Halo: Campaign Evolved is a first-person shooter remake of the original 2001 classic Halo: Combat Evolved. Read on to see what it did well, where it fell short, and our review of the game.
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Overview
What is Halo: Campaign Evolved?
Halo: Campaign Evolved is a first-person shooter developed by Halo Studios (formerly 343 Studios) and published by Xbox Game Studios. It is a modernized remake of the original 2001 classic Halo: Combat Evolved.
The game follows Master Chief and his AI companion, Cortana, after crash landing on a ring-shaped alien world, where they must rally human survivors to fight off a hostile alien alliance known as the Covenant.
Although it retains the sandbox combat of the Xbox classic, the remake introduces enhanced visuals, expanded co-op options, and brand new prequel missions that further explore the events leading up to the original adventure.
Halo: Campaign Evolved features:
⚫︎ 10 original missions
⚫︎ 3 bonus missions
⚫︎ 17 weapons
⚫︎ Re-recorded voice acting
⚫︎ 2-player split-screen co-op (console)
⚫︎ 4-player online co-op
⚫︎ Cross-platform multiplayer co-op
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| $49.99 Standard Edition |
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| $69.99 Premium Edition |
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| $20.00 Premium Edition Upgrade |
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Halo: Campaign Evolved Review: It's a Real High Quality Conversation Piece
Pretty Doesn’t Mean Perfect
To say that the original Halo was influential to modern FPS games is a massive understatement. It was one of the defining games of the genre, helping establish many of the conventions that console shooters still use today. Alongside later franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield, it shaped the modern FPS landscape. Halo: Combat Evolved is arguably the most important console FPS ever made, and its success is easily the main reason Xbox became such a massive gaming platform.
So in an era where the industry seems increasingly enamored with remakes and remasters, it’s not really a wonder why Halo: Combat Evolved got one of its own. Granted, Halo already received Anniversary, but Campaign Evolved is an entirely different kind of project. More than a visual overhaul, it's an attempt to rebuild Combat Evolved into what Halo Studios believes is its definitive modern form—and as a game, it's an excellent one.
Campaign Evolved isn't interesting because it's good, though—it's interesting because it sits in the awkward space between preservation and reinvention. The combat loop is hectic and fun, the audiovisuals are almost immersive (sometimes annoyingly so) and the expanded co-op options help make up for the absence of multiplayer. Yet at the same time, modern and series-controversial additions like sprint fundamentally step on the game’s power fantasy, while Sgt. Johnson comes across as noticeably more restrained than in the original.
The scope of the project makes sense, though. As the title implies, Halo Studios set out to build the definitive edition of the original game’s campaign, and for the most part, they succeeded. There are definitely a few caveats, mostly stemming from modern gameplay decisions that make it feel like the developers were hedging their bets. And fortunately, this doesn’t extend to the story.
Battle Buddies of Old
The original campaign is mostly untouched. It’s a very faithful retelling of Combat Evolved, just done through an engine that eats your hardware alive. There’s still Covenant ranks to smash through, The Flood to clean up, and a lot of mystique that hides everything under a thin veil of wonder.
What Campaign Evolved does add, however, is a three-mission bonus campaign that explores Sgt. Avery Johnson’s relationship with the Master Chief. While much smaller in scale than the main campaign, it effectively showcases how well the two work together and bounce off each other, even in the midst of heavy suppressive fire.
The chemistry is there; the campaign simply doesn't spend enough time with it. Just when our boy Johnson and Chief start feeling like genuine partners rather than soldiers sharing the same battlefield, the story is already wrapping up. Halo: Campaign Evolved’s missions aren’t that long in the first place, so only having three of them to try to give more meat to one of the series’ most iconic battle buddies feels sorely lacking. And that shortage of content culminates in the ending’s severe lack of payoff.
If it were up to me, I’d at least double the mission count. That way, the arc would have more time to breathe without overshadowing the bigger narrative of the original campaign.
