Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsI am really disapointed with this. It feels more like a beta or demo console for its huge problems in everything. DO NOT BUY!!!!
Reviewed in the United States on April 12, 2017
Well after a long decision of whether I should buy this or not I decided to buy it. I bought the new updated version (2017 model) with the 16gb of memory. And expanded it with a USB drive that most bought from Sandisk. So before I keep going I will say that the reason I bought this thing. First I wanted something to watch Nerflix or Youtube in order to keep my phones battery from draining faster. The second is that I own an Nvidia Shield Portable and since its always getting a full memory I decided to buy this in order to play the games (that took a lot of space and required wifi) in this device. Plus since the Portable flew so well and with few issues I thought that this will be a another great experince but without the button mapper. But if your experience is like mine youll most likely run into problems with this device after the 30day warranty has expired.
Was 200 dollars (without including the extra 31 dollars spent on the USB) worth the device?! Nope! After barely two months of usage I can defetly tell you that this is not worth it. Lets get in the obvious for a sec.
Does this device has good games? Well kinda, it has some really good games like Metal Gear Rising, Tomb Raider (reboot), and plenty more that you can see if you search on Youtube for the best game on theNvidia Shield TV offline. Now whats good about those games is the they dont need wifi to get played (sorta). Your wifi does not determine if you can play these games with lag or no lag as the wifi doesnt do any of the with these games. The only reason you'll need the wifi is to validate your license very time you start the game since without it you cant play the game (and yes these are legally obtained). Now there are other games you can play from the Google PLay Store but the store is so badly organized and the varaity is so low you'll get very pissed off. Plus there are game in the store the are not compatible or dont work. For example the game Modern Combat 4 doesnt even build right. by saying this I mean that it will crash all the time and the game is never fully built creating a world with lines everywhere, no character get completed as well and looks worse than the original Tron movie. Other game like the Codex dont even start after downlaoding all the content necesary to play. While some people say that all of this isnt a problem from Nvidia and more of a problem from Google its still an Nvidia Problem since they advertise this a console for gamers while the only thing that might back that up is the horrifing Gamestream Service thats totally a waste if you dont have a really good internet. Plus the account sync is the worst ever. I have one on my Portable and decided to use it on this but nope it says password wrong. I changed the password to see if putting a brand new password fixed anything but nope still nothing. I opened a new account on my other email through the Console and when I tried to login with the new account on my computer it said that the pasword was wrong. So I just gave up on that. Other games must be gotten if you have ES downloader with another dvice in order to pass the app from the (example) phone to the device. This makes for new games to be added but not all work (unsuprisingly). If you have a game like Modern Combat 5, Oceanhorn or Assassins Creed Identity (throught ES downloader) then you'll be glad to know that these games will play amazingly with zero lag, great movement with joystick and presicion. BUT!!! these game have something special in common and thats the ability to transfer save files through the could. And for some reason this FREAKING device doesnt allow any cloud of any type to be used. Giving you the middle finger each time you try to use it. This is just insulting. Only two games allowed me to use cloud these were Modern Combat 5 after I gave it an update to the one from Playstore with Aptoid and the other was Dead Effect 2 after doing an annoying sync with my account that suprisinly worked but these were the only ones despite more than enough games using cloud save in 2017. You can also download emulators but its not that big of a deal unless you are super nostalgc about a game and some game dont run all that good.
So lets talk about the controllers. The gamepad and tv remote are smooth but couple of problems on booth of them. The voice recognitionis terrible being worse then Siri at times. The worst of the two controllers is the remote since it changes the words I say drastically. The volume control doesnt work smooth and sometimes jumping from hi to low when your trying to to use it. The other thing is that they discoonect way to fast from the device to sleep. Now I know this is just to conserve power but the volume control doesnt wake them up forcing you to press the buttons and if you need them to lower the volume fast youll have the mother of lags. and no you cannot change the contrllers sleep timer. The tv remote runs on batteries unlike its previous version that was rechargable and doesnt have a headphone connector. The gamepad has some issues like the B button sometimes gets a little stuck and for some reason the right analog stick sometimes gets stuck in the down position internally. This one is the most annoying of all given that if you play any game it will move the camera bellow the character or if you play in first person it'll move it to you feet. How to stop this? well the only way is to let the controller get hit on the floor in order to stop because honestly it just doesnt want to stop otherwise. I reset the Console, Shut it down, forget the controller, check if any updates are needed and yet nothing fixes it and no it wasnt been damaged in any way prior to these problems started to happen.
So lets talk about the console itself. Its compact design is great and the menu screen is pretty easy and fast. However the good thing end there. It doesnt have a built in browser and there are only two ways to get a browser (thanks to the internet). The first is way is to dowload ESdowloader from the Playstore then click favorites at the left side and at the of that mini options you have Google. With it you download Chrome to the device it self. The other way is to download from the Playstore Goggle and with it download Chrome since it has plenty of more options. Before doing anything you must first Download Side Launcher from the Playstore because Chrome only appears there and not on your main menu. Also thats another thing they limit a lot you device its like instead of creating an age restictor mode they made a content restrictor mode that cant be turned off, has nothing to do with age content and is only there to suck all the fun and varaity of the console. Sometimes the console decides to turn on but not display anything on the Television and other times it wont turn on at all forcing me to disconect and reconnect it. Also when you scroll around there are sometimes youll notice that a mouse rapidly appears randomly out of nowhere. While you can connect an actual mouse the one that appears randomly has no use and dissapears later even if you never connected a mouse. I also bought for this thing a USB drive under the requirements and formated it to use it as an internal drive and yet somethings still get installed in the actual device HDD including game and saved data and no they cannot be moved to the external drive thats acting as the internal one but you can move things from the external to the real internal one because... NVIDIA. Also the console is extremely glitchy, laging and unresponsive. Sometimes the console fails to load the main menu of the console it self after turning it on and says that the menu launcher stopped and sometimes after start up it gives you a black screen that does nothing. If AngryJoe had this thing he'd show Nvidia how bad this is.
Honestly I think that a lot of things could have been improved from the original Console but nope they just added the remote, reduced dize and changed controller design and decided to charge the same for it. Dont get me wrong the compact design, new controller are great and probably better then the previous one plus the added controller that supposed to be 50 extra is included for free basicaly in this bundle. This is all great but.... with all the improvement to hardware that could have been done to it in order to show how much you truly care for us you basically get like a similar or wrost stunt then their Titan XP card. Not to mention all the extra problems Im experiencing and maybe these problems are not applicable to everyone but yet they do exist and they happend to me so I dont feel like holding back and especially when I spent 200 dollars for it. This is really shameful for Nvidia. The people that bought this wouldnt know what a good device is even if it hit them in the face ( and that should hurt). You know this thing should hit in the face the people who made this to make them remind them how bad this thing was and is each time they look in the mirror.
Do I recomend this anyone? If all you want out of it is to watch Kodi, Netflix, Youtube, etc. Then yes, since its the only thing that it does good sometimes. Otherwise look elsewhere because theres nothing to see here.Buy an Nvidia Shield Portable or Nvidia Shield Tablet or the original Nvidia Shield TV. But considering that they are trying to force people tu buy this model Id say that chances of finding one at a are low (and even less at a good price).
So overall it really is a bad device and at some point if they give a no glitchy version of this to costumers with problems it would make things better at some extent and ease up on the bad impression they have given me with this. But until that happens I'll be here fighting and bashing this thing.
