Launch Day First Impressions: ROG Xbox Ally X (Patreon)

Today’s the day for this new Windows-based handheld, and I’ve been futzing around with it for most of the day. Some of that is because I want to run Steam and Steam games on it, I guess if I was purely playing games out of the Xbox app (does anyone actually do this?) I would’ve just installed some games and started trying them out?

But mostly I’ve been dealing with Windows setup, Windows updates, and a bunch of firmware updates and all that. Windows eventually updated to 25H2, though it ended up downloading a zillion updates before that because the 25H2 install failed out the first time it tried to do it.

On first launch I immediately got caught in a full-screen browser window with more detail on some error message that it was throwing. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t let me out of that screen, and tapping the touchscreen just made it make the Windows 11 error sound. Cycling power got me out of this.

After the 25H2 update, Windows 11 completely ditched my fingerprint (the power button is also a fingerprint sensor) and PIN code. This left me completely unable to log into Windows 11 for a bit. It tossed up a “hey, you need to tap here and set a new PIN code” message, but there wasn’t actually anything to tap, and tapping all those words and the screen itself didn’t initially do anything. After fingerblasting the screen with my index finger for about 10 seconds while shouting “are you fucking kidding me???” the PIN reset screen eventually showed up. However, that screen isn’t built for controller input! And the little shortcut that’s supposed to pull up a software keyboard didn’t work! So I had to fumble around with a USB-C keyboard and plug that in to get it to accept the PIN. Still not sure if it has my fingerprint in there somewhere, now that I think about it…

This device seems powerful from what I’ve been running on it so far, with one particular unnamed-due-to-embargo game running surprisingly well on it. I realize that isn’t helpful. But performance seems like it’ll depend on quite a few factors and the mere specs of the device won’t always tell the full tale since it’ll be up to games to, say, support AMD’s upscaling solution or not. Some games will need tweaking. Skate, for example, defaulted to low and was locked to 30fps, but I was able to turn it most of the way and switch to 60fps and that worked just fine. BALL X PIT runs great, unsurprisingly.

But, ultimately, I think this entire interface and this entire method of interacting with a copy of Windows 11 isn’t anywhere close to ready for the average player. Especially anyone fooled into thinking this thing is “an Xbox.” The interface is sometimes sluggish, occasionally unresponsive, and I’ve already found myself getting thrown into menus here and there that simply aren’t optimized for two analog sticks and a touchscreen. Armory Crate, Asus’ built-in configuration tool, lets you attempt to swap the controls over to desktop mode, letting you fake a mouse cursor with the analog sticks, but this feels exactly as cumbersome as it sounds. The Steam Deck just feels light years ahead of this device when it comes to the user experience and available controls and I’d say it’s actually kind of embarrassing that this thing shipped in this state. Some of this is just the nature of the beast, right? It’s a new segment, still a new type of device that hasn’t reached mainstream popularity. But it’ll never get there with interfaces like this. It’s a proper chicken and egg problem, but if Microsoft truly thinks that Windows-based machines are the future of Xbox, they have a lot of work to do.

Naturally, a lot of these growing pains are things you’ll only see when you’re first setting up the device. Between you getting used to the quirks of its interface and you eventually just getting things setup the way you like it, you won’t have to dick around with it as much once you get rolling. That’s where I need to get to before I continue, so I’ll let you know how it goes. Either way, I think this thing is a really hard thing to recommend at $1,000. Even if they nailed the interface and UX, that’s a whole lot of money for something that, yes, is more powerful than a Steam Deck, but how many truly powerful PC games are you looking to run on a handheld right now? If you just need a BALL X PIT machine or want to play MegaBonk or Hades II on the go, a Steam Deck is cheaper and easier to use. This is clearly a bump up, but so far it doesn't feel like a generational leap in power above the current Steam Deck specs. More on all this next week.

Below are the quirks and notes I took down while messing around with it today, in case you want to know a little bit more.

Some things I would have found interesting to know beforehand:

The Xbox app—your main menu thing—loses focus sometimes, and the controls don’t work if the app isn’t in focus, so you sometimes have to tap the screen to refocus it before it’ll work.

Launching Steam games from the Xbox interface occasionally causes a terminal window that is slightly larger than the screen resolution to appear for a bit? More weird than anything else, I don’t know.

The dedicated button for Armory Crate makes it way less of a burden that it was on the original ROG Ally.

If you drop to desktop, you’re given an option to swap back to the Xbox Full-Screen Experience, but that comes with a performance hit. The system recommends that you reboot instead.

It ships with Windows 11 Home on it, which means you can’t Remote Desktop into it. Personally, I’d much rather be able to remote into it when I need to do mouse and keyboard stuff because it only has USB-C ports on it and I don’t have a USB-C mouse handy. You can upgrade it to Pro, but the official process for that is $99. I actually already paid that to upgrade the original ROG Ally that I bought and returned when those came out, but as far as I can tell, there’s no way to transfer that upgrade over to a new machine. Guess I should’ve stolen the upgraded product key off that Ally before I returned it, huh?

The Xbox app and Steam will fight for control of the Xbox guide button, which by default pops the Xbox game bar’s compact mode.

Unlike Steam Big Picture Mode, the Xbox app doesn’t seem to have any sort of game-specific controller configuration. So if you, like, want to make one of the back buttons press F1 (which is my Steam Deck workaround for popping the RetroArch menu), it’s easy to set that up… but it becomes a system-wide setting. Armory Crate, annoyingly, does seem to have game-specific mapping options, but that seems to require you to launch games from Armory Crate? Need to investigate this more.

Found a lot of cases where Steam games were picking settings that were way lower than they should be. I was able to turn Skate most of the way up, for example, but it defaulted to low.

The Steam version of Call of Duty simply wouldn’t run. It’d act like it was and then just drop back to the Steam interface. I was able to just download the Game Pass version and play that instead, which is where I ran into another issue: lining up headshots on this tiny screen is a real hassle.

Battlefield 6 (also a Steam game) defaulted to auto-setttings and actually ran quite well on first launch. Still not sure I want to play a shooter—especially one with a longer encounter range than Call of Duty—on a screen this size, but you absolutely can do it.

Sometimes Steam Big Picture mode gets cut off at the top and bottom. Toggling the Windowed/Full Screen option back and forth in the Steam settings fixes this. Annoying.