Xbox Series X Review: Very Good, With Caveats

The verdict, briefly

The Xbox Series X is Microsoft's 2020 entry in a crowded gaming Hardware market, and at £479 it is competing against some of the strongest hardware we have tested. After a fortnight of daily use, the headline is straightforward: it delivers game Pass is the best value in gaming and nothing is close.

In a sentence: Buy it for game Pass is the best value in gaming and nothing is close. Think twice if this would bother you daily: a thin first-party exclusive line-up.

Design and build

There is nothing experimental here, which is mostly to the Xbox Series X's credit. The detail worth calling out is that Quick Resume held five suspended games across a reboot. Against the rest of the gaming Hardware category it feels considered rather than novel.

Performance

Our testing runs the same suite on every device so figures stay comparable across years. The figure worth quoting is Load time: 3.8s average. That places it comfortably above average for its price bracket.

How we tested

Every figure quoted above comes from the same protocol, run on every unit in this category. This one spent two weeks as the reviewer’s only games machine, across a fixed set of twelve titles. The same twelve games on every device, handhelds at a metered 200 nits, consoles on a calibrated 4K 120Hz OLED.

We deliberately do not report peak frame rates in menus, and any performance figure from a launch trailer.

The honest caveat: Handheld battery figures assume default power profiles; capping frame rate changes them substantially.

What we liked

• Game Pass is the best value in gaming and nothing is close
• Backwards compatibility going back four generations
• Quick Resume across multiple suspended games

Taken together, those strengths make it a natural fit for anyone who plays broadly rather than chasing exclusives.

Where it falls short

• A thin first-party exclusive line-up
• Proprietary expansion cards are expensive
• The controller feels a generation behind the DualSense

None of these are dealbreakers on their own. Whether they matter depends entirely on how you intend to use it, which is why the section below matters more than the score.

How it compares

The closest alternatives on price are Steam Deck OLED and PlayStation 5 Slim. All three have been through the same tests, so the figures below are directly comparable rather than collected from different reviews.

The Steam Deck OLED scores higher at £479, so the Xbox Series X has to win on game Pass is the best value in gaming and nothing is close rather than on the total.

Is it worth the money?

At £479 the Xbox Series X undercuts the category average of £513 by £34, against an average score of 3.9 out of 5 across the gaming Hardware we have tested. Its own 4 works out at roughly £120 per point. That is the straightforward case: above-average result, below-average price.

If the budget is the binding constraint, the Xbox Series S at £249 is the floor we would still recommend — below that the compromises stop being ones you can live with.

Daily use

Two weeks in, the figure that stopped mattering was output — 4K 120Hz, 8K capable is more than adequate and you forget about it by the third day. What kept surfacing instead was that a thin first-party exclusive line-up, which is easy to shrug off in a spec comparison and harder to ignore at 6pm on a Friday. On the other side, Quick Resume held five suspended games across a reboot turns out to be the sort of detail you only appreciate after living with the alternative.

Who it suits

Buy the Xbox Series X if you are anyone who plays broadly rather than chasing exclusives. Skip it if this is something you would notice every day: a thin first-party exclusive line-up.

Buy it if:

• Anyone who plays broadly rather than chasing exclusives
• You want game Pass is the best value in gaming and nothing is close
• You value backwards compatibility going back four generations

Skip it if:

• You need a thin first-party exclusive line-up to be a solved problem
• The Steam Deck OLED at £479 already covers what you need
• You upgraded within the last two years — the gap is not worth the outlay

Verdict

Buy it for game Pass is the best value in gaming and nothing is close. Think twice if this would bother you daily: a thin first-party exclusive line-up.

Score: 4 / 5 · £479 at the time of writing.

Behind this piece

Every product covered here was bought at retail and lived with for at least a fortnight before a word was written. Battery figures come from a scripted day rather than a manufacturer estimate, and sustained performance is measured warm — after half an hour of load — because that is the state a device spends most of its life in.

Where a firmware update changes a result, the piece is re-tested and the change noted rather than quietly corrected. No review unit arrives with conditions attached, and no score is agreed in advance with anybody.

Where to go next

If you are weighing this against the rest of the gaming we have covered, the category archive lists every review in date order. The closest comparisons we have published are Xbox Series X vs Ayaneo Air 1S: Is the 2023 Model Worth the Change? and Xbox Series X vs Legion Go: Is the 2023 Model Worth the Change?.

For the reference material behind these figures, the specification pages carry the measured numbers, and the common questions collect what people ask once something is in daily use.