Whatever it 'is', the ROG Xbox Ally X makes me pine for Xbox's distant heyday

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.

Asus ROG Xbox Ally – Official Pre-Order Trailer Watch on YouTube

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.