Halo: Campaign Evolved Review

Grab the lads and find the nearest bathroom, it's time to start the Gregorian chants as Halo may actually be so back. Halo: Campaign Evolved is a remake of the original 2001 Xbox release with the addition of a few modern day bells, whistles, and weapons that entered the franchise in later entries. Not everything works, but for the first time in the 343 Industries / Halo Studios run it feels like they’ve managed to recapture what made the Bungie era games so great…and that includes the three new prequel missions.

Halo Campaign Evolved is at its best as a co-op game. Grabbing a bunch of pals and causing chaos in the Halo sandbox has never felt as fun as this. Halo Studios have seemingly pulled back the guard rails they forced on players in previous games, and now you and your pals can pull of silly hijinx like jamming your warthog into the back of Foehammer’s Pelican at the end of Assault on the Control Room, or having one player pick up an unlimited ammo skull and just start blasting the Fuel Rod Cannon into frays with no care for whoever gets hit (be it Covenant, Marine or their own pals).

Finding little tricks with friends to get to areas you’re just not supposed to go hasn’t been this endearing in over a decade, and going into Halo Campaign Evolved with the mindset of, “I’m gonna beat this on Legendary with my pals, but also have a proper fuck about,” has never been more encouraged.

On the other side of the coin, playing solo can often show the cracks in the original Halo Combat Evolved formula. As much as that original game was a masterpiece at the time, setting the standard for first person games, some of the level design and combat encounters can feel dated. One example is the first Forerunner structure on the second level, Halo, where four waves of Covenant get dropped into combat one after the other. In the modern day, this feels like padding, and could have certainly been streamlined.

The majority of the first half of the campaign is mostly untouched in terms of level structure, and in reality probably should have had more expansion and adjustments, especially given the work that has gone into the back half, which was famously made up almost entirely of backtracking… and, ugh, The Library.

These back half levels have had a fairly major overhaul, especially The Library, which has forgone its repeating corridors to something a little more engaging and interactive. I wouldn’t say the issues are fully resolved, but the addition of more Flood goop, as seen in Halo 3’s Cortana level, getting more and more intense as you progress really helps elevate the journey and aids to ease monotony. The newly added Flood form from Halo 3, the Tank form, also mixes up the variety nicely.

The Flood also seem far more difficult in this updated version. On my initial solo-runthrough for this review on Normal, the Flood took me completely by surprise. Flood Pure Forms are much more overwhelming and can cause real problems now — back in the day you could just leave them to pop on you, but here it’s not the case.

On the topic of the new Flood difficulty and the Tank form, suddenly adding sprint to the game doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. The first half of the game doesn’t really gain anything from sprint, unless you are doing nonsense that involves a lot of backtracking. But in the back half, when you’re genuinely panicking, being forced to backtrack to escape or find ammo or pick up the rocket launcher you ignored, it really becomes useful.

One feature the game could really have done with is clamber. There’s a surprising amount of awkward jumps that could have been eased, especially in the middle segments of The Maw. Even though I’ve done this section a million times, my modern-day monkey brain still tried to clamber. It feels like bringing in sprint but not clamber is a strange half measure, especially if they could have given it a speed debuff so there’s always the panic of The Flood absolutely messing you up on the climb.

This would have been an incredibly fun problem when playing on Campaign Remix, which randomises enemies across the entire campaign. Fighting the Flood on the PIllar of Autumn and Truth and Reconciliation can really change things up!

Campaign Remix really is the highlight of Campaign Evolved. The randomised weapons and enemies opens up replayability to a whole new level, and surprising friends who may not know the feature exists or haven’t unlocked it themselves can lead to some great laughs. This one mode truly brought back my love of the sandbox and the franchise, leading your crew into some really nonsense antics, and I can only see this growing as I unlock more Skulls to modify the game further.

With 42 Skulls in the game, 3 hidden in each level, it’s going to take a while for fans to hunt them all down (unless a group of tenacious Halo YouTubers have done it already, which wouldn’t surprise me). I also found a very strange secret on the level Halo at the first Forerunner structure, but I won’t go too in depth into that here, as there may be more to it than meets the eye. Let’s just say: the new Machinima Mode is a godsend for secret and Skull hunting.

