Halo: Campaign Evolved – Review

25 years and back to square one

For many, Halo is that console FPS from 25 years ago. They’ve heard of it; apparently it was decent. For others, Halo is the best console FPS and the game that wrote the rules of controller pew-pew. For me, Halo is part of my life experience – not just my gaming one. I know for sure I’m not alone, because I’ve met plenty of brudders into the fusion of Halo, Gears, Xbox and Mountain Dew. We are Legion, and we live among you.

So I find it very hard to understand, in my own head, why the first reaction to the announcement of yet another Halo: Combat Evolved remake went down so oddly. Seriously, are we remaking a remaster of a port? Because that’s the timeline: we have the first Halo, we have its “port” to Xbox 360, we have the remaster in the Master Chief Collection, and now yet another remake. Modernised and migrated to Unreal Engine. With improvements for today’s audience. So why am I not ecstatic, as I should be?

Well, doesn’t the DOSboi in Aidan want to tear through the Covenant and the Flood on the Great Ring again? In 2026, with mind-blowing graphics, even on PS5? Of course he does. It’s just that DOSboi, for all his obsession with this franchise, is scared of the fact that he’s writing about himself in the third person, and of the unimaginable ability of today’s developers to wreck legendary games with remakes “for the modern audience.”

Was my fear justified? Yes and no. Let me explain.

The Halo-cinating Myth

Few games have attracted as much free hate as Halo Campaign Evolved. Oh, you can’t shoot women on the ship’s deck (you can, but some of them have no animations implemented, only sound, unlike the ones with a Marine skeleton), oh, this, oh, that. A lot of honest content got made, and a few mouths got fed, before the game was even out.

The truth is that the new Halo has other flaws, sitting – wouldn’t you know it – on a solid foundation that’s well executed where it counts, and they’re not the culture-war kind cooked up for TikTok. For example, as I said above, some animations are missing from a game developed over roughly three years on Xbox/Microsoft budgets. They could have been there, but they aren’t, because we all know what silly things go through gamers’ heads. Let he who has never taken a mace to the children in Skyrim cast the first stone. Real problems. The Gothic remake doesn’t make blunders like these, and it was practically made in a garage on a budget raised from second-hand sales on Vinted.

I’m not the type to hate for the sake of the debate, but I won’t sell out when it comes to one of my favourite games either. So I’m caught between a rock and a hard place. One part of me loves Campaign Evolved, while the rest of my gaming-industry-battered body is confused: the game looks good, plays like a new Halo and carries off the nostalgia factor with flying colours, yet it makes a few mistakes that look, at first glance, deliberate.

As usual, the truth is harder to believe than the myths. Because to me, Campaign Evolved said, in no uncertain terms, that until now Halo Studios has not understood the subtleties of the franchise it looks after. Those touches of finesse, style and substance that made Halo a colossus. All it has grasped is that Halo has to be a shooter with impact…

Tech Demo(n) Spartan

…unlike The Coalition, which is showing us ever more clearly that it has poured its soul into E-Day. Microsoft, Xbox, pay attention here: this is how it’s done, Gears of War-style. Remember how Halo Infinite fizzled out? Well, if the studio had come back now with a carefully structured and executed sequel, we’d be having a very different conversation in this review.

Rebuilding the first Halo in Unreal only makes sense in the context of a PlayStation launch. But that points to a plan for Halo 2 and 3 remakes, when it would have been simpler and better to bring the MCC to PS, followed by a shiny, brand-new Halo. One that would blow our minds like it did 25 years ago, exactly as E-Day manages to do before it’s even out.

It’s hard to see the point of Campaign Evolved until you start playing and get a feel for it. Because all the arguments aside, CE is a decent game that rises above mediocrity. You just have to take it with a memory wipe, as a fresh title that appeared out of nowhere. That’s tough to do after 25 years of Halo, and I can’t help comparing it to a tech demo with a massive budget.

