Halo: Campaign Evolved Review

As I sat down to re-experience the fight I first began a quarter of a century ago, I realised that times have changed. The much beloved ‘Duke’ controller which was about the size of a small infant has been superseded by my sleek Xbox Elite controller. The iconic Halo series so deeply entrenched in Xbox lore is now available for any PS5 owner with a wallet and curiosity to experience on their crosstown-rival platform. Harambe is dead. But perhaps the biggest difference between now and then is the fact I have a fully grown nine-year-old son sitting next to me, bursting at the seams to play this curious old game made new with his dad. My greatest enjoyment of Halo: Campaign Evolved was not retreading familiar ground with fancier graphics and updated gameplay, but seeing the adventure again through his eyes.

As the name might suggest, Halo: Campaign Evolved is not merely a remaster of the adventure that kickstarted a platform and spawned a legend – it is a complete remake. It certainly walks and talks like the game you know and love, but every aspect of the visual and audio experience has been given a drastic upgrade in Unreal Engine 5. Textures are richer, colours are brighter, and enemy and environmental detail are dialled up to a million, both altering every aspect of the game’s DNA yet still remaining fiercely loyal to the heart and soul of the experience. There are gorgeous new cutscenes, there is freshly recorded dialogue – it’s a complete belts and braces approach to dragging a 25-year-old title kicking and screaming into the modern era. It’s all achieved with a confidence and clear love for the source material, with the only misstep I can put my finger on being the odd redesign of Cortana’s face that has a touch of the uncanny valley about it.

Not content to simply update how the game looks and sounds, Halo Studios (previously 343 Industries) has introduced a whole bunch of mechanics and weapons that would only appear many iterations later. Some may consider this sacrilege, but to me it does a fantastic job of injecting commonsense mechanics and variety without compromising identity. For instance, there is now an option to sprint, vehicles can be hijacked, and you can jump on a Wraith and pop a hot potato in it and lean back and watch the fireworks. As I approached combat encounters I naturally went to pull off these feats, not remembering that I wasn’t supposed to be allowed to. The key clambering mechanic from later titles has not found its way here however, perhaps wisely as it would fundamentally change the feel. While there was some initial frustration that the amount of new mechanics meant I couldn’t fully map the controls how I wanted (left trigger for grenade and B for melee is a religion for me), it’s a small complaint. A note that the ever-popular Skulls are now featured, with a dizzying 42 Skulls to be found which will make your next LASO run a brutally chaotic affair (with head-popping Grunt confetti of course).

The other major change you’ll quickly recognise is the addition of a slew of weapons that were only available in subsequent Halo titles. This includes the iconic Energy Sword (I can’t believe this wasn’t always available), the SMG (great against the Flood in fact), the Beam Rifle (how I hate thee, Jackals) and the Sentinel Beam (great against the Sentinels themselves). If you dabble in the bonus content (more on this in a moment) you’ll also get to wield the Brute Plasma Rifle and Needle Rifle (one of my absolute favourite precision rifles), and it all fells just right, like it’s always been there and was always supposed to be.

Halo was always a game about moments, from the experience of staring up at the skybox from the peculiar surface of the titular Halo, to jumping behind the Teflon-coated jelly on wheels with a turret known as the Warthog for the first time, I gleefully anticipated these moments to witness my son seeing them with fresh eyes. I perhaps caused a nightmare or two by subjecting him to the Flood, but he overcame the fear and we both emerged triumphant. All those moments are here just as you remembered, and if you are lucky to have a freshly minted human being old enough to handle the experience this is by far the best way to go about it.

There are gorgeous new cutscenes, there is freshly recorded dialogue – it’s a complete belts and braces approach to dragging a 25-year-old title kicking and screaming into the modern era.

The game features three new missions that take place before the events of the game that put you alongside the venerable tough guy Sgt Anderson as you go behind enemy lines to retrieve some crucial nav data in the desperate war against the Covenant. We also get a glimpse of the early days of the induction of the Brute faction into the umbrella of the Covenant (something that would eventually echo through the complex alien political sphere with devastating results for all involved), and in general it’s about an hour or so of fresh full-canon content.

I liked the fact that Halo Studios took the time at this juncture to introduce some new architectural elements such as the ornate gold and bone sparring room, which sets it apart from the shiny purple Covenant aesthetic that features prominently just about everywhere else. There are also some fun gameplay switch-ups that fit the epic scale well. It is recommended to play these slightly spicy bonus missions after you have refamiliarised yourself with the main game, but I found the difficulty to be more than manageable (just pick up a Needle Rifle, you’ll be fine), so if you want to tackle it chronologically then no one’s going to stop you.

Final Thoughts

Halo: Campaign Evolved manages to give the game that started it all an extreme makeover, while expertly capturing the essence of what made it great in the first place. New gameplay mechanics and weapons weave themselves naturally into the action, and you’ll quickly forget that you aren’t supposed to be able to do half of the things you can now do. Does this multi-platform release signify the end of the console wars? Does anyone truly care? The 16-year-old version of me that first played this game in 2001 probably would, but he was also a Sega fanboy (Mega Drive for life baby) and had dreadlocks so perhaps he knew less than he thought.

Reviewed on Xbox Series X|S // Review code supplied by publisher

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