Xbox Series S Check-In: Ghostwire: Tokyo

I came in with low expectations and was modestly surprised

Xbox Series S Performance Mode screenshot taken by the author.

Tango Gameworks’ 2022 release Ghostwire: Tokyo was an intense rendering challenge for the PS5 and a GPU-heavy game on PCs. So, I went into this year’s Xbox release expecting a similar technical showing — and with some extreme skepticism towards the little Xbox Series S.

In spite of Microsoft’s huge marketing push, I wouldn’t fully call the Series S a next generation machine. It’s more like a firm half-step. I love the console, and I think its CPU and storage speed are undeniably impressive for the price, but it just misses true next gen status for me due to its lack of memory and its cut-down GPU. It frequently has to go without graphical effects and the range of performance settings found on the more expensive machines.

Ghostwire: Tokyo is no exception. This game has tons of different performance and quality modes on the PS5 and Xbox Series X, but just two settings on the Series S. There’s a “Quality” mode locked at 30FPS, and a “Performance” mode that targets 60FPS. The latter has a big warning in the options menu that it’s not going to hit that target all the time and that users will notice dips.

I’ve played many hours of each mode on the small cheaper console, and the settings do exactly what they…