There's a slew of games optimized for touchscreens. Many of these games are already on phones, but they're far from "phone games." There are games like Dead Cells, Slay the Spire, Streets of Rage 4, Hellblade, Minecraft Dungeons, and Tell Me Why. These games utilize on-screen touchpads that you can move, configure, and customize to whatever size phone you have. Doing so is a touch unintuitive, and the first time I loaded it up, several of the buttons were so far off the screen I had no idea they existed. But once I figured it out, I was able to play a few games without many problems besides the obvious ones: no tactile feedback, my fingers covering half the screen, and the general slipperiness of touchscreen gaming. Even so, it's a viable way to log on for daily rewards or whatnot.
Xbox Cloud Gaming - Performance & Latency
Every streaming service review deserves a boilerplate disclaimer: When using Cloud Gaming (and every other game-streaming service), your internet connection is the single, mercilessly exacting determinant for how your experience will play out.
Suppose you're in the middle of rural America with a poor internet connection. In that case, there's really nothing you can do to achieve even a subpar cloud gaming experience, shy of buying a satellite and pointing it into your living room. But as 5G rolls out across the country, the required speeds will become available to more and more Americans.
Xbox Cloud Gaming requires at least 10Mbps download speeds and recommends a 5GHz WiFi connection. At 940mbps down, my San Francisco internet connection was nearly 100 times faster than necessary. That kind of bandwidth isn't typical though, even for San Francisco, so I also tried using a slower (but still adequate) WiFi connection, as well as a connection much further from the router.
The good news is connections were all pretty stable. Once a game started, I never dropped it. But checking a text message, or upping the brightness, or anything that required me to leave the game often booted me to the loading screen.
And unfortunately, loading takes a very long time - though it has improved greatly as the service has matured. For instance, several months ago, I measured that Halo 5 took 37 seconds to load. Today, it took just under 17 seconds.
Graphical fidelity and game size doesn't seem to factor, with smaller (possibly less in-demand) games sometimes taking longer to load. Celeste took 20 seconds to load, while Slay the Spire took 25 seconds to load. Which is, again, a marked improvement from where it started. Celeste had taken 47 seconds when Cloud Gaming launched on Android phones, and Slay the Spire had clocked in at a whopping 52 seconds.
Your internet connection is the single, mercilessly exacting determinant for how your experience will play out.
“ Still, after years of scrolling and tapping apps at fever-pace, these are long waits to stare at your phone. And on some occasions, the loading screen just never resolved. I waited more than four minutes for Guacamelee 2 to open and more than six minutes to boot up Ori and the Blind Forest. Neither opened.
Quitting the game and restarting it wasn't the silver bullet I'd hoped for, either. After quitting Ori, the next time I opened the game, it hung up on the loading screen again, then crashed to my home screen the following two times. Nothing about the service deterred me from it more than these will-they-won't-they loading screens.
Once actually in-game, my playing experience was mixed. Over the last few months, I've played nearly every game I was interested in, including Forza, Halo 5, Ori and the Blind Forest (once I eventually got it working), the Master Chief Collection, and Absolver, among many, many more. On mobile, the controls always seemed to register relatively snappily. I'm used to a certain level of barely perceptible latency while streaming, but in some cases, even when the visuals started artifacting like a thirty-year-old jpeg, the game still seemed to recognize my inputs. At one point, with nothing but blocky smudges on-screen, I was able to aim a Spartan Laser in the right direction and secure a double kill.
Xbox knows this, and it's licensed several phone-controller hybrids, including the Razer Kishi and Backbone One . I tested the Kishi and a Moga phone-clip that connects directly to your Xbox controller. With my 1,000 Mbps down connection, both of these control schemes were close to flawless, with no discernible latency when close to the router or hotspot. With a little distance, however, I could feel that almost negligible muddiness that comes with streaming games. Now and again, a small line would traverse down the screen, moving pixels ever so slightly to catch-up with the action.
I also had a slew of problems connecting next-gen controllers to Apple devices. With the 14.5 iOS update, Xbox Series controllers can now pair via bluetooth - but in practice, connecting to iOS devices can still be a little troublesome. These connection issues will surely be ironed out as Xbox Cloud gaming on iOS moves out of limited beta and Apple releases its own updates. But right now when paired with those awfully long load screens, I found setup to be most painful on iOS.
While browser support is still in limited beta, it's also worth pointing out that on Mac and Windows 10, I ran into a slew of problems. Audio and gameplay cut out was frequent, and at one point my computer stopped registering inputs from the controller. In many ways, your phone is the worst place to play these games due to the small screen and constant barrage of notifications that require your attention, so I'm eager to continue testing cloud gaming on browsers - especially as stability improvements continue to rollout. It's also worth noting that a controller is required for playing via browser. Mouse and keyboard are not supported - even in the case of games that have a PC version - as it's the console version that's being streamed.
Xbox Cloud Gaming - Bandwidth Usage
All game streaming services will eat through tons of data, but Xbox Cloud Gaming used a lot less data than we've come to expect. Unlike Stadia, which burned through 6.2GBs in 30 minutes of gameplay, we saw a much more reasonable 1.3GBs of data on Xbox's service in that same time.
That's because, unlike Stadia's 4K target, until recently Xbox Cloud Gaming only aimed for a 720p resolution - but now has 1080p resolutions, with up to 60fps. That could be a bit of a disappointment for resolution aficionados, but your data cap will thank you.
Like the Netflix of 1998, Xbox Cloud Gaming has immense promise. But unlike the pre-Millenium Netflix, Xbox Cloud Gaming has actual competition. Run-of-the-mill technical hurdles dampen some of Xbox Cloud Gaming's gleam, but I can't help but think how miraculous it is that people no longer require a PC or Xbox to stream such an immense and shining catalog of games.
