Microsoft has learned a lot in the past few years, and it’s put much of that into the new Xbox Series X ($499.99) and Series S ($299.99). The fourth Xbox is a successful iteration on the Xbox One, taking much of what worked about it, dropping what didn’t, and building the result around a state-of-the-art high-speed internal storage device.
If you’ve put a lot of time into your Xbox One, the Series X in particular is a direct upgrade in just about every way, especially loading times. It’s also got some of the best value for money in the modern games industry between Microsoft’s Game Pass streaming service and its All Access payment plan, which is perfect for newcomers and players on a tight budget.
However, the Series X is currently held back by a limited launch library, a lack of true exclusive games, and a heavy reliance on monthly subscriptions for some of its value. The Series S is also enough of a performance and usability downgrade that it’s not worth the lower sticker price. Early adopters have a lot to watch out for here, but with a bit of time, this could develop into the best Xbox yet.
For returning users
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I booted up the Series X (XSX) for the first time, but it wasn’t more of the same.
That isn’t a criticism. There’s usually some degree of change for change’s sake in the UI between generations of console hardware, but the Series X is unusual in that its overall user experience is much the same as the Xbox One’s. The setup process even involves importing your saves and settings straight across from your Xbox One to the Series X/S via the cloud.
The biggest difference, in fact, was that I didn’t have to wait for the Xbox to boot up. The XSX’s big-ticket feature is its internal high-speed solid-state drive, which lets it run faster across the board than any version of the Xbox One ever did. It may not sound like something you’d base an entire new generation of hardware around, but it really is an incredible improvement. I don’t do a lot of gaming on my Xbox One specifically because I know I’ll spend a lot of my time staring at loading screens, but with the XSX, I’m online and in-game almost before I know it.
Most of the other obvious changes are smart. The new XSX controller has a more textured feel on its grip, along with an improved D-pad and a specific button for sharing screenshots and video. (Unfortunately, it’s also still powered by two AA batteries, rather than being rechargeable like the PS4, PS5, or Switch’s controllers.) The incredibly sensitive front power switch on the Xbox One has been replaced with a more sensible alternative, and both the X and S have a proper front-facing USB slot for peripherals.
The Series X has also been built with a substantial amount of backwards compatibility. Most of the Xbox One library is playable on the XSX, barring those that specifically require the Kinect camera to work, as well as all of the supported games from the Xbox and Xbox 360, as strange as that list is. (Rumble Roses XX and Bound by Flame, but not Enslaved or Lollipop Chainsaw?) It does still use your physical discs as a license to download digital copies of your old games, which is vaguely obnoxious, but it’s better than losing access to them entirely. You can also use your old Xbox One controllers, including all of the third-party models that I was able to test, with the XSX.
All in all, this is a console that respects your time. Every game I tested loaded and ran significantly faster; you can still play many of your old games; and with a new feature called Quick Resume, you can pause and switch between up to six games at once without impacting the system’s overall performance. Compared to the Xbox One, the Series X offers a substantial, immediately obvious boost to your overall user experience.
Series X vs. Series S
The Series X is shipping at launch alongside its little brother, the digital-only Series S. The XSS has slight but significant hardware downgrades from the XSX and tops out at 1440p resolution, but also costs $200 less.
The biggest drawback between the two units, which are otherwise very similar, is that the XSS has a 500GB solid-state hard drive. Out of the box and with local files installed, that only gives you about 360GB to play with, and there are a lot of big Xbox games such as Gears 5 that can take up a third of that by themselves.
If you plan to stick with an XSS for this generation, either count on purchasing additional storage sooner or later (which will eat up all of the money you saved by getting an XSS in the first place), or get used to spending a lot of time clearing up hard drive space. As a method of inexpensively playing the latest blockbuster games, it’s almost more trouble than it’s worth.
That said, the XSS is surprisingly lightweight, features all the ports and UI options of the XSX, and is still a reasonably powerful machine for its size and price. You can cram a lot of indie and retro games into 360 GB, and the XSS is small enough to comfortably fit in a shoulder bag or big purse. It’s not a bad way to keep a curated selection of games available on the go, especially for frequent travelers, “barcade” operators, or tournament organizers. It’s about as close to making a portable Xbox as Microsoft has ever come.
If you do most of your gaming in your living room, prefer high-definition games such as Call of Duty, and never take your console anywhere else, it’s worth the extra money to invest in an XSX. The XSS is still a nice piece of technology and may fit some specific users’ needs better, but it’s got too many built-in drawbacks to feel like a genuine alternative.
The end of graphics
Microsoft has advertised the Series X as the most powerful Xbox ever made, and on paper, it surely is. If you were going to build a high-end gaming PC right now with specs that rival the Series X, you’d spend maybe three times as much money on it. Right now, however, as we approach the XSX’s launch, all that processing power is borderline irrelevant.
One of the biggest arguments against picking up an XSX on week one is its anemic launch lineup. Many of its first games — NBA 2K21, Borderlands 3, Mortal Kombat 11 — are upscaled ports of recent releases, while a few others like Dirt 4 are XSX versions of cross-platform titles. There are a couple of big AAA games that will show off at least some of the XSX’s graphical potential, particularly Ubisoft’s historical Viking simulator Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, but they weren’t made available for testing during the XSX’s early review window. (As such, this can be considered a review in progress.)
Instead, Microsoft made several older games, such as Gears 5 and Ori and the Will of the Wisps, available in an upscaled format for reviewers. They look great, load faster, and run more smoothly than they did on Xbox One, but they’re still ports.
Right now, the Xbox Series X does not have a “killer app,” a big showcase game that’s designed to take full advantage of the hardware. It’s probably going to be Halo Infinite, whenever that comes out, and that’s a near-guaranteed system seller.
