Bought for husbands birthday. A great price and was repacked like it was new. Which made it a perfect gift! He’s loving playing on it and had no issues. It’s no different from a brand new one!

Purchased this little beast too play Starfield as it wasn’t coming too Playstation. Anyway! So impressed with this little guy, easy set up. I paired it up with my AOC AGON AG275QXN/EU gaming monitor which is 1440p. Looks great! Got game pass ultimate for now, great games too get stuck in with. Recommended

I got the Xbox Series S refurbished for 149.99. The console and controller look brand new, with no marks and works perfectly.

I’ve had a PS5 since launch but got the Series S as it was a good deal plus I wanted to take advantage of Game Pass and play Starfield when it comes out. So you’ll probably see me comparing the two consoles a lot.

First the good. As a console it’s powerful enough to cope with all the new releases. The size of the thing is astonishingly small compared to the PS5 and the minimalistic design is clean and crisp. The customisable menus and options are great, especially folders which is currently sorely missing from the PS5. The ability to buy and play games from the original Xbox to the current generation is great for nostalgia (I’m very tempted to revisit Lost Odyssey). The ability to carry on where you left off when switching between games is handled a lot better on the Xbox than PS5. Also the Game Pass subscription is good value and means you rarely have to purchase additional games. Lets face it, considering there’s no disc drive most people who purchase the Series S will be subscribing to Game Pass.

Then the bad points. When I first turned the console on I decided to install Halo Infinite and Forza 5, then I realised I had used way over half of the available hard disk space. Basically the base drive space is not big enough and you have no option than to buy an additional hard drive if you want more than a handful of games installed. This can be achieved either through an external hard drive or an overpriced official expansion. I found the controller feels a bit cheap compared to the PS5, nothing to ruin the experience but it just doesn’t feel next gen to me. In my opinion the Xbox’s UI feels quite cluttered and whilst it gets the job done, it does feel a bit like menus within menus. I’ve also noticed that there are a few bugs within the UI where on rare occasions the menus/processes hang or don’t load.

Overall I can’t fault the Xbox Series S for the price I paid. It’s great value for money and although it isn’t as powerful as the Series X or PS5, it’s a an excellent option for those who don’t want to spend a huge amount on a next gen console. There are a few minor annoyances as I previously mentioned, with the only major one being the tiny hard drive.

Game Pass is this console’s saving grace, offering a huge catalogue of games at a relatively low price and without it I’d probably be a lot more disappointed. You’d be hard pressed to find many big improvements over the One S other than the (admittedly greatly) improved loading times in most games and the smoothness of the UI.

If it looked and ran great on the One S, it’ll look the same here but run better. Any last-gen games are going to benefit from stable frame rates, but it won’t turn a 30fps locked game into a 60/120fps locked game. They’ll also benefit from drastically improved loading times, which alone is a worthy upgrade. It’s unfortunate that you can’t run the One X versions of games on here due to how the backwards compatibility layer works, meaning for those coming from the One S this won’t feel like much of a graphical upgrade, and will be a downgrade for those coming from the One X. The even bigger caveat is that this also applies to BC of older gen (360/OG) games, which don’t get to benefit from the same 4K upscaling and graphical improvements the X models do.

But what about Series optimised games? The new stuff? Well, there isn’t a lot of it right now and likely for the for the next year after launch. What is there, really does show an improvement both graphically and performance-wise over the One S. Forza Horizon 4 for example is 1080p/60fps on the Series S and it plays great! As developers get accustomed to the new toolkits they’ll be able to pump out even more impressive performance out of this small box, but for now it’s not too shabby. This is a secondary console to my PS5, so I’m playing it on the same 55″ 4K TV and while it’s less sharp up close, from couch distance it still looks pretty good to my eye. I don’t feel like I’m missing out by not having the Series X when playing optimised games, but the older games being the One S versions really does make me reconsider my purchase decision knowing that many S titles will run at below 1080p resolutions which don’t upscale nicely to 4K and come out muddy.

512gb storage isn’t great, and roughly only 360gb of that is usable. Still, I managed to fit a dozen games on there ranging from some 360 titles to some Series S optimised ones. As games don’t need the 4K textures on the S, they’re usually not too big in size. Some games are 100+gb, particularly multiplayer titles, so if you’re someone who regularly swaps between games you may find the storage limiting. You can move games off to an external drive just for safe keeping, freeing up internal space, but you can only play older gen games off it. Any new games will require to be installed on the internal storage. At 200+ for a 1TB expansion card, you’re better off just buying the Series X to begin with. The small storage space works for me, but it may not work for you.

The console is small. Not much wider and taller than a Switch, which is pretty impressive. It also runs whisper quiet, and without a disc drive there’s no spinning disc noises either. The large fan does a pretty good job of keeping it cool, and to make it even more impressive, the power supply is integrated into the console! Seriously, well done Microsoft. I do wish it had a disc drive, though. Physical games can usually be found for cheap months after release, but you’ll be paying full price (excluding sales) for digital. Not an issue for me, as it’s primarily for Game Pass games.

The controller is, in my opinion, a huge improvement over the last one despite the subtle changes. The textured, matte triggers feel much better than the glossy material that would get grimy over time. The joystick dimples are a little wider too, and a little shorter, making it much more comfortable for my thumbs during long play sessions. The D-Pad is excellently tactile, if a little obnoxiously loud. I’m all for removable battery compartments, but can we make the next iteration contain rechargeable batteries in the box? Overall, it’s a pretty great controller. I do enjoy the Dualsense’s features and ergonomics a little more, but this isn’t far behind.

Okay, so is it worth it? Sure, if you want it as a secondary console you’ll probably get a lot of love out of it. As a primary console or upgrade to One S/X? It has a lot of unrealised potential, but older games will never be at their “best” on this. If you’re okay with that, then yeah it’s a good buy.