A juggernaut picking up speed

It’s been almost exactly three years since the Xbox Series X was first released in a blast of fanfare, and Microsoft’s most powerful console is still looking mighty fine today.

In the intervening time, Xbox Game Pass has gone from strength to strength, and Xbox has added Activision Blizzard to its haul of acquisitions – so how does its flagship console hold up? Check out our updated verdict.

Design

There’s no two ways about it – the Xbox Series X is big. It’s a hulking great box of a console, very much the polar opposite of the PlayStation 5 in terms of its design aesthetic.

Where Sony went futuristic and curvy, Microsoft went utilitarian, and that resulted in one big heavy cuboid of hardware, with a huge fan at the top, grated for airflow, and the ability to sit vertically or horizontally without a stand.

The Xbox is a heavy box to move around (although most people won’t exactly be doing that very often), but the ease of its vertical or horizontal swapping is really appreciated.

It’s still only available new in black, though, outside a few limited editions to tie in with new games – although Xbox now sells wraps that clamp around your Series X to give it a new look.

Still, without spending any extra on that sort of thing, you’re stuck with a pretty ugly box – and it’s also one that does have a habit of getting pretty hot in use.

We can’t comment on exactly why, but in the exact same spot on our TV stand, playing similar games, the Xbox Series X tends to get a lot hotter than the PS5 in our testing.

It’s still quiet, though, and that heat isn’t an operational issue or a danger at all – it’s just worth noting.

The front of the Series X houses the 4K Blu-ray player’s disc slot, and a single USB-A port. We’d have loved a USB-C port on the front given that port’s ubiquity. That there’s not even a USB-C port on the back of the console is astounding, and the sort of thing that Microsoft should have looked into fixing with a minor design revision at some point.

Hardware

I’m not convinced that anyone cared about teraflops of processing power before the Xbox Series X and PS5 were unveiled, but we know that the Xbox is slightly ahead in that particular chart.

This means the Series X is the most powerful option you can go for on the market right now if you don’t want to build your own PC, so for raw power it’s peerless.

It has 16GB of GDDR6 RAM for fast memory and, in storage terms, it boasts a 1TB internal SSD, although it’s not as fancy as the PS5’s slightly smaller drive.

This means that certain exclusives on PS5 do have storage advantages over the Xbox, although in cross-platform games it’s pretty much never resulted in any differences.

The Series X has a slot on the back for really easy installation of custom storage cards that you can buy to expand your internal storage – this process couldn’t be easier. The downside of it, though, is that because it’s proprietary the prices have been pretty discouraging and haven’t fallen that much compared to NVMe drives for the PS5.

User experience

Xbox debuted the Xbox Series X with the exact same user experience as people were used to on the Xbox One generation – continuity was always a major selling point for the console.

This has proved a mixed bag, in our use. On the one hand, it’s genuinely great moving between different Xbox configurations and not being befuddled by changes to layouts and menus.

Microsoft / Xbox

Equally, though, it meant that the console didn’t feel very new or fresh to use at launch. Since then there have been some noticeable changes to layouts and backgrounds that have made a bit of a difference, though.

This means that the home screen is a bit richer of an experience, the main upgrade, but overall we still think the UI feels a little like a work in progress, without a clear destination in mind.

The big positive is that the Xbox Series X’s hefty specs mean that it all runs really smoothly and responsively, whether you’re using the quick menu to check something while in-game, or the actual main console navigation to download a new Game Pass title.

Performance

Before it arrived, this console generation was heralded as the one that would bring in ray-traced lighting as a new standard, massively upgrading the realism of virtual spaces in one swoop.

The reality has been a lot more complicated than that, and the targets aimed for by the Xbox Series X are a bit more nuanced than expected.

Games run terrifically on the console, for the most part, we should say – but, like the PS5, the dream of smooth 60FPS gameplay in a native 4K presentation is still one we’re chasing.

Xbox

In reality, the power level of the Series X tends to enable 30FPS at 4K, typically in a “Quality” graphics mode preset with ray-tracing on, while 60FPS will generally require a “Performance” preset that dials back the graphical fidelity and probably opts for a variable resolution.

Upscaling means that these two options can often look closer than you think, and stunners like Forza Motorsport demonstrate that smooth performance can still look amazing, but it’s not as reliable as we were led to think it would be.

Even major exclusives like Starfield have been limited to 30FPS on Xbox Series X as a result of their complexity, so you should be prepared to sometimes compromise on frame rates.

Bethesda/ Pocket-lint

Cross-platform games perform excellently on Microsoft’s hardware, though, and in fact sometimes have a small advantage in resolution given the Series X’s power bump over the PS5.

The Xbox Series X has a 4K Blu-ray player included in it, and thanks to its licenses with Dolby you can get Dolby Vision and Atmos from it for a really excellent audiovisual package.

Depending on your sound system you may have to play around a little to eliminate any lag, in our experience, but that’s nothing that AV experts aren’t used to.

There’s also a full gamut of streaming apps and services to access on the Xbox Store – all the big hitters were here right from the start, with Xbox’s platform remaining the same for them.

So, from BBC iPlayer to Netflix and Prime Video, you’ll almost certainly be able to access all your memberships and accounts to watch movies and TV through your Series X.

Games

Games are what makes a console, and the Series X has had an interesting time of it in the three years it’s been out. Things started off a little wobbly, with the continuity message meaning that it had fewer launch exclusives than Sony.

This was compounded by delays to Halo: Infinite, which finally arrived with a great campaign but undercooked multiplayer in late 2021, and while Forza Horizon 5 was incredible, it was also on Xbox One (as was Infinite).

After a slow 18 months, 2023 finally started picking things up noticeably for Xbox, with the releases of Starfield and Forza Motorsport finally giving it major games that you couldn’t play on Xbox One, and both are well worth checking out.

However, there’s still no real argument that the PS5 is streets ahead on exclusives, with more regular games and a higher average quality mark for them. The ace in Microsoft’s sleeve is, of course, Xbox Game Pass, which gets you access to all of its biggest titles for a monthly subscription, but is also full to the brim of excellent smaller games like Pentiment and Psychonauts 3.

It remains the best deal in gaming for casual customers and is likely to get even more compelling now that Xbox owns Activision Blizzard – 2024 should see the arrival of a whole heap of Call of Duty games, among others.

Verdict

The Xbox Series X is a hulking bit of kit, but one that hosts enough power to easily allow for some superb gaming and media experiences, all in one box. It’s well-made and carefully laid out, and while it’ll divide opinion in terms of looks, it serves its purpose really well.

Even with a big 2023 in progress, though, the feeling remains that its Achilles’ heel is still games – with a swathe of exclusives that cannot match Sony’s output. It’s picking up steam but still has a little way to travel before it’s really going toe-to-toe with the PS5.