GAME REVIEW: Halo: Campaign Evolved is a lovingly-crafted tribute to the original game
While not exactly 1:1 with the original, most of its changes are improvements.
Game: Halo: Campaign Evolved — Release: 2026 — Platform: PC (Steam)
Words aren’t enough to describe just how special Halo: Combat Evolved was to my childhood. The first “violent” video game I was ever allowed to play by my parents, they let me download the free Silent Cartographer demo on my Windows XP laptop when I was seven years old, and I was hooked deeper than any addiction could ever take me.
I played that demo hundreds of times over the next year before my dad finally caved and bought me a full copy of the game off eBay. And on a day home sick from school, my eight-year-old self had my mind blown by the twists and turns of the first Halo’s story. Desperate for even the barest sniff of more Halo, I started reading the novels written by Eric Nylund, and eventually my parents bought me the special Halo: Reach edition of the Xbox 360, at which point I disappeared into the caverns of Xbox Live and my family would only see me when I needed food.
Even into high school when the first game was fairly old already, we would throw copies of the game on our USB drives and run 16-player LAN matches in the computer labs, slamming Banshees into Scorpions on Blood Gulch. Combat Evolved was like lighting in a bottle, with half of what made the game so iconic not actually being intended by the creative team, but rather being a mere function of limited time and budget. After the heavily flawed 2011 remaster, Combat Evolved Anniversary, there was fair question over whether Halo Studios-née-343 Industries was foolish to remake this beloved classic.
Thankfully, as someone who has lived and breathed every inch of Combat Evolved, I found Campaign Evolved to be a lovingly-crafted tribute to the original, making tasteful changes comparable to the adjustments made by Capcom in their modern remakes of the pre-HD era Resident Evil games. Halo Studios has released a great entry point to give newcomers—especially those on PlayStation—the ability to play through one of the great classics of gaming history, in a more polished form.
Firstly, while some people may have preferred an exact 1:1 remake where the only updates were to graphics, I would see this as a pointless endeavour. Did we not already attempt this with the botched 2011 remaster? Through the Master Chief Collection, the original version of Combat Evolved is well-preserved on XBOX and PC. Gamers do not lack access to the classic that took the world by storm, and thus I prefer to see this remake change things, with the sandbox rebalanced to an extent. Weapons like the Energy Sword, Sentinel Beam, and Fuel Rod Gun are now wieldable by the player, and vehicles can be hijacked both by players and by enemies. Controversially for the Halo fan base, sprinting has been added to the game.
If you really don’t like the new additions to the sandbox that Halo Studios has added, you can turn off most of them with skulls that are collectible in the game. In terms of collectible skulls, Campaign Evolved boasts the most of any Halo game, and they work well with the new Campaign Remix mode, which randomizes the enemies and weapons across levels. You’ll also have terminals to collect in every level, although they return to the text-only format of Halo 3 and Halo: Reach, not even having audio narration. There’s a lot of replayability here, both for new fans and seasoned veterans who have run versions of these levels as many times as I have.
One of the best changes that Campaign Evolved boasts is their fresh take on the Flood, and the levels that feature them. Pod infectors can now revive dead combat forms, and Tank Forms arrive to create a Flood-equivalent in the sandbox to the Covenant’s Hunters. Notoriously, the original Combat Evolved has three levels in the back half of the game that repeat a significant amount of level geometry from the front half of the game. The Library, while not being a repeat of a previous level, was criticized for being repetitive itself. But since this is a remake and not merely a remaster, Halo Studios have reworked some geometry and encounters to make them more interesting, and I can honestly say that I prefer this version of The Library to the original. Even the choice to have you descend downward in The Library rather than ascend upward contributes towards the mood of boiling tension, as you delve deep into this zombie-infested hellhole.
