I’ve completed the Halo: Campaign Evolved single-player game and collected my thoughts about it. But a little preamble first. I’ve been with Halo since 2001, when the first game came out. And it’s good to go back home again.
Let me start that again. I’ve been with Halo since before 2001. I remember when it was Apple game being worked on at Bungie. When Microsoft bought that studio, I recall that Ed Fries, head of Microsoft Games Studios and one of the Xbox founders, got an angry call from Steve Jobs. I remember when Bungie first publicly showed off Halo, a first-person shooter played on a mysterious ringworld, with pulse-pounding music from Marty O’Donnell. I still feel alive when I hear that music.
So I was there, not quite at the beginning, but almost. I’m an OG Halo fan. I’ve played every Halo campaign in the series and that has made me fall in love with and out of love with and back in love with the franchise a lot of times.
And yes you could say I was excited to play Halo Campaign Evolved, a remake of that first-person shooter game from so long ago. The game debuted for all in the galaxy on July 28 for the Xbox Series X/S, Xbox on PC, cloud and Xbox Game Pass. It’s also on Xbox Play Anywhere, Steam and PlayStation 5. And I would say it was worth my time, and I recommend it for anyone, from old timers like me to the young crowd that wants to understand what it’s all about.
There’s some extra value here as the game comes with three new missions that are dubbed Operation: Meteorite, featuring Master Chief and Sgt. Johnson on a clandestine UNSC operation behind enemy lines. That leads into the 10 original missions of the first game, which turned into a franchise that sold tens of millions of copies — nobody knows because Microsoft hasn’t released the numbers.
The game from Halo Studios was rebuilt from the ground up using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5. You’ll notice that the environments look beautiful, and you can thank UE5 for that. The details pop out and the experience feels so much more real. But you can also notice some of the bugs. My preview copy didn’t work great on the Xbox so I switched over to play co-op with my friend Mark Chandler on the PlayStation 5. We played crossplay, as he was on Xbox on the PC and we had to connect in order to play through the campaign in co-op mode.
You can play it with two-player split-screen (console only) and up to four-player online co-op on consoles or the PC. It has crossplay and cross progression. I highly recommend playing with at least one other player, as Mark did the driving with the Warthog (a dune buggy) and I manned the gun. In a single-player experience, all you can do is drive the Warthog and hope that you can run over the occasional Covenant enemy.
The game keeps all the tone, mystery, scale and sense of discovery of a new world that made the original so memorable. Now the visuals are modern, as are the gameplay, cinematics and audio. And it’s actually a great experience to play Halo continuously, where you can speed through the campaign without stopping to fight every single battle over and over and over because you’re outgunned. (I of course speak for myself here). We sped through the campaign in about three evenings and we rarely had to stop and backtrack on the missions.
The Halo remake still has the classic satisfying weapons, the smart enemies that dodge your bullets, crazy combat vehicles, stick and non-sticky grenades, and a sandbox. You can run right through the campaign quickly or collect a set of Skulls with 42 gameplay modifiers. You can tell your children about skewering enemies with an energy sword and whether it feels the same as the original. The skewered Elites still die with a sigh as they collapse to the ground. They still drop their precious grenades to the ground. But there’s still never a spot in the game where you can find a box full of grenades. Some things never change.
Now this feels like it’s overdue because we haven’t had a new Halo game since Halo Infinite in 2021. But we have had lots of remakes. We had Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary edition in 2011, about 10 years after the original. Then we had Halo again in the Master Chief Collection of 2014.
Despite the long wait since I last played, I decided to be brave and play it on Heroic Level when I started the solo game by myself on my Xbox Series X. I played as much of the campaign as I could on the Xbox and then switched to replay the whole thing on the PS 5.
It was a bit harder than I remembered it being, or perhaps my skills have declined with age. Those damned Hunters were still hard to kill. You can sneak up behind them and shoot them or grenade them in the fleshy orange parts in the back that are not covered by armor. But good luck with that.
The difficulty of Halo has not only been the great AI and challenging nature of the enemies. It’s that the enemies, when bunched together, represent an almost impenetrable combat team when you’re fighting against them. The Grunts can peck away at your armor with small arms fire. The Elites can pin you down into a solo fight. The enemies can lob grenades at you if you concentrate your fire on just one enemy. And the tanks are just so hard to beat.
The brilliance of the game design is that there are a wide variety of enemies. Some require you to lob a grenade into a crowd, but grenades are scarce. You have to ration your ammo across multiple encounters. Some require shotgun blasts, but the ammo is also scarce. You have a lot of assault gun ammo, but the the damage is light and you have to pump a lot of bullets into the toughest Elites. But the simple Grunts and Jackals (snipers with shields fighting at longer ranges) are faster and can take you out if you’re careless. That means when you run into a clump of enemies, it won’t be an easy fight.
And Master Chief was built for that. He’s more powerful than the average human and bigger too. He has some pretty awesome armor, but it can get damaged and that makes the chief vulnerable until the armor recovers. He can melee a lot of the smaller enemies, so long as they’re not shooting at you with good aim. He can wield a lot of weapons, and he can steal enemy equipment, get into tanks, hover around on a Ghost or fly in a Banshee.
