The Xbox One Review

My wife won’t let the Xbox One in our living room. She’s afraid the upgraded Kinect camera will spy on us. That’s become a pretty standard line about the One, and my wife’s at least partially joking when she says it, but after seeing how powerful the Kinect has grown from the Xbox 360 to the Xbox One, it may not be that paranoid of a reaction.
When the Kinect is plugged in, the Xbox One is always listening. If you say “Xbox”, it turns on. Once it’s on, it’s always watching, and it will almost always recognize you, immediately logging int o your Xbox Live account. It hears better than the original Kinect, and it sees better, both in light and in darkness. It can handle beards. It stares down to our bones, tracking our skeletons. Consumer electronics now know what we look like and wait for our voice to turn them on. I can see why my wife is a little creeped out.
I’m probably not inviting the NSA into my home by setting an Xbox One up in my basement. Microsoft swears that won’t happen, and if I was truly afraid I could disconnect the Kinect and still use the Xbox One. I am bringing in a high tech piece of gaming technology, though, one that aims to redefine how I interact with my entertainment boxes. If you want to judge the “next generation” of videogame consoles by how futuristic they seem, by how far removed they feel from the previous systems, than the Xbox One edges out the PlayStation 4 based simply on its display and user interface. The PlayStation 4 stylishly redesigns the bulky box and stilted “Xross Media Bar” of the PlayStation 3, but the Xbox One embraces a low-rent sci-fi aesthetic with its voice commands and the ability to snap multiple active screens on top of each other. It’s the videogame version of every movie where characters sternly tell a computer what to do.

It’s weird, then, that something so futuristic looks so dated. The Xbox One looks like something you’d find in your uncle’s den in 1986. It’s a big, black block that should eat VHS tapes from the top. It should be plugged into a massive rear projection TV that has football scores burned onto the screen. My dad tried to force a laserdisc into it. Despite its boundary-pushing tech, the Xbox One’s exterior doesn’t share the sleek industrial design of the PlayStation 4. I’m tempted to rebuild the state-of-the-80s entertainment set-up my friend’s dad had thirty years ago with the One at the center.
That’s just the exterior, though. Between the Kinect and the HDMI input port, the Xbox One feels more advanced than the PS4. It feels more foreign. Microsoft has heavily marketed the One as more than just a gaming device, touting it as the one essential piece to a home entertainment system. That’s a bit of a reach, but the One’s non-gaming applications are more ostentatious and more central to the system than the PlayStation 4’s.
The Xbox One replaces your TV’s remote control with your voice. You can plug your cable box directly into your console through that HDMI input on the rear. The Xbox One can then control your cable box via the Kinect’s microphone. If you say “Xbox Watch NBC”, the Xbox will change the channel to NBC. It will do that in the middle of a game, popping you straight from Dead Rising 3 to Brooklyn Nine-Nine. You can’t control your cable box’s DVR or On Demand features through the One, so you’ll have to keep that remote handy, but for live-viewing or random channel flipping you’ll be able to speak your destination rather than type in a series of numbers. (You can also plug any device with an HDMI output into the Xbox One, including other gaming systems, but there’s no point to that and the lag between the screen and the controller becomes unbearable.)
It’s still something that only people who play games should buy, but the Xbox One’s weird TV business isn’t as pointless or off-putting as I had expected. It works well enough that I can legitimately see a button-free future for the living room. I’m not entirely converted—I still use my remote control more than my voice box—but the Xbox One’s voice recognition works reasonably well, and as that technology improves the remote control’s primacy will slowly dwindle away.
When you first load up a TV image on the One it appears in a large rectangle on the main menu that’s surrounded by a jumble of smaller panels. The One’s main menu is patterned on that Windows 8 layout that Microsoft has extended across most of its consumer products. It’s a familiar look if you’ve played a 360 or seen any ads for the Surface tablet (or if you watch any of the many network sitcoms that blatantly work a Surface into multiple shots every episode.) It’s a cluttered, awkward interface, and runs counter to the simplicity and ease of use that voice commands supposedly offer. But then perhaps that’s the point—if they make the menu a bummer to cycle through, people might flock more readily towards the weird new voice interface.
Those panels resurface in one of the One’s signature features. You can “snap” an app to the side of the screen while running another program. You can snap the Xbox Music app and jam a playlist while playing a game. You keep an eye on the news or sports scores or anything else on TV while slashing your way through Ryse: Son of Rome. There are some limitations right now—certain apps, including Skype, don’t support snapping, and the audio for both screens runs simultaneously—but in certain situations snapping is a useful tool.

