I went into Halo: Campaign Evolved thinking it didn’t need to exist, but after playing two levels I want full remakes of the original trilogy and Reach

When Microsoft revealed that Halo: Campaign Evolved last year, I balked at its claim that this would be “a faithful yet modernised remake of Halo: Combat Evolved’s campaign“. How could it be? It’s made in Unreal Engine 5, very few of the original team is left at what is now Halo Studios, and the devs dared to tinker with the controls. I made my views very clear. I even cited examples from the very minds that made the original game when Bungie was but a fledgling studio with dreams of grandeur; it wasn’t just me that felt this way: even the series creators did. Vindication!

But I hadn’t actually played the game. I had seen the initial reveal trailer, and done a lot of reading, and I was left unconvinced. But that was enough to enamour one of Master Chief’s other parents, Marcus Lehto, however; he’s been picking up what Halo Studios has been putting down from the start. And it turns out I should have trusted his instinct more, because Halo: Campaign Evolved is an absolute blast. I was given a short pre-flight test of the game after its big showing at Microsoft’s Sunday showcase, and I lapped up the two levels on offer in a matter of hours. Then I booted the demo up again, on Legendary. Halo is back.

Let’s address the key complaint I’ve seen from wary Halo veterans first: Unreal Engine 5. Yes, I agree, I think it can be really ugly, and I think that all-too-familiar shine we get from Lumen and Nanite (the rendering and lighting tech that makes UE5 look like… that) is a problem plaguing the games industry as Epic’s engine becomes more ubiquitous. However, whatever the technical wizards at Microsoft have been doing with Epic’s tech is pretty special; the fluidity, the soft lighting, the dimly illuminated tunnels of the structures that honeycomb the insides of the eponymous Halo… it all looks phenomenal. In fact, it might be one of the best-looking games I’ve played on the Series X.

What’s more impressive is that this looks how I remember it. Except, of course, it doesn’t. Even the (relatively) recently remastered version of Combat Evolved present in The Master Chief Collection looks ancient compared to this. But levels like “The Silent Cartographer” and “Assault on the Control Room” (the two we had access to for the demo) feel seared into my brain; the beachhead paths and canyon rifts hardcoded onto my cortex from many misspent evenings in my youth. So there’s almost this sense of deja vu in retreading them, yet I’m not on a sixth-generation console – I’m playing on a ninth-gen one.

I am not being dramatic when I say that my breath caught in my throat a little as I emerged from the internal structure in “The Silent Cartographer”, forgetting the tropical climes that lead me inside and being awe-struck by the snowy peaks that lay ahead of me. The snow deforms from blasts and gunfire and Ghost tracks. The light from detonated plasma grenades illuminates the snow softly before blasting it away to show charred rock beneath. The desperate dash to mount and sabotage a Wraith before it strikes me down with mortar fire was awash in a frantic blitz of purple and green and orange and it honestly made me feel a bit like a kid again. This is what Halo felt like back on my CRT TV, except it never looked this good.

I don’t think the screens or trailers do the game justice; seeing it in action is the only way to go.

The sound design, too, is loyal to Bungie’s original opus. Even down to the inane and genuinely funny barks the Elites and Grunts utter whenever you die – you know, the ones that always seem to last a bit too long, like even the devs are having a joke at your expense. The Covenant guns feel spacey and the UNSC guns feel kinetic and the flurry of plasma and rocket detonation all around you is muffled and marbled and magnified so naturally by the environment you’re in, you barely even notice how good it is.

Even the AI, which I assume has been reprogrammed from the ground up thanks to the engine migration, is at its goofy, funny best. I laughed out loud at least three times when, after clearing a room or taking on a hunter pair with nothing by my beloved magnum, a Grunt would appear out of nowhere, scream something like “if I go, I’ll take you with me!” and completely blindside me with a suicide double-plasma dive. Off I go, my ragdoll body flung unceremoniously into a dark corner, and my checkpoint loads. Is that not the core Halo experience? I also ended up dying by firing off a rocket too close to my own face (standard) and by eating at least one direct hit from a hunter after I’d so cleanly dispatched its wandering mate. These are, genuinely, things that happened to me way back in 2001. And 2004. And 2007. And, well, whenever a Halo game released, I guess.

One of the dev comments I mentioned above came from Jaime Griesemer, who had some nitpicking about the placement of props in the levels shown off in the game’s initial reveal. “You aren’t supposed to be able to take the Warthog up to steamroll the Hunters,” he posted in a thread containing a 13-minute gameplay clip of the new title in action. “I intentionally placed rocks in the way so you had to fight them on foot. When you can just smash the crates out of the way it wrecks the encounters. […] On further analysis I’m sure it’s because the vehicles take damage and so you’re just as likely to destroy the hog as get it over the rocks. If anything that makes it -worse- because -none- of the vehicle tricks are going to work anymore.”

Now, I agreed with that at first, but after playing the game, I think I see Halo Studios’ vision. I think these changes have been made to make it more fun. Maybe that’s not in line with the original game… but we can still play the original game. If we’re remaking something, with slightly different geometry and design-level tweaks necessitated by new programmers working in a new engine, we cannot expect the same gating and logic when it comes to minutiae like this. There are some key differences in Campaign Evolved compared to the original – reload speeds are quicker, there are no health packs but instead both shields and health recharges, there is fall damage – and it makes it feel more like you’re playing something like Reach or Halo 3.

You can drive a Wraith in this game. You couldn’t in Halo: CE. But its placement, and the way you can use it to clear out a path and cut through defensive instalments on the way to the Cartographer feels like it’s always been part of the experience. Killing a chosen Elite and using his energy sword to finish off the rest of his squad feels like it’s always been an option, because that’s what we’ve got used to in the games since. But you could never use the energy sword in the first Halo. Likewise, you can aim-down-sights on the Needler and assault rifle (which still feels weird), and – importantly – sprint!

Some purists may balk at this, but honestly, I prefer it. Some of these changes are simply better, more in line with modern sensibilities. I want to be able to sprint in my FPS games, I don’t want to stop and smell the roses unless I really have to! (That said, purists, there are so many skulls in this game, you can probably modify your way back into a more classic Halo experience if you so desire… including an option to turn sprint off, masochists).

On balance, there are some changes I don’t like: the voice acting is too peppy and cheery, and whilst there’s always been a goofiness to Halo, it feels a bit off-key. There are environmental additions, like markers on the floor telling you where to go. These are actually genuinely lore-friendly, if you ask me, but it smacks a bit of the modern game-makers reluctance of letting go of a player’s hand for my liking. Rooms are bigger, which feels weird sometimes, but I think that’s to account for the fact that Campaign Evolved can host four player co-op, rather than the original game’s two.

From my early time with it at least, Halo Studios has achieved something remarkable, and truly unexpected: it has defined the essence of Halo, and managed to magnify it. It has reinvigorated the first game with all the best bits of the following six. Microsoft’s goal here was to “make a modern entry point to the Halo franchise for new players”, and I imagine Campaign Evolved is successful enough to do that. But it’s also reignited my love for a franchise that expanded my horizons as a teenager, and made me reassess what I loved about the original trilogy; that sense of puzzle-crafting in firefights, the on-the-fly decision-making that makes you feel god-like and dangerous, and the joy of play that comes from engaging with a goofy sandbox in the goofiest way imaginable. I don’t think the spirit of Halo lives on in Campaign Evolved, I think it is reborn. And I can’t wait to see what else this studio can do in the future.