Halo: Campaign Evolved is a full and faithful remake of Halo: Combat Evolved – modernized and rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5 with updated visuals and environments.
I was able to play a couple of missions of Halo: Campaign Evolved, featuring the iconic missions Assault on the Control Room and The Silent Cartographer as part of a press preview. It’s an excellent remake so far, with visuals up to 4K resolution, ray-traced lighting, updated animations, newly recorded voice lines, and remastered music.
Players can experience Master Chief’s first adventure, enjoyed by generations of fans and newcomers alike. I played the game on the Heroic level, and it was pretty challenging. But I’m impressed with the results.
The Silent Cartographer is an early part of the game where you land on a beach, aiming to gain access to a key map point by breaking into the Covenant defenses underground. I landed, fought the small force on the beach, and grabbed a familiar Warthog — a military version of a Jeep in the future with a big gun mounted in the back. I was also glad to hear the voice of Cortana again.
I drove it along the beach and had to get used to steering and accelerating using the controller sticks again. I ran over some of the Covenant forces, then parked it and hopped to the back to take out a lot the Covenant from afar. Then I drove it to the next location and even drove it up the narrow pathways to the stronghold.
Along the way I fought elites and grunts even some that had stealth shields. It was a delightful mission, but I always wished that I had more grenades and more ammo to fight the forces of the Covenant. The hardest part was fighting the Hunters, the tank-like creatures who are heavily armored and pack a gun that fires like a tank cannon. I had to toss grenades at them, use the Warthog gun, and run around behind them to shoot their fleshy parts. They made the mission very difficult, even though you can bypass them. I wanted to take them out.
I had the hardest time disarming the Sangheli Elite and taking the Energy Sword, a double-bladed weapon. It’s hard to close in on a group of enemies with just the sword, but it’s devastating up close.
Meanwhile, the Assault on the Control Room mission was another cool mission where you fight the Covenant in heavy vehicles in snowy canyons. This mission features the USNC’s heavy tank, which causes great destruction until someone takes you out. And you can hijack the Covenant’s in their flying vehicles or motorcycle-like hovering Ghost and the hovercraft Banshee. Both are great at gaining speed or height advantages on the enemy.
As it is a pre-release demo, not a full game preview, it was only available on Xbox Series X|S consoles and Xbox on PC. The demo is optimized for Xbox Series X and Xbox on PC — I played it on the Xbox Series X.
The demo has a curated selection of gameplay-modifying Skulls and the new Campaign Remix Mode were unlocked for use.
Overall, the two levels brought back great memories for me and I can’t wait to play the full game — without fretting that graphics in the good old days look so quaint now. In fact, seeing the game in 4K was pretty awesome to see. It’s great to have Master Chief back.