Perhaps the trickiest question to answer about the ROG Xbox Ally handheld is how seriously to take it. It’s such an unusual project. It is an Xbox — like everything else, apparently — but it also isn’t. For one thing, it’s not made by Microsoft. For another, it doesn’t play Xbox games.
The ROG Xbox Ally is a PC gaming handheld manufactured by Asus, and the latest iteration of its ROG Ally range. Its Xbox branding reflects the deal between the two companies that has made the Ally the launch pad for Microsoft’s new “Xbox full screen experience”: a streamlined, console-like front-end for gaming on the Windows operating system. Think of this as Microsoft’s version of Steam’s Big Picture Mode, which is the default interface for the Steam Deck.
So the Xbox Ally is intended to be console-like, but it is, crucially, not a console. It is a Windows PC, and it plays Windows PC games. It won’t play your library of Xbox games natively, unless they also have PC versions compatible with Xbox Play Anywhere, the Xbox service that allows about 1,000 games to work seamlessly across platforms. (It can stream some of them from the cloud, or directly from your Xbox.)
Viewed from one angle, this device — which comes in two versions, the $600 Xbox Ally and the premium $1,000 Xbox Ally X, which is the version Polygon was supplied with for review — is quite a niche product. It’s the latest competitor in the PC handheld space, a relatively small enthusiast market that is ruled by Valve’s Steam Deck, which doesn’t run Windows. Within this market, it’s interesting as a sign of a push by Microsoft to make the notoriously fiddly Windows-based handhelds as friendly to use as the Steam Deck; the Xbox full screen experience is exclusive to the Ally right now, but will ultimately be available on other devices.
But from another angle, the Xbox Ally could well be a canary in the coalmine for the future of all Xbox hardware. In a June announcement of Microsoft’s partnership with AMD on the next generation of Xbox consoles, Xbox boss Sarah Bond heavily implied that these consoles would, like the Ally, be Windows-based devices compatible with rival PC gaming stores like Steam. (She did add they would also, unlike the Ally, be backward compatible with Xbox console game libraries.)
This makes the Xbox Ally hugely significant — and, having spent a week with the device, pretty worrying, even if I can see the promise in it.
As gaming hardware, the Xbox Ally X is fine, although it under-delivers for its exorbitant price point. As a vision for platform-agnostic gaming, it’s pretty exciting, with caveats. As the new standard-bearer for Windows gaming, it’s not quite a disaster, but it’s not great at all.
Lift the Xbox Ally X from its packaging and it’s immediately clear that it’s not the product of Microsoft’s in-house design teams. It’s also unavoidable that it does not feel like it costs $1,000. It’s robust but chunky, none too pretty, and not built from premium materials. Its aesthetics are bordering on tacky — or at least too gamer-y for my taste — with a reflective diagonal strip across the back, and aggressively bright color LED rings surrounding the two sticks. The $450 Nintendo Switch 2, with its silky matte finish, steel elements, slender profile, and elegant design, feels much more like a premium device.
The Ally X is heavy and thick, although its thickness does give it the benefit of good ventilation — it’s far from silent, but runs quieter than a Steam Deck, and the fans don’t seem unduly exercised even when running the most demanding games, like Cyberpunk 2077. The speakers are impressively loud, but don’t sound great, with an overpowering midrange and lack of treble or bass. But ergonomically, at least, the Ally is very good, a noticeable step up from the utilitarian Steam Deck. The full, Xbox-controller-inspired grips are very comfortable, and the button and stick placement is almost perfect. (The exceptions are the programmable buttons on the back surface, which are too small and located too far from your fingers.)
The $600 Xbox Ally is a close match for a mid-range Steam Deck OLED in terms of specs and power. As such, it should be a capable jack of all trades, if not quite powerful enough to handle the latest AAA releases. At $1,000, built around AMD’s new Ryzen Z2 Extreme processor, and with 24 GB of RAM as well as 1 TB of storage, the Ally X ought to be able to smash through that AAA barrier.
Based on my testing, it doesn’t so much smash through that barrier as straddle it awkwardly. On default settings, well-optimized games like Diablo 4 and Doom: The Dark Ages run beautifully, hitting north of 70 frames per second most of the time. Forza Horizon 5 looks great and runs at a steady 60 fps with a few minor drops. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a solid and handsome 30 fps experience. The 1080p, 120 hz, variable refresh rate screen looks sharp and minimizes the impact of any frame rate variation.
But, again on default settings, I found that some recent releases like Avowed and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 could not reliably hit 30 fps, and chugged along in the high 20s quite noticeably. Forza Motorsport’s benchmark test netted out at 31 fps, compared to 50 fps on my four-year-old Razer Blade gaming laptop. These results seem merely OK to me. Of course, they can be mitigated by tweaking graphics settings, but if the point of the Ally X is to serve up a seamless, plug-and-play, console-like version of Windows gaming, it is not quite hitting the mark you would expect for a $1,000 device.
