After having a week to mess around with the New Xbox Experience, I think it’s about time I sit down and write up my impressions on the update. Now anyone who has been following NXE progress already knows everything there is worth knowing. Due to this, I’m going to try keeping this short and simply give my opinion on a few things which worked well and not so well.

The first thing you’ll be prompted to do once you install NXE is creating your avatar. As I explored all the customisation options, I was a little surprised at all the things you could add to your virtual representation. Basically if you want to make your avatar look like you, it’s fairly decent at getting the job done, but if you want to just make something cool or whacky, this seems to be a lot easier to do. Face paints, vampire teeth, elf ears, you can even get a monocle. That’s right, a fucking monocle.

As promised the NXE is mostly faster at loading sections of the dashboard, but I noticed it still takes a lot more than I’d like for a game description page to load up. I imagine this is because it’s trying to load all kinds of new crap regarding the game such as related downloads, screenshots, box art and a description. Still, at worst the loading times are simply as bad as the current dashboard, yet at best they’re substantially faster, so I can live with that.

Though Microsoft has assured people their themes will work fine on the NXE, what they didn’t say is how awful they’d look. If you look at screenshots of the new dashboard, you’ll see that half of the background is blocked by the foreground, meaning only the top half of your wallpaper can be seen most of the time. This problem will be solved as companies make wallpapers with this issue in mind, but don’t expect that Castle Crashers theme you installed to look that great upon upgrading.

Party chat, the feature I was most excited about, works just as I imagined. If your friends are online and you want to get a nice discussion going as you play Fallout 3 and they play Gear s of War 2, this is now possible. Optionally, if you’re in a clan and you want to focus on communication between your members without hearing that fucking asshole make jokes about tea and crumpets, this is a much better way of muting everyone around you.

Ultimately my message to you all is don’t be excited over this update too much. As with anything, when you get too hyped you just get a lot more disappointed. Yet at the same time, don’t misunderstand my warning as me saying the NXE isn’t great; it’s simply a fresh coat of paint. Once you download the update I highly doubt you’ll be missing the old dashboard, as it seriously feels outdated when compared to the NXE,  both functionally and aesthetic ally. There are many positive/negative details I could mention, but I think it will be best for everyone to discover these themselves on the 19th of November.