NOVEMBER 2020 PCWorld 101PC or Xbox, but in a much more vision-
friendly format on your Chromebook. You
can even play on an external display.
I tried a few games: Forza Horizon 4;
Dead Cells, and Sea of Thieves, among
others. Immediately, I noticed that playing
was simply far more comfortable,
ergonomically, than squinting at a tiny phone
screen—as I did in my hands-on last October
(go.pcworld.com/hoct).
There’s no getting around it—there was a
slight bit of network latency on my end...
which didn’t make that much difference?
Dead Cells is a roguelike 2D sidescroller, fairly
dependent on accurate timing and quick
reflexes. I found myself adopting different
tactics as a result, occasionally spamming
attacks rather than trying to finesse each
enemy. With Forza, I found myself
unconsciously factoring in what little lag there
was in terms of cornering. And with Sea of
Thieves, a rather relaxed first-person
adventure game, I didn’t notice the lag much
at all. Of course, the type of game matters; it’s
fairly obvious why games like Afterparty,
whose plot is largely driven by text
conversations, and Wasteland 3, a turn-based
RPG, were included in the cloud-gaming
portfolio.
Games like Forza also showed some drop
in visual quality—again, probably more
noticeable when projected upon the larger
screen of the Chromebook, and at high
speeds. Sea of Thieves, however, looked justA calm, slow-paced game like the Windows 10 Edition of Cities Skylines is ideal for cloud gaming.