraction, this hit 66fps without any form of upscaling at the default highest preset with its dynamic resolution and plugged in (it hit 64fps unplugged), so it’ll be possible to get closer to maxing out the 120Hz refresh rate with some lower quality settings. For reference, dropping down to 720p at Ultra pushed the FPS figure up to 96fps.

The oddity in my testing was Forza Horizon 5 in some respects, not least with the device unplugged. At 1080p High, the 73fps average matches Asus and MSI, although it dropped as low as 48fps when it was unplugged. Going down to 720p Medium settings, it pushes as high as 102fps in Performance mode, pushing towards the 144Hz refresh rate on the 8.8-inch screen.

The 1TB SSD didn’t turn out to be anywhere near as fast on battery power as it did when the Legion Go 2 was plugged in, which is a common occurrence with these handhelds. However, overall, it’s still faster than both ASUS and MSI, with respective reads and writes of 3538.75 MB/s and 3500.82 MB/s on battery power, and 6607.20 MB/s and 5856.49 MB/s when plugged in.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 2 hours 6 minutes in the gaming battery test
• 65W brick puts charge back into it decently fast

The battery inside the Legion Go 2 isn’t quite as large as competing choices, although a 74Whr cell is still decent in size.

With the brightness dialled back to the requisite 150 nits, it only managed four hours and six minutes in the 15W Balanced mode in our usual PCMark 10 Modern Office battery test. That’s a very poor result, especially when we’ve seen much stronger results from the other Z2E handhelds that are nearly quadruple this number. Even the base model Asus ROG Xbox Ally is nearly double.

Gaming is, of course, a theoretically bigger battery drain, and in the PCMark 10 Gaming benchmark, it went down to two hours and six minutes of use before conking out. This is an hour shorter than the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X and some 40 minutes shorter than the MSI Claw A8 that has the same Ryzen Z2 Extreme processor inside.

The Legion Go 2 has a small 65W brick that goes with it, which is decently brisk at getting charge back into the device. It took around 40 minutes to get it back to half charge, while a full charge took 90 minutes.

Games & Software

• Xbox FSE and Legion Space as launcher options
• Slick, console-type UI with Windows 11 underneath
• Some teething problems and finicky elements

The Legion Go 2 comes running full-fat desktop Windows 11, working as the base operating system atop which you can run a choice of launchers to make this Lenovo handheld feel more like a proper gaming handheld.

Microsoft recently updated Windows 11 to include Xbox FSE out of the box, and the Legion Go 2 was one of the first handhelds to take advantage of it. With this in mind, this Lenovo handheld didn’t boot straight into Xbox FSE as I expected, leaving me to use desktop Windows 11 on a touchscreen at least initially. It’s frustrating without a dedicated keyboard and mouse, although the Legion Go 2’s trackpad helps alleviate some of the pain for initial setup.

Once I’d got things set up, Xbox FSE worked as expected, with a slick, console-like interface right in front of you. It pulls all of your games installed from different apps into one convenient list, regardless of whether they’re installed via the Xbox app itself or through third-party launchers such as Steam and Ubisoft Connect. Launching a game is as easy as clicking on it – it pulls through the relevant process and boots the game with ease.

You also have the option to use Lenovo’s Legion Space, which sits at odds with the Xbox app when you have it enabled as the default launcher. This works in a similar fashion, pulling your games library through from the varying providers, while also giving you access to change system settings such as power modes, controller button remapping and more. As with Asus’ ROG Armoury Crate on the ROG Xbox Ally handhelds, it even gets its own dedicated button on the left controller.

Should you buy it?