When the ROG Xbox Ally handheld was announced at the Xbox Games Showcase earlier today, it was immediately accompanied by a series of previews for the device, both in written form and on YouTube.
And, based on what we're seeing so far, there seems to be a lot of positivity surrounding these two versions of the ROG Xbox Ally! GamesRadar even went was far as suggesting it's as exciting as the Nintendo Switch 2!
Let's have a look at what these previews are saying about the ROG Xbox Ally so far:
IGN (ROG Xbox Ally X Preview)
"After getting a brief hands-on demo with the Xbox Ally X, I think we might be the closest we’ve been to having the ideal gaming handheld when it launches during the holiday season this year.
"I played Gears of War: Reloaded for about 15 minutes running at 1080p with high settings, AMD FSR 3.1 at Quality mode, 16x anisotropic filtering, and maintained a smooth 60 fps the entire time – it’s worth noting that the system was running in Turbo mode, which increases power to get higher performance at the expense of heat and battery life."
Game File (ROG Xbox Ally X Preview)
"It ran nicely, felt good in my hands, all of which is to be expected, right? The controls felt like Xbox controller grips. The gameplay was crisp and clear."
GamesRadar (ROG Xbox Ally X Preview)
"While I'm certainly curious to know what a first-party developed Xbox handheld would look like – to be clear, Xbox staff I've spoken to have made no commitment to such a device in the future – the ROG Xbox Ally X is shaping up to be an exceptionally solid solution.
Booting up the ROG Xbox Ally X, rather than hit standard Windows 11 OS screens I'm pushed directly into the Xbox full screen experience.. It's really clean, it's fast, and features none of the nonsense that I sometimes (fairly or not) associate with playing on PC."
As you can see, most of the previews right now are for the more premium ROG Xbox Ally X, so we'll have to wait and see what the critics think of the standard ROG Xbox Ally - the one that's bound to be much cheaper when it arrives.
Still, this is a good start! There are a bunch of YouTube previews as mentioned too, and we'll throw a couple of them down below for you to have a watch of. There's no release date for either the ROG Xbox Ally or the ROG Xbox Ally X yet, but we know they're coming in Holiday 2025 - with more details to follow soon.