Even knowing something like that is coming sooner or later, this still feels like a technical plateau. There was always a theoretical point in game development where graphics couldn’t measurably improve in a valuable way, and ray-tracing notwithstanding, we might have reached it. There’s usually a bigger graphical jump than this between consoles, particularly in the last few generations, when we went from composite video to HDMI to 4K. Instead, the ninth generation is staying at 4K for now and focusing on speed and access: higher framerates, less loading screens, a shorter interval between booting up and gameplay.
We’re probably no more than a year or two out from the first 8K games, of course, especially now that I’ve said this in public, but it’s hard to imagine that being an actual benefit to anyone who’s either playing or making a video game. As such, the raw power of the XSX doesn’t impress me as much as its investments in an improved overall user experience, and I can’t imagine that changing as the hardware continues to mature.
The Game Pass firehose
To some extent, the Xbox Game Pass as it stands is too good. For a base price of $9.99 a month, subscribers on Xbox gain access to a digital collection of over 100 games, ranging from first-party Microsoft titles to small-studio indies. While a game on the Pass does require local installation to your hard drive, it can be played for no additional cost thereafter for as long as it stays on the service, and you can always buy it to retain access afterwards.
For $14.99 a month, subscribers gain Game Pass Ultimate, which bundles the Game Pass lineup with all the benefits of Xbox Live’s paid services, including several free games per month.
What still shocks me about the Game Pass is that it has no real filler. Microsoft didn’t do the Netflix thing where it picked up 60 of the cheapest duds it could find just so it could say “100 games a month” in the sales brochure. This is a solid collection of current and past hits across a wide swath of genres, and represents more games per month than even the most dedicated enthusiast could ever hope to play.
The Game Pass is the single best thing about the Xbox as a platform, and the best overall deal in modern video games. It’s difficult to imagine that changing any time soon, if only because it’s such a Microsoft sort of project. The Pass doesn’t make a lot of money, but Microsoft is hoping to use it to build up a loyal base of customers, so it just eats any attendant losses. Nobody else would just set millions of dollars on fire like this.
Crazy as it might be, a Game Pass subscription means you have a giant library of decent-to-good games on tap as soon as you fire up a Series X. While a lot of the best games on there are lo-fi retro throwbacks — one of the first games I installed was this year’s indie horror adventure Carrion, which is deliberately styled to look like the best game 1997 could offer — they genuinely do play better on the XSX, with minimal load times, smooth animations, fast installation, and quick transitions into the game.
The Game Pass adds so much to the Xbox in general, in fact, that not having it feels like an overall detriment to the console. Owning an Xbox Series X (or Xbox One) and not being a Game Pass subscriber is like remodeling your kitchen so you can eat takeout in it.
This does go back to one of the stranger things about Microsoft’s overall strategy with the Xbox department, though. Microsoft has been reasonably forthright in saying that they hope to bring the overall Game Pass experience to every platform that will host it. The best reason to own an Xbox Series X is also not exclusive to the Xbox Series X… which is actually a trend. Hold on to that thought.
Costs and ease of entry
The Xbox Series X is launching at an MSRP of $499. That’s a steep cost in a pandemic-induced recession, but interested consumers can also sign up for Xbox All Access for $24.99+ a month. That includes the Game Pass Ultimate, which bundles the Pass with Xbox Live Gold, and a console with a controller.
In theory, that dramatically lowers the XSX’s initial costs, which makes it readily available to a lower-income audience. It did and does strike me as a little predatory, like rent-to-own furniture, but $25 a month for an Xbox and several dozen games is still a pretty fantastic use of your entertainment budget. There are titles on the Game Pass right now, like Destiny 2, that could keep you busy for a month by themselves.
Combined with the Xbox Adaptive Controller, which the Series S is designed to match, Microsoft has made great strides in the last couple of years in trying to expand the gaming audience beyond a relative handful of middle-class A/V nerds. It’s exactly the kind of move that the overall industry has needed to make for a while.
The bottom line
There are a lot of reasons to pick up an Xbox Series X, but what keeps tripping me up is that they aren’t the reasons that I’d usually give for buying a new console.
Ordinarily, you’d pick a system based off of its exclusive software library, like how half the reason to own a Switch is to play Nintendo’s first-party games. But the Xbox doesn’t have any exclusives. Even the titles made by Microsoft’s partner studios are usually simultaneous releases on Windows 10 and Xbox, and they aren’t adverse to bringing them out on Steam eventually. Even the Game Pass is planned to be system-agnostic, through Microsoft’s Project xCloud streaming service if nothing else. As such, a lot of the conventional wisdom about recommending a console is useless here.
What you’re paying for with the Series X, then, is a high-powered, user-friendly method of entry to Microsoft’s list of services. With All Access, this is easily the cheapest ticket into modern video games on the market today, and with the Game Pass, it’s an extraordinary value for your dollar.
For Xbox fans — well, you already have a Series X pre-ordered. I don’t know why you’re still reading this. Even so, the Series X is everything you like about your “Xbone,” but consistently better on every measurable axis. Microsoft’s put a lot of what it’s learned from the Xbox One into the Series X and S, and the result is a streamlined experience that builds directly on what immediately came before it. It’s not the blind, flailing leap of faith that has often characterized previous new console generations; instead, it’s a more measured forward movement.
It’s hard to recommend the Series X based purely on its games lineup, and a couple of petty irritations persist, like how weirdly loud all the buttons are on the new controller, or the downright criminal price tag on the additional storage drives. It’s also real hard to recommend the Series X or S at all if you don’t intend to subscribe to the Game Pass. However, just in terms of affordability, available services, backwards compatibility, and accessibility, the new Xboxes are easily the best ones yet.
Microsoft provided early retail units of both the Xbox Series X and Series S for the purposes of this review.
