Halo: Campaign Evolved Review - Gorgeous, but Plays It Safe

Some remakes chase reinvention. Halo: Campaign Evolved chases memory - and mostly nails it.

This is Halo Studios rebuilding the 2001 original, Combat Evolved, from the ground up in Unreal Engine 5. It launched on July 28, 2026, and for the first time in the series' history it's on PlayStation 5 as well as Xbox Series X|S and PC. The standard edition runs $49.99, with a $69.99 Premium tier and a five-day early-access window that I'd happily skip.

The good

The moment you step onto the ring and the skybox curves up over your head, it's obvious where the budget went. Halo has never looked like this. Bump a Grunt and you still get the same gorgeous overreaction, but now the lighting, the water and all that Covenant chrome genuinely sell the fantasy. The 30 fps relic this is not - it's smooth, razor-sharp and stunning on a good TV.

The combat holds up because the original's "golden triangle" of guns, grenades and melee was years ahead of its time. Sprint is on by default now (toggle it off if you're a purist), you can hijack vehicles, and the Warthog finally seats four so a full co-op squad can pile in. Four-player online co-op plus two-player split-screen, with cross-play and cross-progression, is exactly the package the Master Chief Collection should have shipped with years ago.

The headline extra, Operation: METEORITE, is a three-mission prequel starring Chief and Sgt. Johnson set a year before the main story. It's brief but well made, and a smart way to ease you in before the big ring reveal.

The not-so-good

Faithful cuts both ways. The infamous back half - The Library and those copy-paste corridor crawls - is still here, prettier but no less of a slog. This is a visual overhaul, not a redesign; if you were hoping the padding got trimmed, it didn't.

The bigger omission is competitive multiplayer. There is no PvP at all. For a game called Halo, shipping without the arena that defined a generation of LAN parties feels like a hole, even if the campaign is clearly the star this time.

Verdict

As a way to replay one of the most important shooters ever made, this is close to definitive. It's gorgeous, it plays beautifully in co-op, and the new prequel is a welcome bonus. But it's cautious - a loving restoration rather than a reinvention - and the missing multiplayer stings. If you've never finished Combat Evolved, buy it now. If you have, and you're not desperate for the new coat of paint, it can happily wait for a sale.

Score: 8/10

Image: Xbox MENA / CC BY 3.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Halo_MCC_banner.jpg