Ryse: Son of Rome Speaking of Skype, with that app and the new high definition Kinect camera, the Xbox One is the closest we’ve yet come to Infinite Jest-style videophones. It’s FaceTime on your forty inch TV, with that new 1080P Kinect letting whoever you Skype with get a vivid look into your home. I anticipate avoiding this type of communication for the rest of my days.
That camera would make the Xbox One a perfect fit for streaming on Twitch or Ustream. It’s easy to stream on the with a less powerful camera. I was deeply skeptical and disinterested in letting others watch me play games until the PlayStation 4’s simple and direct Twitch interface made it as easy as pressing a button. Surprisingly the Xbox One doesn’t have that functionality, at least not yet. A Twitch app should be available in January, but for now there’s no way to live stream from the system.
It does feature a game DVR, though. The One continuously records video as you play through a game. You can save thirty-second clips and upload them to social media with a voice command. You can make longer clips or edit clips together in the Upload Studio app, and upload those videos to Microsoft’s SkyDrive file hosting service. It’s not live video, and there are space limitations, but if you are desperate to let other people watch you play as a crude ethnic stereotype in the Killer Instinct remake, it is possible with the Xbox One.
Skype, the upgraded Kinect, the TV interaction and the game DVR all make the other, more popular kind of streaming feel a bit blasé at this point. Videogame consoles were given new life when Netflix and other streaming video services first became available in 2008 and 2009, and even though those kinds of entertainment choices are central to the Xbox One, it no longer feels revolutionary to stream movies or old TV shows through a console. Of course the One has all the streaming services you expect in the year 2013. HBO Go will remain exclusive to the Xbox platform, but it won’t be available for the One until December. As I wrote with the PlayStation 4, these apps are basically mandatory for game consoles now, to the point where it doesn’t even seem necessary to mention them. It’d be far more newsworthy if the One didn’t come with Hulu or Amazon Instant Video. And yes, Barney Miller fans, Crackle is an option, as well.

This falderal is all well and good, but you will buy the Xbox One to play games. The current line-up of games features many of the same third-party perennials as the PlayStation 4, with the latest Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty and Need for Speed games, and a variety of sports releases from EA and 2K. The Xbox One has a deeper roster of exclusives, though. Dead Rising 3 is familiar but fun, and the beautiful but brutal Ryse: Son of Rome succeeds with brief spurts of mindless violence, but most of the other exclusives don’t just underwhelm but often bring some of the more odious trends of mobile gaming into the console sphere. Repetitive on-rails shooter Crimson Dragon and racing simulator Forza 5 push annoying microtransactions, and the new Killer Instinct embraces a free-to-play model where you have to pay extra to unlock game content, including the full roster of fighters. The family friendly Zoo Tycoon and PowerStar Golf might be the best of the lot. There are many games that you can only play on the Xbox One, but none of them are worth going out of your way for.
The Xbox One controller makes several changes to the 360 model, but most are minimal. The joysticks have the same asymmetric positioning, but the tops of the sticks are textured to keep thumbs from slipping. The directional pad is no longer set into a ring of plastic, so it isn’t nearly as imprecise. The home button is smaller and higher up on the controller. Back and Start are replaced with View and Menu buttons, which are used to pop out of a game and back to the main menu of either the game or the system itself. (Like mobile devices, the Vita and the PlayStation 4, you can now effectively pause a game and back all the way out to the main system menu without losing your place.) The controller still requires two AA batteries, but instead of bulging out from beneath the controller the batteries slide unobtrusively into the controller’s top. The shoulder triggers and bumpers both feel a bit clunkier than on the 360—they make louder clicks when you press them, and they feel cramped, crammed in tightly to the point where the bumpers take more effort to press than on the 360. The controller feels noticeably different in your hand, but it’s not a significant redesign.
I’ve been comparing the Xbox One to the PlayStation 4 throughout this review because those comparisons are inevitable. They came out within a week of each other. The greatest thing they have in common, besides playing games, is the fact that there’s no reason to rush into buying one unless you are a diehard videogame fan who can’t wait for the next new thing. The Kinect might give the Xbox One an edge, at least for those who are dying to control their cable box with their mouth, but the camera is still untested as a viable videogame interface, and the current line-up of games isn’t particularly inspiring. For now we’re keeping an older game box in our living room, one that runs the same video apps as the Xbox One, but that doesn’t make my wife feel paranoid.