I would say the most special treat that Campaign Evolved offers isn’t even the remade campaign, however. It is the three brand-new levels that form a self-contained “bonus” campaign, taking place one year prior to the events of the game, and featuring the Master Chief and Sergeant Johnson on a covert mission, Operation: METEORITE. Through a clever decision to reuse certain assets and only create new ones where it’ll be most noticeable, Halo Studios managed to create a fun, compelling single-player narrative on a reasonable budget and timeline.
Halo Studios recommends that you play this bonus campaign after the ten remade levels, and I concur with this suggestion, as it has a different sandbox of weapons and enemies, feeling suspiciously like Halo 2. Notably, however, the Campaign Remix feature allows enemies and weapons from the bonus campaign to appear in the main campaign, and vice versa, in case you want to throw Brutes and their Spikers into Silent Cartographer, or bring the Flood and Sentinels to the bonus levels. Nine of the game’s skulls are also distributed across these bonus levels, and all skulls can be used in either the main or bonus campaign. Again, there’s a lot of replay value in this game to keep you busy.
From a technical perspective, Halo Studios has rolled back to a previous version of the Blam! Engine, the Halo: Reach edition, and certain subtleties can be noticed in the game mechanics if you’ve played Reach before. However, to simplify development, Blam! is now solely a plugin for managing sandbox mechanics, while the core engine handling graphics and user input is actually Unreal Engine 5, allowing Halo Studios to leverage contractors familiar with what has become an industry standard for AAA game development.
Playing 1440p at 21:9 ultrawide [Edit: on Ultra settings] with a Ryzen 9800X3D, an NVIDIA 5070 Ti, and 32 GiB of DDR5 RAM, and all upscaling/frame gen turned off, the game can hold fairly steady at 130 frames per second in large outdoor environments, boosting to 140 fps in smaller rooms. For the graphical fidelity that this ray-traced experience provides, you’ll get reasonable performance out of your hardware, and don’t need to worry about any Unreal Engine 5 performance issues. While I observed some glitches during gameplay like instant kills by enemies against the player with overcharged Plasma Pistols, Halo Studios issued a patch to fix this bug during my review, so I have confidence that the game will continue to be refined with additional patches and bug fixes over the next few months.
One curious technical note is that if you’re playing on a PS5, or using a DualSense controller with the PC version, you’ll get use out of the adaptive triggers and the haptic feedback, and the light bar will also blink in time with Cortana speaking to you. Nothing that radically changes the game experience—although frustratingly, on PC button prompts won’t show PlayStation icons despite the game recognizing the DualSense controller and using Sony’s exclusive API—but it does reflect poorly on modern XBOX platforms that their controller is so far behind the technology of Sony’s DualSense and Nintendo’s Joy-Con and Pro Controller.
The best performance on console is also to be had with the PlayStation 5 Pro, which plays this game at a greater fidelity than the Xbox Series X. All of these details appears to be an artifact of the Phil Spencer era of XBOX, where multiplatform releases were encouraged to try and recoup additional revenue. I imagine that a different, more exclusive approach may be taken for the inevitable remake of Halo 2, as Asha Sharma seeks to revive the XBOX brand from its historic low point and create incentives for people to pick their platform over the competitors.
I’ll note, though, that while that Halo 2 remake is inevitable—in the Legendary ending of Campaign Evolved, Sergeant Johnson breaks the fourth wall and explicitly tells the player “see you in the sequel”—I also eagerly anticipate it. Halo Studios used this remake to refine their production pipeline, and the bonus campaign as a prototype for making their own original experiences. I do miss the multiplayer mode of Combat Evolved, but that remains faithfully preserved in the Master Chief Collection, and with how finicky the balance of PvP multiplayer can be, I would much rather play the original version as-is, and not rework the mechanics or the sandbox.
Overall, Halo: Campaign Evolved is a great entry point for those new to the series, and a sincere good-faith effort towards existing fans who have sought a traditional Halo experience. This is an easy recommendation for most gamers to buy.
Halo: Campaign Evolved is available on Steam, PlayStation 5, and XBOX Play Anywhere.