The three new bonus prequel missions, known as Operation Meteorite, that follow Master Chief and Sergeant Johnson through a Covenant ship (one that is strangely reminiscent of Pokemon Scarlett and Violets Blueberry Academy) serves as a brilliant demo of what Halo can become going forward. Although the narrative is fairly thin, offering very little than establishing how the humans discovered a specific Covenant secret, the gameplay itself is incredibly reminiscent of Halo 3. This is mostly down to the Brutes, and bringing their iconic Spiker into the sandbox.

The new levels feel like a testbed for gameplay in the future but also to solidify the Johnson and Chief relationship as Halo Studios hopefully look to remake Halo 2 and 3. The new levels aren’t an essential play from a narrative standpoint, but the joy of diving into something completely new, that plays like an upgraded version of Bungie’s Halo games is absolutely delightful - even if the Seraph space combat sequence fails to deliver anything truly exciting, never even scratching the quality of Reach’s ‘Long Night of Solace’ level.

The cutscenes are genuinely beautiful (the whole game is, to be honest) and expand on what appeared in the original release. Seeing the full scale of the Covenant attack on the Pillar of Autumn and the intensity of the crash on the Halo is a sight to behold, as is the flood reveal from Jenkin’s head camera and Master Chief’s grand entrance at the start of The Maw. My only real complaint here is that the original sight gags like Chief teleporting in upside down just don’t translate to the game’s new level of realism and clash with the tone.

Alongside that, it's always a shame to be critical of a new actor into a franchise, but the new voice actor for Sergeant Johnson doesn’t come close to capturing David Skully’s original performance. Some of this may be down to new lines, which, if I'm honest, don't really capture the essence of the character. My best comparison is season 4 of Community, where all the pieces are there, but it just feels wrong, like the essence was misunderstood.

This issue translates to Cortana too, who as always is performed by the amazing Jen Taylor, but an effort to give her more emotional range instead turns her into a much more quippy and sarcastic character. She feels more like The Weapon from Halo Infinite than Cortana. The original delivery of certain lines to fans are like religious scripture, and changing them feels sacrilegious. That's what happens here, and it often negatively affects the characterisation of Cortana. She is audibly mad and lambasting Captain Keyes in the line delivery of “I knew it! The Autumn is accelerating. Keyes is going in manually.” It’s a very odd choice that will definitely piss off a lot of Halo loyalists.

Master Chief isn’t fully safe from this either, but any additions to his script do aid the story telling, and the same can be said for Captain Keyes, who’s new voice actor does an incredible job picking up the baton from Pete Stacker. There is more acknowledgement of lore established later in the franchise in his dialogue, and it fleshes him out in ways that were one hundred percent necessary in a project of remakes.

Annoyingly, the cutscenes do struggle with frame drops, which normally occur once per scene. It’s not the end of the world, but on Xbox Series X you’d really hope this wouldn’t be the case considering how well the gameplay holds up in performance mode.

Halo Studios has done a fantastic job across the board at matching the original vibe and visual language of Halo Combat Evolved. The skybox on the level Halo is stunning and feels like an evolution of the original rather than a reimagining. Praise can also be thrown to 343 Guilty Spark, The Library, and The Maw — the developers took what Bungie imagined and ran with it, adding more detail but never losing the feeling. The Maw has even had a very specific upgrade that fans have been calling out for for a long long time. The warthog run may not be as tough as the original with the updated physics, but it sure as hell is a lot of fun.

Dated level design may be the biggest issue for Halo Campaign Evolved for new players joining the series, but that doesn’t stop it being the best Halo release since Bungie left the franchise. That factor, alongside dropped frames in cutscenes, and some less than stellar scripting and line delivery hold Halo Campaign Evolved back from a perfect score, but for any lapsed or longtime Halo fan out there this is an essential play through — especially with friends.

Review Score:★★★★

Reviewed on Xbox Series X, code supplied by publisher.