Already suffering from January blues? Well, Tesco has just the ticket to turn that frown upside down, with an excellent Xbox One X deal.
That's right, head on over to Tesco's website and you can purchase an Xbox One X for £449, and add up to six free games to your order. The free games on offer? That'll be Gears of War Ultimate Edition, Halo 5, Overwatch, Middle Earth: Shadow of War, call of Duty: WWII and Assassins Creed Origins. That's six Xbox One X games at no extra cost.
Microsoft Xbox One X review:
Before I get onto that, though, let me first outline the console’s key features. The Xbox One X is Microsoft’s first proper 4K games console. It will sit alongside the Xbox One S, which also has a 4K Blu-ray drive for UHD movie playback, but can only play games at 1080p resolution.
In terms of the UI and what you can do with the console, the Microsoft Xbox One X is pretty much identical to the One S; yes, it looks a little different, but switch it on and you’ll forget all about that. The key difference is more power under the hood, plus support for gaming at 4K and HDR, which means sharper graphics, frame rates and a richer colour palette.
To enable all that, there’s more power squeezed inside the Xbox One X than any other games console around, with a quoted 6TFLOPS of computing power – compared with the PS4 Pro’s 4.2TFLOPS – 12GB of GDDR5 RAM with 326MB/sec of bandwidth, 8GB of flash storage plus a 1TB internal hard disk.
Microsoft Xbox One X review: Design and the hardware:
The Xbox One X is a masterpiece of design. It doesn’t look flashy or even particularly exciting, but it’s compact – around the same size as the One S – it’s quiet and has all the connectivity you’d expect.
The front and left side is stepped with a short overhang obscuring the Blu-ray drive slot on the left side, there’s a front-mounted USB 3 socket and two further on the rear, plus a pair of HDMI sockets - one is for connecting your set-top box; while the other is an HDMI 2.0 output for connecting the console to your TV. The optical S/PDIF port makes another appearance, which gives plenty of flexibility to those preferring that type of output, or who have a wireless headphone like the Steelseries Siberia 800 connected.
The box itself supports HDR10, which is the most common form of HDR. It would have been nice to have Dolby Vision as well, which supports higher peak brightness and dynamic range than HDR10, but for now the Xbox One X covers most of the HDR-enabled TV’s on the market. Assuming you have a compatible TV, like the Samsung UE65KS9500 I tested the Xbox One X with, you’ll see both richer colours and brighter specular highlights.
Microsoft also promotes the console’s ability to support Dolby Atmos on its website, which is very much a GOOD THING. It’s worth underlining, though, that this is not only for 4K Blu-rays and streamed TV and movie content, but also those enhanced games (more on that later).
One thing the Xbox One X doesn’t bring is any kind of improvement on the controller front; in fact, you get exactly the same Bluetooth-enabled controller in the box as comes with the Xbox One S. It’s a great controller, but it would have been nice to see some features trickling down from the Xbox Elite controller, such as rear-mounted paddles or a rechargeable battery pack as standard.
Microsoft Xbox One X review: 4K performance and games content
And so to the elephant in the room: 4K games, how they look and how they play. The answer to the second part of that question is “exceptionally”. Play Gears of War 4, Super Lucky’s Tale, Forza Motorsport 7 or FIFA 18 side by side with the same titles on a One S and the differences are obvious.
Before I go on, though, it’s important to note that not all enhanced games will run in native 4K. Some will run with checkerboarding like the PS4 Pro and some will offer enhanced frame rates while others will use the power of the new console to offer dynamic resolution, increased texture detail and higher polygon counts. Some, of course, will do all of these things and look stunning – the point is, not all will.
In the end, it’s up to the developer to decide how to optimise for the One X, but all the games I’ve installed so far play more smoothly, look more colourful and pack cleaner, crisper and sharper visuals across the board on the One X. When you go back to the same games on the One S you’ll wonder where all the detail went and you'll certainly notice the frame rates are less smooth.
As far as Blu-ray video content goes, it looks just as good as it ever did on the Xbox One S with settings for 8-bit, 10-bit and 12-bit output, depending on what your TV supports.
As with all 4K content, however, there is a catch. And that is that is that, although the smoother gameplay and colours are obvious from any distance, as soon as you sit a reasonable distance away from your TV the extra detail that 4K brings just fades away. Everything looks great sitting in my Ikea armchair a metre away from my 55in Hisense M7000, but as soon as I go to sit on the sofa and play, those differences become less apparent.
The other issue for Microsoft is that the number of fully 4K-optimised games available at launch isn’t all that great. At launch, Microsoft’s first-party games support is fronted by Forza Motorsport 7, which it has to be said, does look utterly gorgeous, but the rest of the first-party 4K titles leave a little to be desired, with only Disneyland Adventures, Rush: A Disney-Pixar Adventure, Zoo Tycoon Ultimate Animal Collection, Super Lucky’s Tale, Killer Instinct, Gears of War 4, Halo 5 Guardians, Halo 3 and Halo Wars 2 among the list.
On the third-party front, only a light scattering of AAA titles is ready for day one. FIFA 18 is the headliner here, and it stars alongside Assassin’s Creed Origins, Call of Duty: WWII in 4K and Rise of the Tomb Raider.
And, it must be noted that that the same was true of Sony’s 4K library when the PS4 Pro launched but Sony does have a year’s head start, so there’s a much larger current selection of games than is available for the Xbox One X right now.
Still, as more developers begin to release patches for existing games, the landscape should change soon; in fact we expect as the console goes on sale from midnight on 7 November a whole slew of games should become available. And, since Microsoft states there are 130 titles confirmed as “Xbox One X Enhanced”, there will be plenty available to play by Christmas 2017 and throughout 2018. You can keep tabs on those on Microsoft’s website.
