The new collaboration between Xbox and Asus, the cumbersomely named ROG Xbox Ally X, is a strange old thing. As Tom elucidates in Eurogamer’s review of the device, it is many things at once. Marketing will tell you that it is ‘an Xbox’. The reality is that it is a PC, of course, albeit one with an Xbox interface grafted on. It’s something of a Frankenstein’s Monster in that sense, though like the monster it is also hardy and functional. One can see the case and audience for it.
I got my hands on the ROG Ally X at the perfect time. The day after getting the device I had a one-night family hotel stay, and so the machine got road-tested from the bed of a brain-meltingly colorful bedroom in a kids-first hotel. Upon returning from said hotel, which thanks to its kids-first nature has the bacteriological make-up of a petri dish in a top secret underground virus-making bunker, I got deathly ill. Banished to a sick bed in the spare room and genuinely feeling too poorly to even drag myself downstairs to my office, the ROG Ally X was then perfectly poised to spend several days as my primary gaming device.
I learned a few things from that experience. First up: Ball x Pit is bloody excellent, gingerly scratching that same sicko itch that games like Vampire Survivors and Balatro do. It’s exactly the sort of game I most love on such devices, too – the sort of game that you want tactile physical controls and a larger screen than the average phone for, but also a game simple enough that it doesn’t particularly tax a device such as this. There’s no slowdown, and the battery probably lasts better, too. Good.
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I also played a bit of The Outer Worlds 2 (review coming soon), and a chunk of Expedition 33. Expedition 33 runs well, but its performance is still a pretty jarring frame rate switch-up from where I’d been replaying it on Series X. That led me to install Nvidia GeForce Now on it – which works wonderfully. If you’ve got WiFi access, GFN now has its 5080-powered servers online – meaning you can get ridiculous-quality versions of compatible games streamed in – and its app runs beautifully on this device, as on other similar handhelds. There’s also compatibility with other storefronts, crucially including Steam.
As Tom says in his review, it’s good. It works. It works more than well enough, though with a suite of unsurprising caveats that come with it being a Windows PC, or even just being a device that is part of Microsoft’s complicated ecosystem.
There’s a hell of a lot of nitpicks I can make about the Xbox Ally X, mind. You have to laugh at a device like this coming with bloody Office 365 pre-installed on it. Could they really not spring for a custom Windows 11 installation branch that jettisoned all that stuff, making it optional unless required? An individual service, like the Print Spooler or what have you, might not have a huge impact on game performance… but should I be having to turn off OneDrive or whatever in the settings to try to make this boot faster? A lot of the nitpicks, you can tell, come from the fact that this is a PC, not an Xbox, whatever the marketing says.
The problem with eliminating the unspoken no man’s land that previously existed between PC and console has never been laid more bare than with this device. Consoles are good at certain things because they are stripped-back, locked-down ecosystems. PCs are the opposite. That has benefits too, though – installing whatever apps you fancy, weird emulation setups, and so on.
But even in the increasingly competitive space that is PC handhelds, you can see better options. If you buy a Steam Deck, it always boots into SteamOS and Valve’s store front, and it’s perfectly viable for a confused end user to completely avoid seeing anything but that store front. To a beginner, the Deck feels quite a bit like a console. That never appeared an option to me with the Ally X – not when you have to do the standard windows logins and setups on your first boot.
At the same time, there’s a lot to love once you are set up. Borrowed from Steam Deck is a flagging system to show which games are ‘optimized’ for handheld play and which might not work so well, for instance. While the interface can sometimes get a little confused and laggy when switching between different services, on the whole the ‘Xbox’ app functions admirably here. It does indeed feel like you’re on an Xbox when you’re browsing around that. That does expose what feels missing (my Xbox ‘owned games, installable’ tab on a Series X tallies 427 games, on a ROG Ally X it numbers just 108 thanks to the lack of ‘full’ console compatibility) – but it feels like an Xbox nevertheless. Just a slightly hobbled one.
Which brings me to the thrust of this article, really. I really like the ROG Xbox Ally X. It’s a device I’ll continue to use, and I think, given Steam compatibility and the power increase I can easily see it supplanting my Deck. I feel dedicated enough to it that I’ve got another tab open to buy the case as I write – and that case is sixty quid, so that definitely signals a level of intent on my part. With that said… oh, what I would’ve given for this sort of device a decade-plus ago.
Not in technological terms – this would’ve been impossible back then – but just in terms of, y’know, Xbox. It makes me pine for the era in which Xbox was my primary gaming platform – and that of my friends. In an era where all my friends were still on Xbox, where an Xbox Live subscription was absolutely essential, back when I still cared about Gamerscore. In other words, in an era where this particular ecosystem was totally alive to me… I would’ve lapped this up. I dare say it might’ve become one of the places where I’d outright game the most, in fact.
That isn’t the current ecosystem, though. Friends, colleagues, and gaming rivals feel to have largely moved on. My friend list and activity feed has the feel of a town centre on Easter Sunday, when only one or two shops even bother to open.
“We lost the worst generation to lose in the Xbox One generation, where everybody built their digital library of games,” said Xbox boss Phil Spencer back in 2023. Say what you will about Phil’s time at the helm, but clearly he knows where things went wrong. Using this device, his words have never seemed more accurate. In this sense, this attempt at unification serves to coarsely underscore just how far Xbox has fallen. It’s a great device at a terrible time for this brand. But perhaps this valiant effort is an important step in the road to some redemption. I hope so.
