Project Xcloud preview serves as a passable, portable Xbox One

Remember the old Xbox “Jump In” ad campaign? Apparently it’s back.

Microsoft

Remember the old Xbox “Jump In” ad campaign? Apparently it’s back. Microsoft

This loading screen was up for about 60 seconds before the start of a new game.

Microsoft

This loading screen was up for about 60 seconds before the start of a new game. Microsoft

Yup, that’s me.

Microsoft

Yup, that’s me. Microsoft

This loading screen was up for about 60 seconds before the start of a new game. Microsoft

Yup, that’s me. Microsoft

Microsoft wants to know what you think after every stream during the preview.

Microsoft

How about I just write a long-form impressions article rather than using your form?

Microsoft

It’s a tiny indie game, you’ve probably never heard of it.

Microsoft

Tapping the on-screen Guide button brings up this menu, letting you connect with XBL friends.

Microsoft

Gears 5 looks pretty good, even on a tiny phone screen.

Microsoft

Reading those captions might require squinting or getting really close to the screen when playing on a phone…

Microsoft

Through nearly two decades of Xbox game consoles, Microsoft has never followed Nintendo’s and Sony’s lead in attempting to create a dedicated portable gaming system. Project Xcloud, which entered a limited public beta test this week, is an interesting end-run attempt at filling in that hole. Instead of downloadable games running locally, you stream games running on powerful remote servers over Wi-Fi. Instead of dedicated hardware, you use the smartphone you probably already own.

After spending a few days playing “portable” Xbox One games at home via Xcloud, we’re somewhat warming up to the idea. But there are enough hassles and caveats that we’re glad Xcloud isn’t serving as a full-on replacement for Microsoft’s existing gaming strategy just yet.

Head in the clouds

After getting approved for the preview, setting up our Xcloud test was as simple as logging in to the free Android app with a Microsoft account and connecting the controller via Bluetooth. There were about 60 seconds of loading when first starting up a game, but much less when switching back to an existing game after briefly moving to another app on the phone.

The preview app currently offers full access to a selection of four titles: Halo 5: Guardians, Gears of War 5, Killer Instinct, and Sea of Thieves. Each seems relatively forgiving for the streaming Xcloud format in its own way. Halo 5‘s generous auto-aiming lessens the impact of control latency on precise targeting. Gears of War 5 already has significant input latency when running on a local Xbox, perhaps making any additional Internet-based latency less noticeable. Killer Instinct‘s combo-heavy gameplay has generally forgiving timing windows which make frame-perfect inputs less of a necessity. And Sea of Thieves is a relatively casual exploration game where quick reactions are not crucial.

All that said, for the most part, playing though Xcloud on a good Internet connection feels practically indistinguishable from local play. Diving in to Halo 5: Guardians on my phone (with a cloud save automatically downloaded from Xbox Live) felt like slipping into a familiar coat, with the same smooth frame rate and snappy controls you’d expect on an HDTV. While there may have been a frame or two of added delay between my inputs and the on-screen action compared to the local version, I’d be hard pressed to tell the difference in a blind test.

“I took my Samsung Galaxy S9 on the bus with a controller. My commute was long enough to play the Gears 5 ‘boot camp’ tutorial via my Sprint 4G LTE connection.

“Merely walking around and blind-aiming a shotgun worked well enough. But I had to adjust my ‘active reload’ button-tap timing to compensate for 4G lag, and snapping into and out of a zoomed-aim perspective led to some hideous visual artifacts. You know how downloaded video files will sometimes show huge color blotches for a few seconds before snapping back into reasonable clarity? It was like that.” Where the Xcloud experience did often suffer was in image quality. While games would usually start at crisp HD resolutions, the image would sometime downscale very noticeably in the middle of play, resulting in grainy textures and washed out colors. This usually coincided with other people in the house making use of the same Wi-Fi network while I was playing, but not always.

Notably, the reduction in image resolution usually didn’t come with a similar downgrade in the apparent frame rate or control latency, which the Xcloud software seems to wisely prioritize. The one exception to this was during a session of Killer Instinct played while also streaming a baseball game on the TV and downloading files to a nearby laptop. Under this stress test (which reduced usable bandwidth on the phone to about 8Mbps), the game would noticeably stutter and sometimes stop altogether for a fraction of a second before running through the missed frames at super speed to catch up.