Somehow, Halo Studios is trying to show me what a new chapter in the series could look like, and asking whether I’m happy with the engine change. I answer by asking where the multiplayer is. There isn’t any, because it’s called Campaign Evolved. Okay, brudders, but 50% of Halo is multiplayer. It has online and local co-op with crossplay, I’m told. Kewl, so it’s an exercise a funded modding team could have pulled off? Conversation over.

Slow is smooth

In all my years of writing about games, I’ve built myself a mental palace where I can retreat and arrange things as I see fit. Campaign Evolved needed its own room, decked out like an older brudder’s bedroom in 2001, where it could be played with an open mind, free of inhibitions and preconceptions. There, in that imaginary room, Halo showed me it can still be fascinating. Captivating. Magnetic. Able to fire the imagination with its remarkable story and universe.

Taken on its own terms and savoured like the first time, Campaign Evolved delivers almost everything it promises – but it does so outside the classic’s parameters. Where Halo burned slowly and flowed smoothly, the remaster speeds up and sprints. Where the original gave you time to understand and take in the context, CE dives in headfirst, bombastic, explosive. All of this happens because a cold Unreal engine ticks differently from Bungie’s warm heart. It simply can’t sit still.

Still, Master Chief is comfortable with the change of pace. After all, Chief is a Spartan, an elite soldier born and bred, an unstoppable force. In his Campaign Evolved incarnation, John is easier to read for the audience just discovering the legendary character. A kind of superhero, if you like. I’ve known him since my youth, dramatic and silent, so we stay firm friends – even if Xbox Studios decided to ship the game with cinematics whose facial animations look like they were made in 2001. Luckily, Chief always wears a helmet.

Cortana and Sgt. Avery Johnson didn’t get that luck, and I will never understand – whatever the arguments, or the new dialogue recorded for almost every character – the decision to change Cortana’s look. Was she too pretty? Why does she look like Jerma now? What’s the deal with uglifying these legends, and who at Halo Studios could possibly have signed off on such an alteration? I think we know the answer.

Smooth is fast

Because Halo feels like a spinning top with a rocket strapped to its backside on Unreal Engine, Campaign Evolved beefs up the three-dimensionality of the spaces where the missions play out. The original had a meticulously calculated pace, with no sprint. That’s how it had to be, because that’s how it was designed. Nothing accidental in Bungie’s game design.

Only now Master Chief sprints, and that means the levels need areas with more freedom of movement. Personally, I’m not a fan of sprinting in Halo, and I caught myself forgetting to run dozens of times, even though I played on Heroic solo. Believe me, towards the end, where The Flood and the Covenant attack at the same time, the game becomes almost agonising, occasionally impossible, without turbo speed from cover to cover – and I’d also advise clinging on to your shield boost or invisibility for dear life (it no longer triggers automatically) if you choose to play on a high difficulty.

Now and then I ran into collision bugs or unfinished animations, which I could exploit with a bit of hopping and strafing, happily bringing calm to the enemies’ chaos with the assault rifle. In essence, Halo has been injected with generic contemporary FPS mechanics: health regenerates, Chief hits the gas, every weapon has aim down sights, and an easy-to-find skull right in the starting area switches on a 3^rd-person perspective – a fresh curiosity that works surprisingly well when I felt the urge to admire my custom skins.

On the other hand, the game looks the business, even on the Xbox Series S, which is what I played it on. On PC it’s genuinely spectacular, though rumour has it the console experience is best on a PlayStation 5. No surprise, because I’m convinced that’s what Campaign Evolved is for – a reboot of the OG trilogy to infect the Japanese console’s turf as well. Honestly, I have no idea why they’re not bringing it to the Switch 2 too, since they’ve started.

Either way, the fact that most levels have been redesigned and flow at a different pace is also why the “arena” areas feel tougher and swarming with a wider mix of enemies than in the original. On top of that come other schemes borrowed from newer games, such as an expanded arsenal lifted from H2 and H3, plus a bug that gives you an insta-kill with a single Plasma Pistol shot against fully charged shields. How you choose to remix the campaign – Brutes on the Ring? – and the difficulty is up to you, but I’m telling you that Halo Campaign Evolved stays within the paradigm of a tech demo with updates copy-pasted from other corners of the franchise.

