I don’t usually like nostalgic framing devices, but in the case of Halo: Campaign Evolved it fits, so indulge me, if you will. It’s the middle of 2003, and I, a recently feathered member of the XBOX club having bounced from console to console for the last dozen years, have just borrowed a game called Halo from my uncle. “It’s pretty good,” he says, “if you like Doom and that sort of thing.” I mostly do; I’m more of an RPG fan. I like The Eye of the Beholder, Diablo, Final Fantasy. But whatever, Doom was alright, I’ll take it for a spin.
Fast forward two years and I’ve played nothing but Halo. I’m living with my best mate and his wife after a break-up, and every day after work it’s two hours of Halo. We’re only on Hard or Legendary, imposing our own challenges like beating levels with nothing but melee, we’re breaking the game and finding shortcuts that skip massive chunks of a level and fail because we can’t trigger a door we need to open. There’s no online multiplayer in the franchise yet so we’re connecting multiple TVs and XBOX units in our living rooms and having “Halo Nights” with pizza and beers and half a dozen mates.
When I tell you my memories of the original Halo are core gaming memories, as formative to me as a person as my first day of school, my first job, my wedding day, I’m not exaggerating. For several years, Halo was gaming, and gaming was Halo, and I won’t deny that I’ve been chasing that exact connection ever since. When I played through the remaster in the Master Chief Collection it was nice, but it was the same game with the ability to toggle the new graphics on and off – and of course, the addition of Skulls, collectible modifiers that allowed the official selection of the kind of challenges I was imposing on myself several years prior. It didn’t take me back in the same way.
Halo: Campaign Evolved is a significant step up from the MCC version. It’s a ground-up remake with a lot of tweaks and additions, and despite the new twists on certain elements, playing it this week has bordered on emotional. The soundbites I remember, the visual cues, the layouts rendered here to such a degree of faithfulness that my rose-tinted brain can’t tell the difference. I’ve been 23 again for a week, and that in itself is worth the price of admission.
But Halo: Campaign Evolved is a lot more than just nostalgia bait for the fans. The first three stages in particular are so painstakingly recreated that I wondered if it was just another reskin, only Halo Studios has added some stuff to mix up my memories. For a start, there are more guns and weapons than the original had. You’ll find enemies with Energy Swords you can now wield, which can alter some encounters, and you’ll also be able to grab the Fuel Rod Gun and the UNSC SMG (though you can’t dual-wield them, sadly).
The mechanics have been tweaked, too, bringing it more in-line with modern FPS experiences like Infinite. You can free-sprint (but not slide), aim down sights with all the guns, and some of the special abilities have been sprinkled in, with the inclusion of the Cloak and the Overshield. Avoiding spoilers, I can say that the three new prequel missions add even more, with some other fan-favourite guns dropping in to say “Hi!”. They can also appear in the new Remix Mode, which I’ll circle back to shortly.
Besides the much improved visuals and cutscenes, there’s so much here that feels like Halo should feel. I don’t know if it’s my aging reflexes, but it felt tougher in places, particularly in The Library, which adds the Flood “Tank” from later games as a semi-regular enemy, which is a massive wall of muscle that takes an immense amount of firepower to kill. And you’ll almost always have two to contend with, like the Covenant Hunters.
Ironically, you can feel the Destiny DNA bleeding through more than ever with the visual design and the feel of the guns, no more so than in the three Bonus Missions. While we’re on the subject, I have to give props to Halo Studios for the new content. I was expecting a remix of previous designs and encounters and was surprised by how much new stuff is in each mission, from weapons and enemies that aren’t in the main campaign (with variations not seen across the franchise), and mechanics we’ve barely seen in the series.
They’re also beautiful, with missions set inside a Covenant hunting preserve, inside one of their ceremonial ships and the alien landscape in which it rests. It ends with a very cool segment I won’t spoil, which took me by surprise and added some weight to the somewhat emotional denouement. It’s not as good as the breakneck Warthog race to escape an exploding Pillar of Autumn that ends the main campaign, but it’s fun.
Playing this now as both a Halo fan and a Destiny fan, I’m still floored by the combat sandbox Bungie built back in the day. Sure this version has been iterated upon with the aforementioned new mechanics and weaponry, but Halo has always been about using the environment to your advantage, even more so now that health packs have been replaced with recharging shields. The guns feel weighty and satisfying, the frag and plasma grenades have the reassuring ting or hiss respectively, and that Assault Rifle sound effect is still like a piano solo to my ears.
If there’s anything that worries me about Halo: Campaign Evolved its longevity. Even with the bonus missions it only took me 6 hours to finish on Normal (though I have, as mentioned, played this game a lot), and there’s no PvP multiplayer component. You can of course play the whole campaign with up to three other players, and the Campaign Remix adds a chunk of replayability. As does collecting the 42 Skulls, which can then be rolled into the Remix Mode – although they’re bloody well hidden. Still, as long as you love the campaign gameplay, you’ll get a fair amount of mileage from what’s here.
There are some performance issues here and there, which will likely be patched out. Some times, particularly in the hangars on Covenant ships such is in Truth and Reconciliation (mission 3), there’s some serious slowdown when the fighting hits a high and you’re battling alongside marines and there are grenades going off everywhere and the particle effects are at their most firework-y.
These are minor complaints though. The Remixed campaign alone is enough to keep going back. It switches on several skulls for every run, one of which prevents enemy factions from fighting as enemies are randomised, so you can be slaying the Flood on the beaches of The Silent Cartographer, or battling Covvies in The Library. What this mode needs, for me, is a reason to grind it. While Halo: Campaign Evolved offers Master Chief skins and weapons wraps, they’re just unlocked from the start, and I’d appreciate a reason to earn them through playing the various campaigns and modes.
Before I close the review I do have to mention how odd yet weirdly comforting it is to play Halo on the PlayStation 5. The original is a game from the very beginning of the Console Wars, and playing it on a Sony machine feels as important to me as the first time Sonic and Mario stepped into the same world on a Nintendo console. Perhaps it’s the internal conflict in me between the XBOX diehard I was and the reluctant Sony loyalist I am now, but there’s something very special about hearing that Halo menu music on a PS5. Of course we did also test on XBOX, and it even runs beautifully on Series S, so wherever you play, you’re getting a good experience.
Halo: Campaign Evolved continues 2026’s trend for solid, faithful, and worthy remakes, following Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag and Star Fox. As with all remakes of vaunted classics, nostalgia will do a lot of the heavy lifting, but Halo, more so than the others, is a seminal title that helped shape an entire genre and almost single-handedly put Xbox on the map. Despite some minor performance issues, Halo: Campaign Evolved feels like it brings everything I loved about Combat Evolved into the modern era. The new missions are excellent and arguably feel like proof of concept for future games, while the Remixed campaign is a great way of squeezing more longevity from the standard template.
