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ROG Xbox Ally - Review Thread

ROG Xbox Ally - $600

ROG Xbox Ally X - $1000


Polygon

>If the Xbox Ally is the future of Xbox, Microsoft is in trouble. 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.


IGN - 9 / 10

>The Xbox Full Screen Experience alone would probably be enough for me to recommend the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X to anyone looking for a new handheld gaming PC. But the fact that it’s so comfortable to use and performs so well is just icing on the cake. All it really needs now is a couple of software updates to really refine the Full Screen Experience and it will be a device for the history books.

Rock Paper Shotgun

>While it stumbles in the right direction, then, the ROG Ally X never fully lives up to the promise of being a truly tailored Windows 11 handheld. There are enough other reasons – the underwhelming screen, the middling battery life, the aggravating face button noise, the price, and especially the temperamental vibration – to give this handheld a miss. Or, at the very least, wait for some fixes.

WIRED - 7 / 10

>These are high-power, high-performance handhelds—but steep pricing and a cluttered UI hold Xbox's first portables back from greatness. Brilliant ergonomics. Extremely versatile. Compatibility with Steam, Epic, and other gaming clients. Cloud gaming works better than ever. BUT - Extremely expensive. Compromised performance on the Ally. Terrible AI “assistant” in Gaming Copilot (but can be turned off). No OLED screens. Cluttered UI. Xbox game library only includes "Play Anywhere" titles.

Radio Times - 2 / 5

>I don't really know who this is for. The Xbox ROG Ally is a solid console in a vacuum, but doesn't offer the value of its competitors. That isn't to say it's a terrible console – it's not. If you buy an Ally, I am sure you will get a huge amount out of it. My criticism is instead that I do not believe that it's worth buying over any of its counterparts. My main takeaway from my few weeks with the Xbox ROG Ally is that it showcases how good value the Steam Deck really is, and that is really not what you want from your new console's review period.

Eurogamer

>Only you can say if £800 is a reasonable price for a handheld that is capable of playing new, technically demanding games, but it's essentially what you need to pay to get this level of performance. Ultimately, I like what the ROG Xbox Ally X offers. It's not a true Xbox handheld console, but for a lot of people it's probably a better, more versatile device.




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New Exodus(rpg made by ex BioWare devs) cover looks similar to ME1 cover
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After my last post blew up here u/Evirstar send us this massive RX 5700XT
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Another lesser know easter egg in Ghost of Yotai
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Alan Wake 2 is Incredible and You Should Play It

I wrote this in Dec 2023 when the game first came out, and I decided to just post the whole thing here directly as I don't wanna mess with getting in trouble with self-promotion or link sharing, and I wanna share it because I think the game just deserves to be played by more people, because it's great and it's now on a big sale on Xbox ($18) and also on PS Plus:

Alan Wake wasn’t just one of the best games to release on Xbox 360, it was one of the best games of the entire generation. 13 years later, I still can’t believe a sequel is here, and after completing the game, I’m asking myself if this will be thought of in the same way.

I loved the first Alan Wake a lot. Like, a whole lot. In the middle of my Alan Wake 2 playthrough I jumped into the backwards compatible version on Xbox Series X and loaded into one of my old saves – and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t still look and feel great.

I love that it has this great horror theme without strictly being a horror itself, and I love that the combat and gameplay keeps things super tense without being overly scary. I love horror, but I love that Alan Wake was a more accessible type of horror story, especially for those who usually keep away from the scary stuff.

The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Silence

Alan Wake 2 is a very different game to Alan Wake. The sequel makes a full shift to survival horror, leaving behind many of the reasons I liked the first game so much, but I really love that Remedy was confident enough to not just update an old formula, but completely evolve everything about Alan Wake with the sequel.

There are a few things about the gameplay systems that I don’t love, but I’ll get back to that in a bit.

Remote Control

Remedy games are anything but average, and Alan Wake 2’s story and setting is an ambitious continuation of the first game, with the time between the first and second game being the same real time that’s passed between the release of the first game and its sequel.

What really makes things exciting – and I’m not going to say much about this – is that since CONTROL, we now know that some Remedy games may share a connected universe, and the way they’re going about it feels very smart and restrained – unlike, you know, the way some other people handle this sort of thing.

It takes Two to Tango

Alan Wake, the tortured writer who’s been trapped in the dark place for 13 years, now shares the limelight and torchlight with a second protagonist,

Saga Anderson, an FBI agent who travels to Bright Falls with her partner that looks a whole lot like Max Payne – not that one, and for intellectual property reasons, not this one either – to investigate a series of murders.

As you might expect, things start going a little “Stephen-King-y” pretty quick, with the bigger story then unfolding over the 20-30 hour campaign.

Bucket List

Something pretty neat is that in many of the Resident-Evil-esque saferooms, you can use a, well… bucket, to swap between Alan and Saga to progress their stories as they spiral towards the conclusion.

With Saga in the forests and familiar surroundings of Bright Falls and Alan in the “dark place”, represented as a twisted version of Alan’s perception of New York, it’s a nice literal change of scenery when you swap between them.

Saga is also leading in investigation which she manages in her “mind place”, and I loved the aspects of working through case files, linking evidence and discoveries or profiling characters – detective stuff is my jam.

Alan, on the other hand, uses a really nifty mechanic where he changes the story of his book to alter his surroundings and open up new scenarios and paths. I really loved just how seamless and creative it all was.

