The game is still king

"Like the 360 only better" is a bit of a theme for the Xbox One, at least on day one. Even the launch titles for Xbox One eerily echo the 360’s sequel- and franchise-rich launch. That’s not surprising: game selection at launch tends to run the gamut of genres so that there’s something virtual for virtually everyone, regardless of taste and age range. The Xbox One is launching with 22 games overall, most of them very familiar. As we said with the PlayStation 4, there’s comfort in picking up a controller and knowing the mechanics, but it also means what’s "next-gen" about the console isn’t necessarily obvious at first blush.

Even if you buy a physical disc, all Xbox One games require installation. You can indeed play games while they install, and they start installing as soon as you pop the disc in the drive, but it takes a lot longer than on Sony's new PlayStation: it took 19 minutes for Call of Duty: Ghosts to install 54 percent of the game, at which point it allowed me to start playing. And even with the installations, load times aren’t any better than last generation. We still had to contend with tedious load screens for most of the games we played — it took more than a minute and a half to load Dead Rising 3 from the home screen, much longer than anything on the PS4. This much waiting feels even more ridiculous as the Xbox gets ever more powerful.

A few good launch games, but these won't be the Xbox One's best

And make no mistake, the Xbox One still only downloads one title at a time. Games can be "ready to play" before they hit the 100 percent installation mark, and you can pause or cancel downloads that are getting in the way, but if you’re downloading a big game, you’ll still need to find something else to do while you wait for it download gigabytes upon gigabytes of content.

Once you fill up a sizable fraction of your hard drive with an Xbox One game, what’s the payoff? When you compare the same exact game across different consoles, there’s a clear difference between Xbox One and, say, 360 or PS3, but compared to the PlayStation 4 it’s more or less a wash. Some games look and play slightly better on PS4, some on Xbox One, but really you’re getting a similar experience.

However, Microsoft exclusives like Forza Motorsport 5 and Ryse: Son of Rome are true cinematic spectacles. They’re gorgeous games that really look next-gen and won’t take a lot of training for someone to jump in and play. Forza, especially, doesn’t feel like a launch game built for an unproven console — the attention to detail is phenomenal, and there aren’t really any performance issues we saw. Ryse, meanwhile, is essentially the movie Gladiator with simple controls and a focus on narration and dismemberment.

On the other end of the technology spectrum, Dead Rising 3 eschews visual fidelity to instead focus on making the Xbox One an undead-manufacturing powerhouse — and it’s actually really impressive just how many individual zombies can be on screen without a hit on performance, and how much mayhem you can cause.

And then there’s Zoo Tycoon, a reimagining of a classic simulation game that’s somehow the most adorable thing we’ve played in the last few years — it has literally brought people in The Verge office to tears, it’s so cute. Admittedly, that game isn’t for everyone.

When the Xbox 360 launched, it had an impressive variety of Xbox Live digital titles — 10 in all, including the critically acclaimed addiction Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, which was an old-school arcade game you could pick up and play for either a few minutes or a few hours. Of all the launch titles, digital and physical, that’s the one major genre Microsoft didn’t check off its list.

Killer Instinct comes close in an update to the classic fighter, but there’s a major learning curve that can be off-putting. (Killer Instinct is also notable for its business model — download a "demo" with one playable character, purchase additional characters in a bundle or a la carte. It’s not an inherently bad model for consumers, but it’s definitely something we suspect will be more prevalent this console generation now that the platforms support it.)

Both in terms of graphics and gameplay, the Xbox One and PS4 are more or less equivalent. Where the Xbox experience differs is the Kinect. Despite its impressive power, it’s currently just a better version of the 360’s implementation when it comes to games. Kinect-exclusive titles fall into two very predictable categories: full-on fitness trainers, and fitness trainers masked as arcade games like Just Dance and Kinect Sports Rivals. Xbox Fitness is actually a great demonstration of how eerily accurate the new Kinect sensor is — and it's something I’ll be using, a lot, as long as my roommates are far, far away from the house.

The Kinect is really where the Xbox One's gameplay separates itself

Kinect’s most interesting use is as additive functionality, which you’ll see in a majority of the launch titles. You can shout commands to your army in Ryse or to your friends in Dead Rising 3, or lean and peek around corners with your head in Forza 5 and Battlefield 4. Zoo Tycoon is the best example yet: it’s much easier to say "view animal," for example, than it is to highlight an exhibit and drill down to the status screens. Want to hang out with lions? They’ll mimic your hand waves, your ear scratching, even your winks. Get close enough to the glass and your reflection will show up.

There’s already a fair amount of good gameplay on the One, but here’s the most exciting part about launch games — they almost certainly won’t stand the test of time. The best years of both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are a ways off. Twelve months from now, the library for both consoles will almost certainly be more fleshed out, and the best games could take even longer.

The longer developers play with these consoles, the better they’ll understand the new platforms. That means shorter load times, better visuals, and more chances to be creative with all the power these new platforms have to offer.

SmartGlass

Just in case the Kinect and a controller weren't enough, you can also control many of the Xbox One's features using the SmartGlass mobile app for Windows 8, Windows Phone, Android and iOS. As with just about every aspect of Microsoft's new console, the app is similar to what's already available on the 360, but with a few new features of varying utility. SmartGlass lets you view basic information like messages, achievements, and friend activity on the second screen. It also allows you to launch companion apps for games that have them — Dead Rising 3 in particular has an extensive companion app with some features exclusive to the second screen. After you get a cellphone in the game, you can use your real phone in place of the in-game phone to access a map of the city and receive missions over the phone; you can also look up items on the map, get text messages and gameplay hints, call a friend to help you fight off the zombie horde, or even request an airstrike from your phone.

You can also launch games and apps via SmartGlass, both in full screen and "snapped" view, which isn’t that useful in practice. In theory it means you can launch a second app like Skype without having to exit the game you're currently playing, but in reality the process takes about the same amount of time whether you use a smartphone or a controller, and it’s faster to use Kinect when it works. However, SmartGlass can also serve as a touchscreen remote control for many apps, and that comes in particularly handy with Internet Explorer. While touchscreens are far from the best way to type, they're certainly preferable to an Xbox controller, and SmartGlass is the easiest way to write out URLs and scroll through webpages on the One. With the Windows 8 version of SmartGlass, you can even tap a button to open the same page you’re viewing on the Xbox on your laptop or tablet as well.