Halo: Campaign Evolved is a pretty remake, but it leaves me with lots of questions

The long-rumoured Halo: Combat Evolved remake is real, having just been unveiled at the Halo World Championship in Seattle. It brings the 2001 Xbox classic into the world of 4K Unreal Engine 5 visuals on Xbox, PC and, most notably, PS5 in the series’ first-ever PlayStation release. (As the name suggests, though, it’s only the campaign with optional local/online co-op; no competitive multiplayer content is supported.)

I got to play a slice of the remake dubbed Halo: Campaign Evolved this week, and my impressions are… complicated. While Campaign Evolved certainly seems like a well-done remake from developer Halo Studios, its positioning in the Xbox ecosystem — and, by extension, the wider gaming landscape — leaves me feeling a bit cold.

First, let’s get the good out of the way: the game sure is pretty. The demo starts during Master Chief’s beach landing in the iconic Silent Cartographer mission, quickly showcasing the breadth of the visual fidelity. The shimmering waves, cragged rocks, indentations on the sand and luscious greenery all glow in modern 4K fidelity. I will say that there was the occasional bit of pop-in, grainy textures and stuttering throughout my roughly 25-minute Series X demo, not unlike what you’d see while streaming a game. That said, Halo Studios stressed this was an earlier build, and the above official trailer, which features footage from this level, looks much more polished.

On top of all of that, Campaign Evolved adds a lot of mechanics that were introduced later in the series, like sprinting, the ability to use weapons like the Battle Rifle and Energy Sword, and hijackable vehicles. (While sprinting will surely be controversial to purists, I simply view it as an option, especially since you can toggle it.)

And really, Campaign Evolved is otherwise very faithful. I watched a playthrough of the original Combat Evolved version of the level after completing the demo and it really is pretty much 1:1. While Halo Studios is promising changes like “enhanced level design,” I didn’t really notice anything drastic here beyond presentational improvements adding to the nostalgia of storming the beach to a remastered version of the iconic Halo theme. That said, the “improved wayfinding” that the developer promised, meanwhile, is indeed noticeable thanks to a marker system. (These sorts of changes will likely be most prominently felt in the controversial Library level, which Halo Studios acknowledges was frustrating and promises to tweak with changes to pacing and environmental storytelling.)

For the most part, then, the remake is clearly making some subtle but smart changes across the board. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” after all. But that also leads to why I’m pretty apathetic about Campaign Evolved even after the demo. For one, the lack of competitive multiplayer is a bummer. On top of that, this is the second time Xbox has remade Combat Evolved, following the 10th anniversary Xbox 360 version that dropped in 2011. And for context, it’ll be the 25th anniversary of Combat Evolved by the time Campaign Evolved releases in 2026. At this rate, will the game get re-re-remade for future milestones?

The gaming industry is so frustratingly obsessed with pixel pushing graphics, and in the case of Campaign Evolved, a perfectly solid updated version of the source material already exists — one that’s included in the comprehensive Master Chief Collection, no less. That could have just been ported wholesale to PS5, but you now have to wonder if we’re going to get UE5 remakes of Halo 2, Halo 3 and the like one-by-one. This isn’t even a reimagining that takes bold creative swings in the vein of the Final Fantasy VII Remake series, either, so there’s no big excitement on that front, outside of three Master Chief and Sgt. Johnson prequel missions that have been teased.

What makes this all even more underwhelming to me is that it comes on the heels of Gears of War: Reloaded, another enhanced version of a classic Xbox game that had already gotten an upgrade before with 2015’s Gears of War: Ultimate Edition. Is this the route Xbox is going to keep going with its portfolio, especially as we hear how much the division is getting increasing pressure to become risk-averse?

It’s also impossible to look at Campaign Evolved in a vacuum, given the state of Halo as a whole. The last game from Halo Studios (back when it was still called 343 Industries) was 2021’s Halo Infinite, which admittedly had the pressure of following the disappointing Halo 5 and disastrous launch of the Master Chief Collection. And initially, Infinite did actually have a promising start, but it ultimately failed due to an unsatisfying campaign that felt merely like MCU-style setup for larger story expansions that would never come and an otherwise solid multiplayer suite that suffered greatly from a lack of consistent updates.

Following that, much of the 343 development team either left or were let go, while future plans for the series were reportedly re-evaluated and reworked. Surely aware of the ever-weakening public sentiment towards the Halo brand, Xbox eventually revealed in 2024 that 343 had been rebranded as Halo Studios and teased a “new dawn” for the series with multiple projects in the works.

But after all this time, a predominantly 1:1 remake doesn’t seem like a fresh start for an iconic series that’s gone through quite a lot of hurdles in recent years. In a sense, Campaign Evolved just feels like a cynical nostalgia play, reminding us of the classics instead of demonstrating why the future is bright. Sure, I’d love to believe Halo Studios can bring Halo back, but we have many reasons to be skeptical, and coming out first with something from the series’ golden years doesn’t help.

To be clear, I’m always happy for more people to get to play a game, and a PS5 debut is a genuinely exciting venture. But even then, I question why it couldn’t have just been a port of the last remake, especially when it’s right there with the Master Chief Collection. All in all, it certainly seems like you could do worse than Campaign Evolved, but given where Halo as a series is right now, you’d hope for a lot better.

Halo: Campaign Evolved will launch sometime in 2026 on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox on PC, Steam and PlayStation 5. It will also be available on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass on day one.

Image credit: Xbox