The Xbox One’s inclusion of Kinect is one reason it costs $500, compared with $400 for the PS4. In Xbox One, Kinect has a wider viewing angle, higher-quality image and facial recognition for identifying individual users. It says, “Hi, Molly” when I sit down on the couch, and then loads my personalized dashboard and recent activities. It’s cool and futuristic, but works inconsistently.

The Xbox has Kinect-enabled voice controls built in throughout; commands like, “Xbox, go home” or “Xbox, go to TV” start specific functions, or you can say things like, “watch FX” to control television playback. You can also use hand gestures for navigation and selection, but as with most gesture controls, the motions required are hilariously impractical for regular use.

Unfortunately, despite the gee-whiz appeal of the voice features, the verbal commands aren’t practical either. They don’t always work, and it’s inefficient to say “page down” repeatedly in the TV guide, compared with quietly pressing a button.

I found myself using basic commands like “Xbox, go home,” and then navigating the rest using the controller or my TiVo remote. And I found it annoying to have to go through the Xbox to get to TV every time. My 6-year-old son loved shouting commands at the console; unfortunately it rarely recognized his voice, and his attraction soon faded.

All this description illustrates the overall fatal flaw of the Xbox One: It’s too much work.

I spent hours setting up the Xbox One. It was in my home for two full days before I enjoyed even a second of game play; there were technical issues with its TV integration (solved by swapping out an HDMI cable after 90 minutes of troubleshooting), and there were endless updates to download.

Both consoles are notorious for requiring frequent updates, but even the three game discs Microsoft sent me demanded updates before I could play. And the Xbox and its games are astonishingly bandwidth-hungry. One game disc, once inserted, asked for a 13-gigabyte download before I could even play.