It would be unfair to go any further without mentioning the Ally’s one great magic trick. It may boot straight into the Xbox interface, but because it’s a Windows device, it can run any Windows gaming launcher. No others are preinstalled, but links to install Steam, Battle.net, the Epic Games Store, GOG, and others are thoughtfully provided in the “My apps” section of the library, and doing so is quick and fairly painless. Within minutes of finishing setup on the device, I was downloading Diablo 4 from Battle.net and had the pick of my entire Steam library, as well as everything included in my Game Pass subscription. Once installed, the games all appear in the Xbox front end, so you don’t need to juggle launchers to access your whole gaming library.
Steam Deck is capable of this, but it requires a lot of Googling and patient tinkering to get other launchers working. Other Windows handhelds can do it, but it’s nothing close to as easy or user-friendly an experience. In this way, the “Xbox full screen experience” concretizes the superpower of all PC handhelds, which is the incredible range of software they can run. It’s a huge step forward.
The Xbox Ally is also a great argument for Microsoft’s Xbox Play Anywhere program, which aims to erase the boundaries between the PC, Xbox, and cloud iterations of included games with seamless cloud saving between them. It was great to pick the device up and resume my playthroughs of Hollow Knight: Silksong and Clair Obscur without a thought to what platform I had bought or last played them on. Instant, unfettered access to the Game Pass catalog is also a huge plus for a device like this; it becomes the best Game Pass machine you can buy almost by default.
If you can sense a “but” coming, here it comes. Windows still sucks as a gaming platform, and the “Xbox full screen experience” does not manage to mitigate or disguise this glaring issue anything like as well as it needs to.
In terms of responsiveness and stability, the interface still lags far behind SteamOS and Big Picture Mode, never mind actual console front-ends (including the Xbox One it so closely resembles). Moving back and forth between the Xbox Ally and my Switch 2 was especially damning; the Nintendo console was vastly more responsive and easy to use, with a much more logically organized (if plain) interface, and needless to say, it never hung or crashed, which is not a claim I can make for the Xbox Ally. On Nintendo’s console, everything has been arranged to minimize the distance between you and the game, or game-related function. It should be stressed that this level of performance is a baseline expectation of any mass-market console, never mind a $1,000 one.
As it stands, the “Xbox full screen experience” feels like an uncomfortable halfway house between a proper console OS and a PC app. It sometimes struggles with something as simple as focus, if another app generates an unexpected pop-up. The interface elements are clearly fudged to work with a controller or touch screen, rather than designed from the ground up to work with them; sizing isn’t quite right and the flow feels awkward. Because it is a one-size-fits-all Windows app, rather than a custom hardware interface, it lacks basic functionality, like being able to view and manage the console’s storage, or manage the internet connection. Some of this can be found in Asus’ separate Armoury Crate device management app, which like the Xbox app can be booted from a single button press. Ultimately, though, you are unlikely to get far into Xbox Ally ownership without submitting to the buzzkill that is booting into full Windows for one reason or another.
It is worth noting that the “Xbox full screen experience” streamlines how much of Windows is running in the background, with benefits to game performance and battery life. But you can’t use the Xbox Ally without being conscious that you’re using Windows, from the unpredictable device sign-in using the power button’s fingerprint sensor, to the telltale Windows pop-ups or the office-productivity chic of the lock screen. It is a little unreliable and a little slow as well as being inherently uncool. It feels less like a console than a Steam Deck does.
As a new entrant in the PC handheld space, the ROG Xbox Ally is interesting, overpriced, and competent enough. As an attempt to close the usability gap between Windows and SteamOS within that sector, it’s the most qualified of successes; the gap is smaller, but it remains. As an experimental first pass at using Windows as the basis for a true-blood console platform, it leaves Microsoft’s engineers and designers with a mountain still to climb.
As a harbinger of Microsoft’s wider gaming strategy, the Xbox Ally is thrilling in theory, deeply frustrating in practice. The promise of seamless, borderless access to all your games and all your progress across multiple platforms in a single place is enthralling — even half-realized like this. It is arguably just what this fragmented industry needs. But the practical result is compromised, confusing, annoying to use, and prohibitively priced. The Xbox Ally X is emblematic of everything Microsoft’s gaming initiative has become, from its corporate acquisition strategy to the increasingly unaffordable boondoggle that is Xbox Game Pass: an incredibly costly attempt to hedge every bet and be all things to all people that is nominally successful in its goals, but that has, along the way, defeated its own purpose.
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