We Always Want to Keep Shooting
In terms of the core combat features, most of it has thankfully been left untouched. The core gameplay is still the very repetitive but extremely fun loop of shooting until you run out of ammo, “borrowing” your (dead) enemy’s gun, and then shooting some more. Oh, and you occasionally throw grenades and die to those chucked at your face—sometimes simultaneously.
Yes, it's repetitive, but that's exactly the point. In fact, this core gameplay loop has withstood the test of time and even thrived for over two decades now, and it’s still addictive. After all, some of the best games are built on the philosophy that sometimes you just want to shoot things dead for six hours straight.
So why, oh why did they add sprint here? Sure, Halo had it for a few games now, but not in the original Combat Evolved that this game is based on. It still feels sorely out of place in these kinds of games where shooting is always the correct choice—and you can’t do so while sprinting. Look at Doom 2016 and Eternal for modern examples; those games leaned so hard on the power fantasy that the Doom Slayer was always at maximum speed, regardless of whether he’s shooting or not.
No, dash is a different thing.
Halo's combat works because nearly every situation asks you how you can shoot your way through it. Merely having the option to sprint dilutes your options away from that. Ironically, simply making Master Chief move faster all the time would've preserved that power fantasy far better than having him suddenly remember he can run.
Like, there was a mission in the bonus campaign that forced you to fight two Hunters on a platform. Ideally, I would have just tried weaving around them, baiting their melee attacks while firing at their exposed bits. Instead, because sprint was there, my Apex Legends brain took over. I spent the next few minutes doing an incredibly un-fun game of cat-and-mouse, luring them into a corridor one at a time while I shot at them in-between their much more devastating ranged attacks.
Everything Looks and Sounds So Much Better—Annoyingly So, Sometimes
Ah, Unreal Engine 5; some love it, some hate it. I personally don’t care as long as it doesn’t make everything look like it has a layer of car wax on it. But in Campaign Evolved’s case, it did a wonderful job at making everything look as wondrous and horrifying (The Library, for example) as they should be. At the cost of making your hardware cry, that is.
The audio design is excellent. You can often tell when enemies are approaching, what they're about to do, or when a grenade is about to send you back to a checkpoint just from the sound alone. Plus, the guns actually sound like they’re punching back on your chest, too, instead of just on your shoulders. Heck, even the Plasma Pistol and Magnum (still gloriously overtuned here) sounds like they’re giving you wrist cramps from across the speakers.
Its audiovisuals combine for a truly immersive experience of shooting and getting blown up. Especially once you face The Flood, it gets rather creepy really quickly because both your eyes and ears convince you that you're never really safe. The effectiveness of the genre shift from sci-fi action to creature feature horror here is such that even the original can’t compare.
And that’s exactly why it can get so annoying at times. See, the original Halo has some of the best missions in FPS history—but it also has some of the most frustrating. Hell, some of the bonus areas have rather terrible stages designs. Some levels are notoriously repetitive, sending you through the same corridors and rooms while throwing the same enemies and weapons at you over and over. Campaign Evolved trims some of that fat, but it can't remove it entirely without fundamentally changing the original game.
By an almost laughable stroke of irony, the remake's greatest strength becomes one of its most obvious weaknesses. By making every hallway, firefight, and impending death-by-grenade so much more convincing, it also makes the campaign's most repetitive sections much harder to mentally dismiss.
Is Halo: Campaign Evolved Worth It?
If you want to experience the original Halo campaign at its prettiest, yes.
For a relatively tame 50 dollars per copy, getting the entire campaign of the original Halo is quite a good deal. The leap to Unreal Engine looks absolutely amazing, the pristine audio punches back hard, especially when a grenade explodes on your face, and the core combat loop is just as hectic and fun as usual. You do have to put up with its legacy baggage, though, like the repetitive level design.
Sure, it doesn’t have multiplayer, but it does have expanded co-op options for you and your friends (which I don’t have) to mess around with. And it’s going to do wonders considering just how hellish, and fun, the higher difficulty modes are.
That does beg the question, though; why can’t Halo Studios just use all these resources and make a new Halo game?
Game8 Reviews