This orchestra of weapons and combat, all tuned to make each firefight intense, is what makes Halo so good. And it’s why I still like it so much after all these years. You can do cool things like steal a Banshee from an Elite as it flies low overhead, or you can hop on a Ghost and toss its driver aside and take over the vehicle for yourself.
It’s particularly hard to fly solo in missions like the Silent Cartographer and Assault on the Control room where you have to face off against two Hunters who can watch each other’s backs. Sticky grenades help bring them down, but rocket launchers are the best. Of course, you only get as many as six rockets at a time and it’s easy to miss because the creatures dodge a lot.
Some things to hate about Halo, a little
The scarcity of ammunition was always a problem for me when I played the original. Back in the day, there were occasional piles of ammo sitting around in a level, but they were not easy to find. Usually, I’d be happy to take the sticky grenades off the Covenant enemies’ bodies. But their guns weren’t as good as the UNSC Marines’ guns. I would always be sad to be forced to drop the USNC assault rifle for lack of ammo (you can only carry two guns). There were many times when I wished I could carry three weapons.
I grew to hate the Wraiths, or mortar tanks, of the Covenant. They had such precise and deadly aim that I had to always stay on the move in order to avoid being pinpointed with the very next mortar shell. Those Wraiths were way overly precise. I also hated one moment where I was fighting the Covenant in a big canyon and I had to run over to a Warthog. I had to pick up a sniper rifle or a rocket launcher. But every time I went to pick it up off the ground, I would be unable to pick it up quickly. It was like it was stuck in the ground and I had to hold the button down for a while in order to actually pick up the weapon. By that time, I was dead. Other Covenant shot me, or the Wraith operator would target me with a mortar shell. I don’t know if that was the slowness of Unreal or just a bug. But it caused me a lot of replays. I kind of remember the same thing in the original campaign, but this is not something I was nostalgic for.
I still say The Flood deserves our disdain. I really hated the repetition of the combat, the zombie-like characters, and the repetitive levels of the Library where you encounter The Flood. But that hatred made it easier to just mow them down. And I was delighted to fight The Flood characters who came in the form of tanks, vomiting out smaller characters and succumbing to fire only after long and harrrowing chases through the Halo labyrinths.
I still love the relationship between Master Chief and Cortana that develops over time. But I could have done without the super scantily clad version of Cortana. And I do wish she would simply explain things a little more rationally to the Chief when he needs to get his butt in gear.
This time around, I always carried an assault rifle, but I favored the shotgun because it was great at taking out enemies at short range, like hard-to-kill Elites. And it made a big impact on the tougher tank form of the enemies like the combat Flood enemies. I figured out with enough shotgun blasts that I could more of them down. Rocket launchers and sniper rifles were also useful. And the most useful weapon of all was the main battle tank, which I used to mow down both the Covenant and Flood infantry as well as their vehicles. I love the last big run with the Warthog, but I’ll let folks discover that for themselves.
Gotta love the new missions
The three new missions are part of Operation: Meteorite, and they feature Master Chief and Sgt. Avery Johnson. They are separate from the 10 main original missions and can be played any time, in any order. In Boarding Action, the chief and Johnson infiltrate the Triumph of Tolerance, a Covenant agricultural ship orbiting the destroyed, or “glassed” colony of Promise. The combat takes place inside the ship, where you have to breach the interior and secure intel.
I loved playing this mission, and just when I thought it was over, it went on and on. It showcased a lot of diversity in the combat and environment, even though the fighting was contained to one ship. The Needle Rifle became our trusted best friend alongside a short-range weapon, as it had the power to take down the surprise enemies. The rifle is a great tool for sniping at long range and taking enemies out quickly at short range at the same time.
The Most Dangerous Game features Chief, Johnson, ODST Williams and UNSC Marines who push into the ship. And they uncover experiments. In Heavy Burden, you extract critical Covenant data and escape before the ship’s soldiers take out the strike team. This sets up Operation: Red Flag, the mission of the Pillar of Autumn at the start of Halo.
I’m glad to see Halo come back fresh and new after all these years. It was a delight to play again and it reminded me of what enjoying a great game on an Xbox, or a PlayStation 5, was all about. I know that the old game was made by Bungie (sad to see what’s happened to them) but I honestly couldn’t tell that this was made by a different studio. Halo Studios, formerly 343 Industries, did a great job. It was also hard to find that many flaws in the Unreal Engine 5 version versus those made with older Bungie engines of the past.
Xbox is coming under fire almost weekly for some of its decisions. For sure, it’s not the same company that arose out of console innocence in 2001 with a surprisingly fun shooter game that gave it a reason to exist. But they did good with this game, and I am glad to play it again. I sure hope Microsoft has more Halo goodness up its sleeve for the future.
For sure, there are improvements in the graphics that blow away the older imagery. But the fact that this game that came out 25 years ago still sports some of the best gameplay is a testament to just how talented the team was back in 2001.
I give this game a 4.5 out of 5 stars. For those who don’t enjoy math, it’s a 9 out of 10, just like the original Halo.
Disclosure: Xbox provided me and my friend with codes so we could play on the Xbox Series X, Xbox PC and PlayStation 5. The opinions here are my own.