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8 hours ago
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This 25th-anniversary remake of Xbox’s most iconic shooter comes loaded with symbolism. It arrives at a time when Xbox’s whole gaming division (and indeed the games business as a whole) is in turmoil. It’s been made by Halo Studios, an outfit that has arguably never quite recaptured the magic conjured by Halo: Combat Evolved’s original developer Bungie, a studio now owned by rival Sony. It has been polished and prettified using Unreal Engine 5, making it look and feel more modern at the expense of visual uniqueness: Halo now looks similar to hundreds of other games made with those same tools, where Bungie’s 2001 original, made with a bespoke engine, still looks austerely distinctive. I never wanted to become this person, but: perhaps things were better in the old days?
I had my misgivings after opening level, in which the freshly defrosted supersoldier Master Chief fends off an alien attack on a disintegrating spaceship. Originally this was a masterclass in explosive action: you wake up, you look around (once a clever way to determine whether you needed to invert the controls), and you get right into it, firing gaming’s best pistol at chittering alien grunts who scatter from your bullets. Now it’s wrapped in needlessly expanded cutscenes and explanations. Where Halo Studios has made changes to Combat Evolved’s pacing, it really feels noticeable.
After that, however, I spent much less time thinking about what has been changed, and much more thinking about what hasn’t. Nobody really makes single-player shooters like Halo any more: tense, adaptable, challenging. In 2026, we have multiplayer shooters of every imaginable kind; there is little reason for computer-controlled enemies to be intelligent and unpredictable, because we mostly play against other humans, and they provide infinite variation. What we don’t have in abundance in 2026 is atmospheric single-player shooters like this, or Half-Life, or System Shock 2. Solo campaigns in shooters such as Call of Duty have been reduced to flashy “cinematic” shooting galleries. Halo: Campaign Evolved reminded me what we’ve been missing.
The imposing Elites are still the probably cleverest foes I’ve ever played against, and it’s been 25 years. They bark orders and duck away from my fire, and they know how to flank me, when to rush me and how to adapt to my assaults. Every time you die in this game, you come back to a slightly remixed firefight, making it endlessly replayable; I never minded going back to a checkpoint, because it never feels repetitious. In other shooters you simply memorise enemy numbers and positioning, but here you must constantly adapt your play, especially on higher Heroic or Legendary difficulty. And I’d somehow forgotten about the Hunters. The first time a pair of those spiked brutes appeared I reacted on pure decades-old muscle memory: I turned around and fled.
Unfortunately, we still must contend with the Flood. After several levels of brilliant open-ended fights against intelligent foes under the strange light of a foreign sun, suddenly we are transported into a boring, claustrophobic zombie shooter. I maintain that these mid-game levels are extremely bad: shooting 400 identical parasitic baddies with a shotgun while waiting for a floating robot to open a door has never been my idea of a good time. This will be a controversial opinion, but I was grateful for the new waypoints that told me exactly where to go in the maze of zombie-filled corridors that is the Library. It meant that the worst parts of this game were over sooner.
In co-op Halo becomes somewhat less challenging, atmospheric and tactical and significantly more chaotic. Especially when vehicles are involved, the game transforms completely with the addition of other players, thanks to its flexible, open level design and adaptable foes. I played through much of the game in split-screen with my partner – I maintain that playing Combat Evolved with four players just feels somehow wrong – and was reminded exactly why I spent hundreds of hours rinsing this game with friends as a teenager. Halo remains the best companionable shooting game out there.
Campaign Evolved is a good remake of a brilliant game. There are things that are worse: I miss the original Warthog’s erratic handling and the early-00s sci-fi aesthetic, which is simply irreproducible with modern graphics. For all its prettiness, this remake chugs along at times – especially in split-screen it would occasionally slow to a crawl, and we never had to worry about linking various different online accounts and connecting to servers when we fancied a quick game of Halo in 2001. But the core of this game is impossible to mess up. For millions of younger players, Campaign Evolved is a perfect, modernised introduction to everything that was great about the 00s-style first-person shooter. For those of us who were there at the time, it’s a welcome return trip.
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Halo: Campaign Evolved is out now
