A Week with the Xbox One: Hands On Review
As Christmas rolls around once more, it is time for another clash of the consoles. This week, both Sony and Microsoft showed off their new products. A review of the PS4 will follow when we get our hand on the box.
First things first. I’m a huge fan of Xbox and have been a proud owner of them all. While they chose the unpopular route of charging an annual subscription fee for their online services, it led to the development of the best entertainment experience in a single machine by far. The Xbox 360 has apps like Twitter, Skype, Youtube, Internet Browsing (although I imagine very few use it) along with video apps like Netflix and RTE Player. It houses the enormous entertainment libraries of Microsoft in Music, Film, Tv and games. You can pause and play video with your voice, watch content instantly on HD and play from an extraordinary library of games. It interacts with Xbox Glass on your Windows phone or Tablet for added interacivity. The Xbox 360 has it all. Which is a bit of a problem for the Xbox One.
Let me get into that in a bit. If you don’t have a console in your house yet, The Xbox One is an all singing-all dancing machine that Xbox hope will be the centre of your living room for the next 10 years. You should buy it. It is a magic box and does everything you could imagine it would, housing all of the above as well as a new Blu-Ray Player with a serious upgrade in the kit to futureproof against the demands of the next decade. It is a monster of power with an 8 core CPU with 8gb of memory and half a Terabyte of Hard Disk Space and will will deliver eye-slicing graphics with ease and stay as silent as a mouse.
The new Kinect sensor is going to flip your brain out. For those not familiar, this is a box with a camera and sensor that can scan the movements of your entire body with accuracy. Including the movement of your fingers. Kinect on the 360 was a MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Kinect on the One has the potential to really change home entertainment. The new Kinect can follow up to 6 different people in the room, knows when you are standing sideways, has improved depth sensors and can even identify people in the background to ignore them if they’re not playing. It can recognise you by your face and voice and it does not wig out when you move unexpectedly. This will be big.
If you own an Xbox 360 though (and many, many people do), the question is – is now the time to upgrade? Xbox One just launched this weekend. So far, there is no RTE Player (which I use a lot on Xbox), no voice controls (which I use too) and only a handful of launch titles (more on those below). All of this will change very quickly and if you do buy now, the Xbox One will be worth every cent of the €500 odd it is at the moment, but right now its younger brother still has so much to offer. The biggest obstacle is that none of your old Xbox 360 are incompatible. A lot of people like myself have built up a collection of games that we’d rather not throw out. In the past 2 months I paid €120 for COD Ghosts and GTA5 alone. Yes, there is the option of trading and upgrading for some games, but doing so will lose all of your progress (unthinkable in GTA5), and many titles aren’t available yet on Xbox one. I should point out that at least your multiplayer achievements are redeemable if you get a free COD account.
Right now, it’s very difficult to review the Xbox One. Playing around with it is like watching Usain Bolt go for a jog. I’d like to see more innovation and more content that really takes advantage of the impressive hardware (the Kinect especially). I love my Xbox 360. I need a bit more time with it and a little more on offer before I can really let it go.
LAUNCH TITLES:
FORZA 5
Is exactly as you’d imagine from the franchise. Uber-realistic graphics, endless customisation options, human-based AI and miles and miles of track. It’s not a massive leap from Forza 4, but it does have a Jeremy Clarkson voice-over. Whether that’s a plus or not depends on you, I guess.
RYSE: SON OF ROME
This is Microsofts take on God of War, Sony’s massively successful slash em up. The graphics are amazing (as you’d imagine from a launch title) and the gameplay is varied and goes on forever. No multiplayer, but a great game nonetheless
ZOO TYCOON:
An upgraded port from the Xbox 360 version, this is sort of like SIMS but with a zoo. Your job is to keep the punters and animals happy while making a world-renowned Zoo. For Kids who have a lot of time on their hands
SPORTS RIVALS
Weirdly, there is only one game dedicated to playing with Kinect. It’s a speedboat game called Wake Racing. It’s fun, but having researched and seen what the Kinect is capable of, it doesn’t really break any new ground.