Xbox Ally and Ally X review: this is not an Xbox

What does “Xbox” mean? Some might say it can only refer to a box-shaped Microsoft game machine. Others will argue it’s a collection of Xbox-native titles like Halo, Gears, Forza, and Fable. I think most would probably agree it’s a game console experience, a way to kick back and easily play the latest games without thinking too much. Press the power button, play, press it again to pause.

The 7-inch Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X gaming handhelds, on sale tomorrow, don’t meet that bar. The cheaper one doesn’t even come close.

They run Windows 11, and they never let you forget it — not during their lengthy setup process, not when you’re trying to navigate their menus, and not when you want the latest games to “just work.” They also don’t play Xbox games designed for an Xbox console, only Xbox games ported to PCs; when GTA VI comes out next May without a PC version, you won’t be playing it here. Not unless you’re streaming from the cloud.

To be fair, no Windows handhelds meet that bar, and the $999 Xbox Ally X is better than many! But these first “Xbox” handhelds were supposed to be Microsoft’s answer to the Steam Deck and the Nintendo Switch. They were supposed to combine “the best of Xbox and Windows together” by reimagining Microsoft’s operating system. We were told the new Xbox Full Screen Experience (FSE) “isn’t just surface-level changes.”

So why does it look so much like lipstick on Windows, with a sluggish UI that feels designed for a mouse? Why are Microsoft and Asus shipping these handhelds today when they’re buggy and clearly not ready for launch?

The white $599 Xbox Ally and black $999 Xbox Ally X officially arrive tomorrow, October 16th.

Both are the same size, shape, thickness, and weigh roughly the same 1.5 pounds. On paper, the only differences between the Xbox Ally X and Xbox Ally are the processor (Z2 Extreme vs. Z2 A), storage (1TB vs. 512GB), memory (24GB LPDDR5X-8000 vs. 16GB LPDDR5-6400), battery (80Wh vs. 60Wh), and whether you get impulse triggers and a USB 4 port or not.

They both supposedly ship with the new Xbox Full Screen Experience, which should let you boot into a desktop-less Windows 11 that suppresses startup apps, saves memory, lets you navigate by gamepad controls instead of requiring you to touch the screen, and puts your Xbox, Steam, and titles from other stores all in one handy interface, with the desktop still a click away if you want.

In reality, it seems that Microsoft and Asus didn’t actually ship its units to stores with that version of Windows installed — or necessary BIOS updates, graphics drivers, and more. Reviewers like me spent hours and multiple reboots waiting for those updates to install before we could play a single game; even after I was done, I still couldn’t navigate Windows without some smudging of the touchscreen and fighting with the gamepad controls.

I want to say something nice about the Xbox Ally and Ally X before I continue to amuse and warn you about their failings, so let’s start with these: Despite each weighing around 1.5 pounds, both Allys are pleasingly comfortable to hold. (Prongs rock!) The front-facing speakers might be the best I’ve heard on a handheld — loud, clear, and with lots of stereo separation — and I love that Asus continues to ship every Ally with a piece of cardboard padding that doubles as an excellent stand but you can totally recycle. The fans spin up more than I’d like, but the grips are well isolated.

And while I’m a little tired of Asus putting a 7-inch screen into what feels like an 8-inch handheld, with dramatically oversized bezels compared to rivals, I can’t entirely fault it for picking the same 7-inch, 1080p 500-nit, 120Hz variable refresh rate display it’s used for the past three years to make Ally games feel smooth. It just doesn’t feel like a flagship screen anymore, not after the Steam Deck OLED, MSI Claw 8, and especially the incredible screen in the (pricier) Legion Go 2.

But the Xbox Ally X, with its AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip, extra memory, and big 80 watt-hour battery, is quite serviceable in the games I want to play. I can get two hours of smooth whipcracking and Nazi-punching in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, one of the most intensive games on PC, if I’m willing to play at low settings with AMD’s FSR “balanced” upscaling, which uprezzes an 1129x635 image to 1080p.

Parrying foes in Expedition 33 was no trouble at an XeSS-upscaled 900p resolution, where I get about two hours at 50-70 fps. I can also get nearly eight hours of the least intensive games like Balatro, around six in Hollow Knight: Silksong, and around four in medium-weight games like Blue Prince by lowering the chip’s TDP.

While it’s not quite as potent or efficient a system as the Intel-powered MSI Claw 8 AI Plus, or even the SteamOS-based Legion Go S with the older Z1 Extreme chip, it’s not far off, and I did find it about 11 percent faster on average than the original Asus ROG Ally X from last year which also uses a Z1 Extreme. The handheld charges fast, too, at up to 100W of USB-C PD power if you have such a charger available.

And — most importantly, the thing I’ve been wanting from every Windows handheld for years — when I press the power button on the Xbox Ally X to put it to sleep, it doesn’t wake itself up! Not in a bag. Not on a table. Not when I wiggle the joystick, shake it, or press all its buttons.

Last week, I paused a game of Indiana Jones by pressing the power button. Nine hours later, my game was exactly where I left it. I put it to sleep again, and 38 hours later, I picked up playing exactly where I left off.

Unfortunately, I can’t always trust it to wake. Twice now, it’s stayed in a coma until I hard-reset the system, losing a little game progress.

And I can’t trust the white $599 Xbox Ally to stay asleep at all. I’ve complained about Windows’ sleep modes for years, but this is the worst I’ve tested. My colleague Tom Warren and I have watched it repeatedly wake up right after telling it to sleep. I saw it randomly turn on three hours after going to sleep, just sitting on a table. Twice, I woke up to find the white Ally had drained the vast majority of its nearly full battery overnight.

Twice, I walked over to a plugged-in white Xbox Ally that had been on the charger for hours, only to discover it hadn’t charged at all. And that’s just one of the extra bugs I ran into with the cheaper version of this handheld.

But fixing the bugs won’t be enough to save the $599 Xbox Ally. Microsoft, Asus, and AMD would also need to fix its performance — because even the two-year old, $549 Steam Deck OLED is beating Microsoft’s brand-new handheld by an average of 13 percent in my tests.

This is a “you had one job” moment, because the AMD Ryzen Z2 A in the $599 Xbox Ally is basically the same chip you’ll find in the Steam Deck, only with a 20W turbo mode when you plug it into the wall. (Valve’s tops out at 15W.) But as you can see above, it usually didn’t beat the Deck even when I plugged it in.

I can’t say whether that’s because the drivers are immature or because Windows is holding it back — but seeing how half-baked Microsoft’s changes to Windows have been and how Lenovo’s SteamOS handheld beat its Windows one, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were the latter.

To be clear, Microsoft has made some real improvements! It’s very nice to be able to enter my PIN and finally use a modern Windows on-screen keyboard with gamepad controls, and the new Xbox button, the first on a handheld, is genuinely useful. Hold it down, and you can quickly switch between all your open windows, and close them, with your gamepad controls alone. I love using it as a fly swatter to smack down pop-ups and game launcher windows I’m no longer using, with just a flick of the stick and a smack of the X button.

And when the Xbox app works, you can see the silhouette of what could someday be a compelling Xbox-like experience. My colleague Tom Warren has been testing how the Xbox Ally devices sync with an Xbox library and console, so here’s a few thoughts from him:

But the rest of the interface never quite feels like a game console. The main Xbox interface just isn’t snappy or remotely feature complete, and much of it isn’t made to be navigated up, left, down, right on a gamepad like every Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo in modern memory. “When you switch to Steam Big Picture Mode it immediately feels like a better experience,” says Tom, and I agree — except that Microsoft owns the Xbox button here, so most of Steam Big Picture Mode’s hardware shortcuts don’t work.

There’s also no tutorial on how to use the Xbox Ally, even though some of its hardware buttons are downright confusing.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve tapped the tiny button with three vertical lines right next to the tiny button with three horizontal lines, which can be a problem, because one of them pauses your game and and opens in-game menus, while the other kicks you out to your game library to launch a new game without pausing your game at all. If you press the library button a second time, it doesn’t take you back to your game, so you probably have to long-press the Xbox button to get back to your game, but not the Library button or the Control Center button because those will summon AI assistants instead, and if you understood everything I just wrote and found it reasonable then boy do I have the operating system for you.

And gosh is it infuriating when I tap the other dedicated button that pulls up Asus’ new Control Center widget in the Xbox Game Bar to adjust brightness or wattage or toggle other controls, only to discover the button or widget completely unresponsive because the Game Bar or some other Windows component has decided it’s time for a silent update. (That happened to me with the MSI Claw 8’s Game Bar widget as well.)

Microsoft also doesn’t have an obvious way for gamers to install and add non-game apps like Discord to the Xbox interface, so any time I game and chat with friends, I have to do it in desktop mode. But frankly, I might stay in desktop mode, because I haven’t seen many concrete advantages to the Xbox Full Screen Experience so far.

Microsoft hasn’t implemented best practices like letting me scroll a long list of items to the “OK” button at the bottom using an analog stick — instead, I’ve gotta go line-by-line. Microsoft doesn’t always surface pop-ups and error messages front and center in the full-screen interface automatically, so I’ll often dumbly sit waiting for a game to launch that won’t until I go find them. I’ve had many moments where full-screen apps mysteriously don’t have focus, so gamepad controls don’t work until I touch the screen or Alt-Tab.

That’s not to mention some of the actual crashes and freezes I saw, far more than with other recent handhelds I’ve reviewed.

And in terms of performance and battery life, I saw no significant difference between desktop and full screen modes — no more than 1fps, and no more than half a watt, well within my margin of error. If you were hoping to see a performance difference between desktop and full-screen Windows like the difference between Windows and SteamOS, I’m afraid it’s just not there.

I’m willing to accept that the Xbox Ally handhelds, like the original Steam Deck in 2022, are a work in progress — that buyers are paying to beta test a potentially better future for handheld Windows gaming.

Microsoft’s reviewer’s guide hints as much: “Both handhelds were designed with ongoing innovation in mind, and your feedback will help us shape where we go next,” the company writes, alongside a list of upcoming features that aren’t available at launch. For instance, Microsoft is promising premade game profiles that automatically balance performance and battery life by the end of the year, and a game save sync indicator next year alongside “automatic super resolution” and AI-recorded highlight reels for the Xbox Ally X specifically.

And unlike the original $399-and-up Steam Deck, this beta will cost you a serious chunk of change. At $599 and $999 respectively, the white Xbox Ally and black Xbox Ally X are the priciest “Xboxes” ever made. Yes, everything is more expensive these days, and it’s hard to even find the MSI Claw 8 that I’d otherwise recommend over the Xbox Ally X. But I’d personally wait until the dust has settled here — unless you’re willing to pay $1,000 to beta test what could be Microsoft’s vision for the future of consoles.