Recently Microsoft started rolling out its new game streaming service in Australia, Project xCloud. The service is only available to those who have applied for it, luckily, I was one of the people who was accepted for it, and I have good news. Project xCloud is Great!... when it works.
I live in a regional area and the first time I used xCloud in town it was fantastic. I never thought I’d play halo on my phone, but it worked, and it works well. There were little to no frame rate dips and the controls were extremely responsive. The game looked great too, there were no texture pops or lag. I played it on a Samsung Galaxy S20 5G and the screen worked beautifully with the game. I also played Ori and the Will of the Wisps and worked just as well.
The app did drain a bit of battery, I played for about 20 minutes and it drained about 10% of my phone’s battery. This wasn’t to be unexpected, but it was no worse than watching YouTube videos on my phone. It was also easier on my data than I expected, after 20 mins of play it only used about 500MB if that. So if you’re using constantly you might go over your limit, but if you have a lot of data that it probably won’t bother you.
There are several reasons why xCloud is great as a service, not just as another avenue to find games to play. The first and biggest reason (for me at least) is that you don’t have to download games to play, all of the games that are there are playable straight away. There is nothing to keep up to date either, all games are immediately updated so there is no need to wait for games to update before you play them.
The downside to xCloud is that if you don’t have a perfect connection then it isn’t worth using. I live only a few minutes out of town and even with full reception, xCloud lagged and constantly disconnected. While this was annoying to test, when I’m at home I’m normally pretty content with my own Xbox so it's not making me put down xCcloud forever. Another somewhat bothersome feature of xCloud is the lack of comptroller rumble support, though again, it is far from a deal-breaker.
All in all the xCloud service is great, if you have good internet then it is well worth getting if our connection isn’t then it's probably not worth your time. Project xCloud will release fully next year and will be free with Game Pass Ultimate.
Here is a list of all the games available on xCloud:
· Hellblade: Snua’s Sacrifice
· Minecraft: Dungeons
· Halo: The Master Chief Collection
· Destiny 2
· PUBG
· Tekken 7
· Ori and the Will of the Wisps
· Sea of thieves
· Borderlands 2
· ARK: Survival Evolved
· Borderlands the Pre-Sequel
· Batman: Arkham Knight
· Black Desert
· Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon
· Code Vein
· Cricket 19
· Day Z
· Dead by Daylight: Special Edition
· Devil May Cry
· eFootball PES 2020
· F1 2019
· Forza Horizon 4
· Gears 5
· Halo Wars 2
· Hitman
· Just Cause 4
· Resident Evil 7: Biohazard
· Shadow of the Tomb Raider
· Civilisation 6
· Skyforge
· Smite
· Stellaris
· WWE 2K20
· Yakuza 0