That’s no crime, because it lets less purist players experiment and try Halo in a way they never have, and that translates directly into a hefty dose of fun. In its own peculiar way, Campaign Evolved is a sort of boomer shooter that refuses to accept its age and insists on all sorts of modern frills in the HUD – optional, thankfully.

Heroes never die!

It has to be understood that the first Halo is turning 25. Campaign Evolved couldn’t just be a graphical update, because that’s already been done twice. No, this remake needed radical changes. Wanting a game to surprise you after two and a half decades while changing nothing is absurd.

Now, the problem with the remake is how these changes were made, because most of them feel rushed. The AI has dramatic moments where it slams on the brakes, the vehicles handle oddly in places and don’t convey any sense of speed relative to the scale of the levels – but the fact that there are now hijacking mechanics, and that everything from the arsenal to the enemies is synced up to Halo Infinite, takes the edge off the appetite for something newer and bigger.

I’ll confess I’m still annoyed that Microsoft decided to chuck out a remake tainted by vibe coding instead of an AAA worthy of the name. The series can’t be saved like this, and the strategic decision is at best a hallucination typical of project managers who are disoriented and cut off from reality.

At the same time, this 2026 shooter, fuelled by the same legacy, kept me glued to the screen for over 12 hours, controller in hand. I wanted to believe in Campaign Evolved and I wanted to feel something again. The credit doesn’t mostly belong to Halo Studios, but rather to the old Bungie – because what still draws you in is the specific magic of the original.

For example, the levels where you carve through the Flood with the shotgun are absolutely unhinged. The scattergun has a sound that sent me round the bend and an impact that tops even the Super Shotgun from DOOM. It bites into that infected flesh with a delicious violence!

Campaign Evolved stands on its own two feet because it exists and dresses itself up in charm and nostalgia. It exploits the latter cleverly through marketing, music and visuals. It prods and tickles your brain right where the memories of the OG trilogy (or even MCC) are saved.

Minus. Bonus. Spartanus.

Campaign Evolved comes with three bonus missions in the form of a prequel, which give off a Halo 5 or Infinite feel watered down to the point of absurdity. They take place a year before Alpha Halo and overindulge in Unreal Engine’s visual capabilities, including in a space combat segment.

You can see with the naked eye where Bungie’s DNA ends and Halo Studios’ work begins, because even Serious Sam has more variety. The objectives boil down to survival, and most fights take place on cramped platforms where your allied NPCs’ AI freezes and the game does nothing but spawn waves of enemies. Extremely boring and devoid of any trace of creativity.

The level design didn’t impress me either, since the levels are little more than a string of corridors and glorified arenas. Still, I appreciated the effort to shore up the main story with the arrival of some… controversial characters. I’ll let you judge them for yourselves, if you last that long.

I, meanwhile, was hooked on collecting the skin codes that were swarming across social media posts and soft drink cans. I admit I’m addicted to this sort of trinket, and I kept my eyes peeled for every new armour design. Hehe, I have a feeling the marketing for Campaign Evolved cost more than developing the game.

And so I got to play the first Halo with a solid core and an imperfect shell. A console FPS that holds up well, that won’t let you go easily if you accept its modernised form, and that still has plenty to offer. With a fair few pluses and almost as many minuses. It exists, it wants to be noticed, and it hopes to find its way. Is Campaign Evolved an experiment, a tech demo or a tribute?

It’s all of these things and, at the same time, none of them. And with Halo Studios at the helm, the franchise’s future looks bleaker by the day. I was generous with the score, out of respect and love for the game that still survives in the depths of this remake.

How would it have turned out in Nightdive’s hands? Wink wink.

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Played on: Xbox Series S
Release date: 28 July 2026
Developer: Halo Studio
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios