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XBOX SERIES X REVIEW
After what feels like an eternity, the ninth-gen consoles are finally upon us. They’re some of the most hyped tech products of the last decade, but you most likely can’t get them yet, because Microsoft and Sony are selling all the Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 consoles they can make. But if you were able to get one, which one should you get? I actually can’t tell you, because I don’t have a PS5 to compare, although I’m impressed with what Sony pulled off; with the challenging pandemic environment both consoles launched in, I’m surprised that anything was launched this year. But spoiler alert, I’ve been enjoying my Xbox Series X nearly every day since launch and there’s a lot of reasons to consider an Xbox whenever they do become more widely available. So, will an Xbox Series X power your dreams? Let’s find out.
View: https://youtu.be/fyArCzlmiKM
Unboxing the Beast
First of all, it cannot be understated how large this thing is after you smoothly remove it from the box. I mean, look at how tall it is with the game cases for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Yakuza Like a Dragon for scale.
It’s a little sleeker when stood up vertically, but I have a cat who loves to charge at everything at high speeds, so I crossed my fingers and hoped it would fit in the media cabinet where my original VCR Xbox One and then my Xbox One X occupied a place of honor. I breathed a sigh of relief when it did fit, but it looks so goofy like that and, more annoyingly, has attracted a ton of fingerprints and dust, in the month or so since the below was taken.
I do like the green optical illusion around the fan grill, but otherwise this is a big, bulky black box that gets out of the way. That suits me just fine.
Powering (On) Your Dreams
Turning on the Xbox, you’re immediately prompted to download the Xbox app if you haven’t already so that you can tie your account to your new console while it’s downloading the required day-one update. This allows you to enable remote streaming of games from your console to your phone, install any game (even if you don’t own it) to your console, and so much more. Doing all this, which took under twenty minutes, impressed upon me that the Xbox Series X is 1.) fast and 2.) complicated for anyone new.
It’s not necessarily unintuitive to get around the dashboard once it boots (in under ten seconds from a complete unplug and under a second in its sleep mode, Instant-On). And it’s very feature rich, unlike the last console transition where the Xbox One launched in a very barebones state. And this section, from the My games and apps menu to the Microsoft Store, is finally snappy and responsive.
But, I have to keep in mind that I’ve had an Xbox for five years and many people will not. There are so many little things to set up that are buried under menus and sub-menus. To name a few: HDR calibration for 4K TVs that support it, enabling 120 frames per second if again your TV or monitor supports it, turning on auto-low latency mode, etc. Don’t let this process deter you, though, even if you don’t know what these buzzwords are! There are plenty of navigation hints and an entire Xbox Assist app to help you out. Plus there are near monthly updates, the changes from which can take a bit for even me to get used to, but that refine the experience.
Here’s Why Data Caps Hate Him
Whether you’ve snagged an Xbox Game Pass or Game Pass Ultimate subscription (which I highly recommend, for reasons I’ll explain later), unwrapped a bunch of discs, or have an existing library of Xbox One and backwards digital games you’d like to download to your shiny new console...
You’ll still be waiting a long ass time staring at download queues. Physical games need massive downloadable patches, downloadable games are sometimes 100 GB large, and worst of all, pre-installed Xbox One games that have an Optimized for X|S patch out require reinstalling the entire game again. On top of that, server speeds at launch were terrible because close to 1.5 million people were trying to download games all at once, meaning that it took nearly the whole day for me to be done.
Server speeds can still be a bit kludgy even with my 50 megabit per second Internet. Consider setting your console’s power (under General > Power mode & startup) to Instant-On to allow games to download overnight, downloading only a few games at a time, and for those who have data caps or live in rural areas, monitoring your download sizes closely, especially if you mix in 4K streaming.
The SSD That Roared
Once you’re done with all that, though, prepare to have your jaw drop.
The biggest next-gen “wow” moments on the Series X all stem from a tiny internal solid-state drive that moves so, so fast. Transferring 50 GB games to it from a hard drive took 20 minutes, if that. Meanwhile the time from booting games to getting to gameplay in most titles was under thirty seconds, and fast travel in Skyrim is too fast for me to read the lore that usually appeared on the loading screen.
But my favorite moments with my Series X have been with Quick Resume, a feature that touts the ability to let you play one game, switch to another, and then come back to the first one in around ten seconds each time. I tested this by opening Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, BioShock 2 Remastered, Haven, Metro Exodus, Planet Coaster, Skyrim Remastered, AND Yakuza Like a Dragon within moments of each other, then playing a different game that does not support Quick Resume and quitting out of it. I was able to jump back into all seven in seconds, and have not seen the splash screens of any of them in weeks.
But it doesn’t work with all games (including being temporarily disabled and can cause the tiniest of audio stuttering or texture flickering for a few seconds in some games, which corrects itself. Plus, you have to keep track of which games are currently “minimized,” so to speak, as the amount of games that can be Quick Resumed is limited, Quick Resume does not work for games that require an online connection and the system does not warn you if you’re about to bump a game out of that at all. It was also temporarily disabled for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla until it was reenabled recently.
Most people won’t play seven or eight games at once, but Quick Resume has still been a lifesaver on hard games with lacking checkpoints or when friends want to invite me to a multiplayer game but I’m in the middle of something else. I never have to tell my wife “Okay, gimme five minutes to save my progress” or my friends “Hang on, gotta get to the next checkpoint” ever again.
The bigger (or should I say smaller) elephant in the room is the storage space. After system files, you have 802 GB of free space on the Series X. With games, again, routinely approaching 100+ GB in size (glares at Call of Duty
) expect that to fill up quick unless you’re only playing smaller games.You can play existing, non-updated Xbox One and supported 360 and Original Xbox games on traditional hard drives, and store but not play Series X games on a hard drive. As you can guess, newer games require the SSD to run, so if you have a massive library, you’re going to be moving games back and forth a lot.
Which is, again, blazing fast. And something that I should point out (at time of writing) you cannot do on PlayStation 5. Plus all PS5 games must be on the internal SSD and there is a slot for third party SSDs, but that has been disabled for now.
But if you don’t want to deal with moving games around all the time, and you want all your games to load fast (and I understand; I was one of them) that’s where this pricey boy comes in.
The 1 TB Expansion Card is the only way to get more storage to play next-gen games on at launch. $219.99 is no small chunk of change, especially on top of the $499 entry price of the Series X itself, but if you can afford it, it makes life so much easier because it gives you another 920 GB of storage, and it’s basically an exact copy of the SSD, so it loads games just as fast as you’d expect. Plus, when my internal SSD filled up, transferring games between the internal and Expansion Card took mere minutes.
I can understand why people would hold off, especially for backwards compatible games, where a cheaper USB SSD has similar gains in loading times, but I’m glad I got it. And both the internal and Expansion Cards are the real, shining next gen pieces of this next gen.
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