Review of the Xbox Series S

The Xbox Series S is an affordable substitute for Microsoft’s flagship next-generation console, the Xbox Series X. It has comparable hardware and plays all the same games as its more costly sibling, but its lower processing power mostly restricts graphical output to 1440p.

This console is surprisingly affordable and quite small. The Xbox Series S offers a tempting alternative if you’re wanting to save money or haven’t made the switch to 4K yet. Gamers who want a 4K UHD in HDR experience will have to pay more for the Series X.

Design: Compact and sleek
It’s nearly impossible to oversell the Xbox Series S’s compact size. I had seen images and videos of the console and the specification sheet, but when I opened the package, I was still taken aback by how small this device was. Microsoft markets it as “our smallest Xbox ever.” It is smaller than the Xbox One S. Given both Microsoft and Sony went incredibly large with their flagship consoles, the Series X and PlayStation 5, that is particularly significant.

What a friend says

Gears of War 5 and other optimized games looked good on my 1080p TV and fantastically upscaled on my 4K TV.

I strongly advise configuring the Xbox Series S through the Xbox app. It greatly simplifies the procedure, pre-loads the Series S with settings from your previous Xbox One, if you have one, and makes connecting to Wi-Fi easier because you don’t have to type your password in the Xbox’s on-screen keyboard.

After going back, I also tried the conventional setup approach because I ended up wiping the console back to factory settings several times while testing it. Similar to configuring an Xbox One, it’s quick and easy, but the app option is superior.

Performance: Exceptionally stable 1440p gaming

Due to its streamlined technology, the Xbox Series S’s performance is a little bit of a mixed bag. The GPU is much weaker in teraflops (TFLOPs) and has less RAM, while the CPU is comparable to the more costly Xbox Series X.

Microsoft reduced the specifications of the Series S hardware in order to achieve its appealing pricing point, aiming for a resolution of 1440p at 60 or 120 frames per second. Even though some games, like Hades and The Touryst, and more recent ones, like Mass Effect: Legendary Edition and Crysis Remastered, render in 4K at 60 frames per second, you’ll notice that none of these are especially taxing by today’s standards.

The majority of games perform best on 1080p, and poorly optimized games like Cyberpunk 2077 suffer I have utilized the Series S with 1080p and 4K TVs, and generally found the frame rate to be rock steady and the pictures to be decent. In my experience, 4K upscaling also performed well, but most games run better in 1080p It’s best if you have a 1440p display because that’s the console’s default resolution. However, it functioned well when I connected it to my 1080p and 4K TVs. Games on the Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S can be optimized by developers to take use of the more powerful hardware. I played a few Xbox Series X|S-optimized games and one Xbox Series X|S game during my first stint with the Series S.

Games that were optimized, such as Gears of War 5, appeared respectable on my 1080p TV and even better on my 4K TV. Gears as I moved from hiding and scuttling over obstacles to chainsaw adversaries, the gameplay of War 5 was fluid and there was no discernible FPS variation.

Our test

Load times were negligible in each of the games I played, which is expected from a system with super-fast NVME SSD storage

On the Xbox Series X|S version, it was strange to see the ghosts of my pals from the game’s initial release populating my races, but Forza Horizon 4, another optimized game, looked and played fantastic.

Titles released after the debut have been diverse. At first, Cyberpunk 2077’s dynamic resolution and restricted frame rate were disheartening. Although the developers eventually added a performance mode that increased the frame rate to 60 FPS at the expense of a lesser resolution, I ultimately chose to play it on a PC. On the other extreme, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Hades operated in native 4K and seemed as fast and fluid as it had on PC as I would have expected from a lightning-fast NVME SSD storage technology, load times were minimal in every game I played. Though not enough to interfere with gameplay, certain games had more visible load times than others.

Games: Microsoft still has an exclusivity problem

You won’t have any shortage of games to play on the Xbox Series S, especially if you’re a Game Pass subscriber. I predicted that the Series S would be the ultimate Game Pass machine at release, and that prediction has borne fruit in my home, at least.

Microsoft’s game subscription service provides hundreds of games to download and stream, including major day-one releases from first-party studios, and that’s how my Series S has seen most of its use.

Full backward compatibility meant you could play every Game Pass game on day one. The Xbox Series X|S launch lineup was robust, with titles like Gears of War 5 re-tuned specifically for Xbox Series X|S and brand-new games like Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Dirt 5, and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla ready to go. Since then, hundreds of additional titles have bolstered that lineup, like Halo Infinite and Psychonauts 2. 

Since its release, Microsoft has acquired companies like Bethesda and Activision Blizzard, so the number of games continues to grow substantially, with even titles like the latest Call of Duty available through Game Pass.

The catch with the Series X|S game library is that all Microsoft first-party console exclusives are also on PC. That means anyone with a decent gaming rig can play the same exclusives as the Xbox Series S. That’s meaningless to anyone who doesn’t own a gaming PC, but it does take a bit of shine off the console from the perspective of a PC gamer.

What test shows

Other consoles, like the PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch, have games you can’t get anywhere else, while the Xbox Series X|S has timed exclusives and console exclusives. That isn’t a knock against Microsoft, as the availability of Xbox exclusives on the PC is fantastic for computer gamers. Still, it does put Xbox consoles in a tough spot compared to consoles from other manufacturers.

Microsoft’s $7.5B purchase of Bethesda’s parent company, Zenimax, brought some hope of additional exclusives appearing in Microsoft’s arsenal. (Bethesda is the publisher of Fallout, DOOM, Dishonored, Skyrim, Wolfenstein, The Elder Scrolls, and more.) However, the situation is murky as the company still hasn’t clarified which (if any) Bethesda titles will be exclusive to Xbox.

Storage: Disappointingly shallow, so bring your USB drive

The biggest problem with the Xbox Series S is the lack of storage. Unlike the Series X, which packs in a 1TB drive as standard, the Series S only offers 512GB of space, although there is an upgraded model with 1TB for an additional fee. That’s still an extremely shallow pool to swim in when dealing with an all-digital console, as you must download every game you play.

Wanting to see how my Guardian looks on next-gen hardware, Destiny 2 was one of my first downloads, and I almost immediately regretted it. At over 100GB, Destiny 2 ate nearly one-fifth of the total storage space on the console. Unable to find a USB drive that I could format, I sucked it up and deleted the game to make room for titles that had been optimized or designed for the Xbox Series X|S.

Even then, space quickly became an issue, and I sacrificed the drive I typically use with my PS4. Moving games is, thankfully, a breeze. However, I could not move the Xbox Series X|S games to the drive because it was too slow. The moral is that if you pick up a Series S, you need to consider different storage upgrades instead of simply adding a regular USB drive.

For me, the solution has been to use the Series S primarily as a Game Pass machine. Since Game Pass lets you stream games instead of downloading them, the restrictive storage issue becomes less of a concern.

For those who need more space, the Series S has a slot on the back for a storage expansion card, a proprietary storage device designed to be just as fast as the built-in NVME SSD. The issue is that it’s expensive. You can get a USB 3.1 SSD of a similar capacity for less than half as much, but these will only work with Xbox One and below games – not Xbox Series S games.

So, if you go with an external USB drive, you’ll only be able to play Xbox One, Xbox 360, and original Xbox games stored on it, which is unlikely to appeal to everyone given the growing age of such titles.

Internet Connectivity: Fast when wired; Wi-Fi is a mixed bag

With all those massive games and the Series S being a digital-only console, you will spend a lot of time downloading. The Series S has built-in Wi-Fi and an Ethernet port, so you have options, but a wired connection is the way to go here.