ROG Xbox Ally review: I don't really know who this is for

In August, I had the chance to try out the ROG Xbox Ally at Gamescom, and I was rather impressed by what I saw in the 10 minutes of Forza Horizon 5 that I was afforded.

Two months on, after a few weeks with one in the comfort of my own home, I would be lying if I said that I was not underwhelmed by the console.

For the sake of clarity, I want to make clear now that this is a review of the weaker, white ROG Xbox Ally, and not the more powerful, black ROG Xbox Ally X.

The Ally retails for £499.99 in the UK ($599.99 in the US), a whole £300 ($400) cheaper than the Ally X, for which you get a weaker CPU and GPU, 16GB RAM instead of 24GB RAM, and 512GB storage compared to 1TB.

They represent a collaboration with Xbox and ASUS, rebranding ASUS's existing ROG Ally duo with the Xbox stamp of approval.

The clearest example of this is that Armoury Crate, the original Ally's means of tweaking and optimising your device's settings as well as launching games, has been replaced on the latter front by the Xbox App.

This thankfully removes the need to use the rather clunky and bloated Armoury Crate as a launcher in favour of the Xbox App, which can detect and launch games from Steam, Epic Games, Battle.net or any other separate launchers you may have.

This is a godsend, and aside from a few dodgy interactions where it launched Steam's Big Picture Mode instead of the game I had selected, works like a charm.

In tandem with this, we now have a nifty Xbox button on the Xbox Ally which gives you easy access to the App as well as the Xbox Game Bar.

Though it takes a touch of getting used to using all of this as your main means of navigating your games, once you get the hang of it, it's a breeze to use, and probably my favourite thing about the console.

Unfortunately, that really is about it for what's new, and indeed, what stood out about the console.

When it comes to actually playing games, I was rather underwhelmed.

I was, of course, not expecting the Ally to be able to comfortably run the newest games, which it cannot, for the most part.

At 720p and the lowest settings, Borderlands 4 averaged around 20fps and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 sometimes crawled up to 30fps.

I had, however, expected decent performance on some older titles, encouraged by my time with Forza at Gamescom, which does hit a reliable 50-60fps even at higher settings.

That being said, many other titles from a similar time struggle significantly more.

Elden Ring, for example, just about managed to hit 40fps on the lowest settings while standing idly by, before very quickly tanking to under 30fps as soon as I entered any kind of combat – not exactly ideal for such a demanding title.

I had similar experiences with Alan Wake 2, Ghostrunner 2, Marvel's Spider-Man and more.

Even The Witcher 3, a visually impressive game but a game that released in 2015 nonetheless, would drop from 50-60fps to below 40fps when using the dedicated Steam Deck graphics preset.

The Ally should not be struggling with a decade-old game. Each performed slightly differently, though none to the level that I would expect from a device that retails for £150 more than a base Steam Deck, and this is all while plugged in – good luck trying to play anything more demanding than Dead Cells on a long journey.

I have spent a tremendous amount of time in Armoury Crate testing various combinations of RSR, RIS, Radeon Boost and more. The exorcism I have performed to purge the likes of Copilot and its fellow Microsoft bloat may have helped marginally, but largely to no avail.

The solution here is likely to mod the ever-loving hell out of some of these games, as you would on any weaker PC, and I'm sure that reckoning will take place in the weeks after release, but it's worth bearing in mind that this is the performance you will get out of the box.

But the Ally does provide one excellent workaround, or rather, it did.

Xbox Cloud Gaming allows you to stream games from the cloud, relying upon Xbox's more powerful hardware to do the heavy lifting while your console simply displays the output.

This does require a good internet connection, so it's certainly not something that you would be doing away from home, but is a nice option to be able to play the newest games on your Ally.

The reason I say "it did" as opposed to "it does," is that Xbox locks the highest 1440p streaming quality for Cloud Gaming behind its Game Pass Ultimate subscription, with the cheaper tiers getting 720p and 1080p respectively.

This is still a decent option, but considering how big a selling point Cloud Gaming could have been for the Ally, it makes it all the more baffling that Xbox would choose to so rampantly increase the price of its Game Pass subscriptions mere weeks before release.

I say this as someone that has been a Game Pass subscriber for many years until the price hike – the prospect of Game Pass on the go was my main reason for wanting a ROG Xbox Ally.

Now, not only are you paying £500 for the Ally itself, but you're shelling out nearly £300 a year on top of that just to cover your Game Pass Ultimate subscription to make the most of it.

This reveals the real issue of the ROG Xbox Ally– its price point.

For around £150 more than the base Steam Deck, you aren't really getting anything extra.

The 1080p resolution is nice, but again, I have been forced to run most things at 720p anyway, so I would argue you're better off with the more expensive OLED Steam Deck, which you can fairly easily mod to use Game Pass on if that's a must for you.

On the flip side, if you do want to play more modern games, once you factor in the exorbitant cost of Cloud Gaming, you may as well just purchase the more expensive and powerful ROG Xbox Ally X instead, or even waiting for the Lenovo Legion Go 2.

The question I have been asking myself is: "Who is this for?"

My simple answer is that I don't really know.

It's too expensive to buy over a Steam Deck. It's not powerful enough to buy over its more expensive sister console. It doesn't add enough to be worth upgrading from the old Ally to. It doesn't excel at anything, leaving it lagging behind its competitors in every regard.

It's the Xbox Series S of its duo, but while the Series S has a role as a cheaper console for a casual gamer, the Ally is inherently a more enthusiast piece of kit – nobody willing to drop £500 on a handheld console is a casual gamer just looking to play a few rounds of Call of Duty!

That isn't to say it's a terrible console – it's not (hence the three stars). 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 ROG Xbox 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.

The ROG Xbox Ally releases on 16th October 2025.

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