Review: Microsoft Xbox One

The final contender in the next-gen console battle has entered the arena. The Xbox One will launch this Friday, 8 years to the day after the 2005 debut of the Xbox 360.

As someone who has happily played three Xbox 360s to their red-ringed graves, I couldn’t have been more excited. I spent the past few days living with an Xbox One, watching on as Microsoft shipped its final few last-minute patches and the third-party apps lit up across the store.

So how is it?

THE HARDWARE

The Console:

Beauty is a subjective topic, but I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone that would say the Xbox One is particularly beautiful.

That’s not to say that it’s ugly, mind you – it’s not. It’s just.. there. It’s a big, black box, its materials a mix of matte and gloss. It has lots of vents. To describe it more richly would be to use needless words. Many a commenter has suggested that the Xbox One resembles a VCR, and those comparisons aren’t wrong. It does look like a VCR, or the box your cable guy might install.

Perhaps that was the intent. Microsoft has been pitching this as an all-in-one entertainment box from day one. For better or worse, it seems they’ve designed this box with the intent of it blending in with the aforementioned appliances, rather than having it scream “I AM A GAME CONSOLE!”. Regardless, it’s not very pretty.

Looks aside, there’s one thing about the design that I do really love: it’s silent. Perhaps that’ll change as the days go on and the dust bunnies settle – but for now, this thing runs stealth.

With that said, people tend to only really care about the way a console looks leading up to its launch, when pictures of the hardware are one of the few things they can really weigh in on. Far more important, however, is…

The Controller:

The Xbox One controller is absolutely superb. It is, perhaps, the best console controller I’ve ever held.

The Xbox 360 controller was already very, very good, but it had a glaring fault or two. Its directional pad was, for lack of a better word, “mushy”, and it only got worse with age and use. The analog sticks lacked any real texture for your thumbs to grip on to, especially when the gaming got tense and the ol’ mitts got sweaty.

The Xbox One controller is essentially a 360 controller refined, scrubbed of its flaws. The names of some buttons have changed, sure – but functionally, it’s a finely polished version of its predecessor. The D-pad now lets out a resounding click in every direction, and the analog sticks cling to your thumbs.

One particularly neat bit I noticed after a few days: the L and R triggers are tapered in such a way that you can pull the triggers while resting your knuckle just over the shoulder buttons. This allows you to tap the shoulder buttons with a twitch of your knuckle, rather than completely moving your finger. That’s great for twitch-heavy first person shooters, where that millisecond finger shift can mean not tossing a grenade in time.

The one big bummer with the controller: no rechargeable batteries, unless you bring your own rechargeable AAs or spring for a $25 Play-And-Charge kit for each controller.

KINECT:

Microsoft has pitched the new Kinect (their motion-sensing, speech-recognizing accessory) in such a way so as to essentially suggest it puts the old one to shame, claiming greatly improved accuracy in both speech recognition and gesture sensing.

The speech recognition does seem better, but not to some insane, mind-blowing degree. Yes, the new Kinect will still mishear you. Yes, you’ll still feel totally stupid when you shout a command at your TV and it ignores you.

When it does work, though, I’m still not entirely convinced that using voice recognition outside of a few particularly use cases is particularly awesome. Pausing a video without finding the remote as I run over to my kitchen? Hell yeah. Slowly commanding my Xbox through the App Store, screen by screen? Meh. The same can be said for using gestures to navigate through the menus; while the Kinect’s improved gesture tracking gives it a few new tricks (for example: you now “tap” at an item to select it, rather than having to hover over it. That can actually prove pretty challenging some times, but I have a feeling I’ll get better in time), it still feels like a neat tech demo rather than something that actually makes the experience better

With gaming, however, the improved gesture tracking starts to shine.

Take Kinect Sports Rivals Preseason, for example. It’s essentially a demo for Rare’s recently delayed Kinect Sports Rivals, but even with just a few minutes of gameplay to offer up, it shows off just how capable the new Kinect is.

In the demo, each player gets a jetski. To steer, you hold your arms up in front of you and move them forward and back as if controlling an actual jetski – all somewhat standard, if you’re used to the past generation Kinect (because we live in the future and get to critique things like how good something is at gesture tracking). But the new Kinect has a new trick that its predecessor didn’t: it’s tracking your skeleton all the way down to your fingers. You squeeze your right hand closed – as if squeezing the accelerator – and your jetski takes off. If Harmonix ever commits to making Dance Central for the Xbox One, expect it to be a whole lot more sensitive.

The new Kinect can log you in to your Xbox profile as soon as it recognizes you, something which seemed to work for me about 90% of the time.

Between the improved skeletal tracking and the fact that every Xbox One comes with a Kinect (where as it only came with certain 360s, or could be purchased separately, late into the console’s life), I’m actually quite excited to see what developers do with the Kinect this time around. For navigation? In most cases, meh. But in games? This could be fun.