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 than that would be using 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 set-top cable box your cable guy might deliver. 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