Xbox One X Review

The One X is the best engineered console Microsoft has built and the least necessary one. Cramming six teraflops, a vapor chamber and a supplemental cooling system into a case smaller than the original Xbox One is a genuine feat, and the results showed at once: games that ran at reduced resolution on every other machine ran at native 4K here, older titles picked up resolution and frame rate improvements for free through backward compatibility, and the disc drive handled the 4K format Sony had left out of the PlayStation 4 Pro.

Reviewers had essentially no complaints about the hardware itself. The problem is what runs on it. Microsoft spent that generation without a first party lineup worth a premium, its studios shipped little of consequence, and nearly everything a buyer wanted was also on a PlayStation that cost a hundred dollars less and carried exclusives the Xbox could not answer. Five hundred dollars bought the better version of games available everywhere else. A magnificent box, sold into an argument its maker had already lost.