Interestingly enough, the game that kept coming to mind the most while playing Alan Wake 2 was actually The Evil Within 2, the survival horror from the same studio responsible for other horrific terrors such as, err… Hi-Fi Rush.

Out With the Old

The move to survival horror means that Alan Wake 2 loses
many of the elements that I really loved from the first game, like burning away words with your flashlight, a bigger focus on skedaddling from one light to the next and a focus on tension over scares, exchanging them for a more traditional horror game setup, including inventory management, save rooms and over-the-shoulder gun combat.

Also, make no mistake, Alan Wake 2 can be scary as balls sometimes, and environments that look like they come out of Silent Hill don’t help either. That said, some of the jump scare tactics are a little cheap and overused.

Bleh Witch Project

The combat itself is clunky and frustrating at times. I’d jumped back into the Resident Evil 7 Remake again just before playing Alan Wake 2 and also played the Dead Space Remake earlier in the year, and despite being such a similar combat system, Alan Wake 2 easily takes third place where combat is concerned.

Since we’ve lost the slow-motion and tension aspects of Alan Wake 1, I often found it very tricky to keep track of enemies, but in a frustrating way, not a scary or challenging way. Inventory management could also be better and didn’t really feel like it added too much to the experience.

Riddle Me This

The world is filled with discoverable stashes or puzzles that range from looking around the environment to doing some pretty gnarly maths problems.

What I really love is that you’re often just left to deal with it – no annoying hints being blurted out by your character. It sometimes left me frustrated that I couldn’t figure them out, and I even missed out on having some good gear for longer than necessary – but I liked that it respected me as a player, and let it be my problem. Google is just a few phone taps away anyways, right?

On that note, pacing could be better too, as I often found myself sort of just wombling around for long periods of time – and even with the world being semi-open for you to explore, I was never quite sure if I should go exploring down a side path or if the area I see on the map is an area I might need to visit as a part of the main story later.

Alan Wake 2 is still a fun game to play, although it feels clear that the storytelling came first for Remedy, and while I think that means that Alan Wake 2’s core gameplay could have been even better, I can really respect the focus on what they felt was the most important aspects of the experience.

See No Evil

What really helps to support the great story and discoveries, is that following on from the high standards set by CONTROL, Alan Wake 2 has some of the best graphics I’ve ever seen running on a console, while the music and soundtrack created for the game is top notch and a big part of the experience itself. I also wanted to note that I really loved that the characters would often make exclamations like that you’d expect from someone in the situation, often mirroring what I was saying and thinking as well.

I had the option of a performance mode that targets 60fps or a quality mode that targets 30fps but considering the pace of the game and the importance of the audio/visual aspects, I very happily opted to stick to the quality mode and was happy I did.

The image can get noisy at times, but the atmosphere provided by thick fog, dramatic lighting, beautiful reflections and incredibly detailed characters, environments and objects had me in a constant state of awe.

The game jumps between real video footage and video game graphics, and we’re getting so close to real looking visuals that these sorts of jumps are barely even jarring anymore.

It was also pretty polished at launch, although I had a few issues with cut or delayed audio a few times.

So, does it deserve to be Game of the Year (Note: Remember I wrote this in 2023)?

The excellent details or little frustrations are almost irrelevant next to the real reason that Alan Wake 2 is so special and why it deserves to be considered as the best Game of the Year.

2023 may be filled with many great games, but how many of them truly delivered an experience that you haven’t already sort of seen or played in
some form before. Sure, some gameplay elements may be a little familiar, but Alan Wake 2 is wildly experimental with its storytelling and presentation on top of still delivering a video game that’s wholly engrossing, fun to play and incredibly good to look at.

As a sequel to Alan Wake, it’s a bold shift in genre and story that’s usually only seen in reboots. As a continuation of Remedy’s connected universe, it’s an exciting next step that opens up the door for even more mystery and discovery. The door has definitely been left wide open.

Alan Wake 2 is what it looks like when a team that’s capable, confident and firing on all cylinders puts all their trust and energy into a focused vision by a creator that really seems to know what the hell they are doing.

But hey, Alan Wake 2 is just a video game, but it’s also not just a video game at all. It’s the rare combination of technical mastery and artistic vision that furthers our understanding of what video game experiences can be.

So, does Alan Wake 2 live up to the 13 years of expectations that I built up for myself? Well, no it doesn’t, because I expected to get more of the same, with a few twists and some better graphics. Instead, it was something very different and unexpected that pushed Remedy’s excellent approach to storytelling and immersive experiences to another level… and I can’t see how that isn’t a whole lot better.

TL;DR: See the post title

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Why do people need every single game to have a “grind”?

A lot of discourse I see around Battlefield 6 or any new game really that comes out today is “what is there to do once I unlock everything?” As if there is zero gameplay value in the games at all. It’s all about just watching a number go up. At that point does it really matter what game it is you are playing? If you NEED a grind to be having fun then any game would be enough to keep you engaged. I feel like most people’s brains are fried and don’t really like games anymore they just like grind.

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Objectives were super straight forward, I'll give them that! (Saints Row 2)
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And the award for the worst back of cover art ever goes to Battlefield 6. Why the wall of text!
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Years of GTA have prepared me for this moment
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Completionists, which game did you try to complete but gave up after some time?

Mainly because the achievement was too hard rather than tedious

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Shoutout to low poly indie games with a unique artstyle and aesthetic, gotta be one of my favorite genders
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2025/10/19 20:30:19
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