Halo: Campaign Evolved is perhaps the greatest example of a remake that didn’t really need to happen but we were glad to get anyway. It also clearly highlights the different approaches developers take to modern remakes. You could go in Bluepoint’s Demon’s Souls direction and make a remake that’s relatively unchanged at its core with a shinier coat of paint, or switch things up enough to the point where it wildly deviates from the source material in certain ways like Final Fantasy VII Remake. Halo: Campaign Evolved falls in the latter camp - a wonderfully reimagined vision of the iconic Combat Evolved campaign with some new content and modernised gameplay tweaks to boot.

By now, most fans are already intimately familiar with the story behind Halo: Combat Evolved’s campaign, but here’s a quick refresher. You play as the legendary Spartan super soldier, Master Chief, who arrives on the ring world of Installation 04. After clashes with the Covenant, we’re tasked with unearthing ancient mysteries involving an extinct space-faring race and the mysterious origins of infected space mutants called the Flood, one of the central antagonists of the original Halo games.



Before we dip into the campaign, Halo Studios adds three new missions to Campaign Evolved that act as prequels to the main story. Set one year before the events of the game, these prequel missions further explore the Chief and Sergeant Johnson’s history in the field and some of the first run-ins with the Covenant. You can choose to play these at any point from the game’s main menu, and it’s highly advised that you do them before the main campaign if you’re a returning player. They’re fairly challenging but otherwise unremarkable missions that enrich Master Chief’s background a bit, though the level design is pretty standard and won’t wow you any more than the main story will. It’s still a bit of extra content to round out a package that only realistically offers an 8-10 hour campaign without its crucial multiplayer component.

Halo Studios adds three new missions to Campaign Evolved that act as prequels to the main story.

As the subtitle suggests, the campaign is really what you’re here for and I’m happy to report that it’s still a blast and a great trip down memory lane, even if it now lacks the ingenuity the original game brought to the gaming world back in 2001. Developer Halo Studios rebuilt Combat Evolved’s narrative framework from the ground-up in Unreal Engine 5, complete with re-recorded dialogue, re-directed cutscenes, huge visual upgrades, new sound effects, refined gameplay, and even new bits of dialogue and content that weren’t present in the original.



On that note, the newly directed cutscenes range from excellent to a bit cheesy, either trying too hard or too little to recapture the admittedly dated spark of the original game’s cinematics. On a visual level, they look great and the detailed lighting, especially at night or in missions revolving around the Flood, really stands out. Unreal Engine 5 has its fair share of criticisms but there’s no denying its ability to deliver on a graphical level, and I think Halo Studios did an admirable job polishing it up as much as possible. Unfortunately, some die-hard fans of the original might feel like the remake loses a bit of that old-school charm that made it so appealing even decades later, and you can’t help but notice how “mechanical” some cutscenes tend to be, lacking in energy or more stylish direction.

The gameplay, on the other hand, is rock-solid. Halo: Campaign Evolved delivers the biggest step up in the series’ gameplay evolution since Halo Reach. Gunplay is snappy, tight, and extremely responsive with a satisfying kick to certain weapons like the shotgun or Needler. Halo Studios also adds familiar weapons to the remake from across the Halo sequels, and they don’t feel out of place at all. Sprinting is also thankfully not as bad as I thought it would be, since Master Chief is relegated to a slight jog and not a full-on Olympic dash like in Halo 4. It’s a good middle-ground to maintain the pacing and flow of fights faithfully from the original game.



Halo Studios haven't done much to improve the vehicle controls for the Warthog or Banshee. They're still floaty, a bit awkward and jank, but honestly I wouldn't have it any other way. There's a strange sense of accomplishment you get from mastering its controls, making the final big dash to safety in the last mission feel earned once you've got the steering and controls down (and yes, I did restart it at least half a dozen times on Heroic difficulty, as the overlords intended). Like the original, the AI still swings from horribly inept at holding a gun to supernaturally gifted expert marksman - it's part of the jank and part of the charm.

Halo Studios haven't done much to improve the vehicle controls for the Warthog or Banshee. They're still floaty, a bit awkward and jank, but honestly I wouldn't have it any other way.

For a remake that heavily relies on the nostalgic factor to carry its weight, I was surprised at how well certain missions were revitalised and modernised without losing the soul of what made them great to begin with. The Silent Cartographer - aka the best single mission in first-person shooter gaming history - is incredibly well-paced and just as exciting to play again in the remake as it was back then. I appreciate that Halo Studios didn’t take obvious shortcuts when bringing it to modern audiences. The levels are highly detailed and gorgeous to look at, and you get the same dizzying sense of awe looking up at the Halo ring here like when you first experienced it in the classic game.



The problems, by and large, for Halo: Campaign Evolved comes down to its technical polish (or lack thereof). I’ve heard conflicting reports about its performance on PC and Xbox Series X but on PS5 Pro (which this review is based on), I ran into numerous frame rate hiccups and sudden dips, especially during The Library mission, and instances where the game’s textures took a few seconds to load in, sometimes not loading in at all. It made for a rather jarring playthrough when so many immersion-breaking technical problems kept popping up. Luckily for the most part, it runs at a stable frame rate on PS5 Pro but those moments where the game breaks really stand out and it hurt my experience.



Halo: Campaign Evolved is a tough recommendation. It revitalises the original classic in unsurprising or expected ways, acting as a risk-free testing ground for Halo Studios to experiment with future installments clearly being built in Unreal Engine 5. It doesn’t do anything remarkably different that you wouldn’t find in the Anniversary remaster from the Master Chief Collection, as most of its appeal comes from the big visual upgrades on current-gen hardware. While certainly impressive as a visual leap for the series - and the joy of finally playing Halo on PlayStation being a bit surreal - this is a safe, by-the-numbers remake that will give fans and newcomers a nostalgic kick before the magic eventually wears off.

PS5 Review code provided by PlayStation | Halo: Campaign Evolved is now available to purchase for R999