Needless to say, we’re a smaller media outlet that does not carry the clout that other sites have, so we were not sent free consoles to test. I had to work an insane amount of overtime to afford my shiny new “world’s most powerful console,” and Jason had to cash in Amazon rewards he had hoarded for years to get his PS5. My nine to five job is often about as fun as dental work, and with the current holiday season coupled with the Covid-19 drama, I mean it when I say I literally walked through Hell to get this Xbox. Was it worth it? Well… this is something to be revisited down the line, because there isn’t really a lot to play on it yet.

Out of the gate, the Series X plays over a thousand games from the past generations of the Xbox’s library with one minor change – it’s kind of like shoving rocket fuel up the same games ass and results in almost every game I’ve tested looking significantly better than they looked on the consoles they were intended to play on. Some games were less impressive, but I did recently retire my Xbox One X model for the Series X, so this may have been less impressive to me than others.

The visual upgrades are only rivaled by the way that most games run ultra-fast. In most cases, loading times are a thing of the past, or at least heavily mitigated. It was downright mind-blowing to see Left 4 Dead 2 load into the game almost immediately when in the same room, I saw the much slower progress on the Xbox One X I handed down to my wife, and Xbox 360 Slim my son was playing on… because we take our gaming seriously and have three TVs in the same room. This experience ran not only flawlessly with each of us playing on our own unique systems, but showcased just how much better the newer hardware made the game look. The facial features of the survivors had so much more detail and clarity that it almost looked like it was built with the Xbox One as the primary platform.

Microsoft made the right decision in not only making a staggering number of titles backward compatible, but also allowing gamers to bring most of their Xbox One generation hardware along for the ride. The only exception to this is the Kinect, which let’s be honest, no one uses. This was a godsend for me because I honestly hate the new D-pad that is the primary change for the new iteration of the controller. It functions as it should, but it just feels off, and I found myself struggling with pulling off the quarter circle moves needed to excel in fighting games. The only other new addition is a dedicated button to share screenshots and video, which I rarely used on my last system, and have only bothered with saving a handful of clips in which I got the best play in one of my better Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War matches. Needless to say, I’ve gone back to my previous controller and have left the newer option in the drawer for when the pandemic ends and a friend can visit again.

If you’re the type to cycle games quickly, most games offer a new quick resume feature that mostly works in the same way the standby mode used to operate on the previous generation, with one major change – you can unplug or completely shut down the system and mostly still retain your progress if the game allows it. The problem here is there isn’t any specific area that tells you whether the game supports quick resume or not, and even if it does, it doesn’t always work (I’m looking at you Vanquish Remastered).

While there are very few exclusive games to the Xbox Series X, a lot of older games such as Gears 5, Doom Eternal, and Borderlands 3 offer free upgrades to the better version of the game with only an update that is required. This is a bit cumbersome, as the Series X games must be played from the internal SSD and cannot run from external devices. While all of the past generation games that don’t not offer an upgrade run perfectly fine from the external drive, if you want the bigger and better version, you must either move the game to the internal drive or in my case, completely delete the game and download everything from scratch, as any other method has left me with errors or the Xbox refusing to launch the software. I’m sure this will get ironed out, but it’s an annoyance nonetheless.

For me, storage has always been an issue regardless of which system I was using, and the Series X will likely be no different. Even with my 5 TB external drive connected, I’ve got less than 6 TBs to work with since the internal 1 TB drive requires some space to be used for the systems OS and whatnot, so I am still shifting things around almost daily. Once some actual games are produced for the system that will likely make the 100 GB+ installs from the last generation seem tame, I will almost certainly have to buy the proprietary Microsoft endorsed Seagate SDD expansion that costs almost half of what the system did.

The console itself is kind of large compared to the previous models, and really lives up to the refrigerator memes and jokes, more so to me since I have a novelty mini-fridge that is actually smaller than the console. It fit within my wooden workbench turned media center thanks to the wide-open shelving on the bottom, but it will likely need to be stood up next to the TV in most setups. It’s weighty and feels like what you’d imagine a console that costs close to $600 after taxes. I would have preferred some more USB ports as I’m leaning more and more towards wired controllers in my old age, as well as the retired HDMI pass thru the previous models offered, but those are the only major complaints I have with the design itself.

I get that COVID-19 has thrown a massive wrench into the world as we know it, which has inevitably delayed games that were expected to arrive alongside the new consoles, and Microsoft is in a great place thanks to the value of GamePass as well as the recent Bethesda acquisition, but as it stands there’s nothing outside of the obvious performance enhancements that should drive you to the retail stores in waves to pick up the new system. I don’t regret buying my Xbox Series X, but I do wish I would’ve waited until the price dropped and a few more games were offered for it.

7 out of 10

Pros

• Cuts Load Times Down, if Not Out Completely Across the Board
• Improves Performance on Older Generation Games
• Backward Compatible Software and Hardware

Cons

• Not Much New to Play
• New D-Pad Feels Off
• Storage Issues
• Some Bugs with the Smart Delivery System

The Xbox Series X is manufactured by Microsoft. The Series X used for review was not provided to us. For more on the console, please visit its official site here.

 

Here at GBG we use a rating method that you are more than likely familiar with – a scale of 1 to 10. For clarification, we intend on using the entire scale: 1-4 is something you should probably avoid paying for; 5-7 is something that is worth using, but probably not at full price; 8-10 is a great piece of hardware that you can feel confident about buying. If you have any questions or comments about how we rate a game, please let us know.

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