Honestly, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I sat down in front of my Xbox Series And honestly, I’m still not sure what to think after playing this game. I definitely wanted to be blown away by the visuals, just like the original Halo: Combat Evolved blew me away back in 2001. Heck, we know Unreal Engine 5 has its full potential! I also didn’t want Halo Studios (née 343 Industries) to get into it too much. Or me? Will Halo 1 just feel elderly no matter what? And will PlayStation 5 players even care about this 25-year-old Xbox classic when it hits Sony consoles for the first time ever, daily on Xbox and PC? So I came in with a lot of questions and left with… a few answers. Let me explain.
I guess we might as well start with the obvious: what it looks like. Is my face fused properly? NO. But maybe yours is? I’ll read the comments on this with interest. Either way, Campaign Evolved certainly looks very nice. It certainly doesn’t look like it’s two decades elderly anymore. I played part of the legendary Silent Cartographer mission from the beginning of the campaign and the skybox is stunning, the water looks great, the trees look very nice, and the terrain texture is acute and immaculate. Once inside the room, the alien architecture takes on a unique glow that the original apparently never had. Meanwhile, all weapons look exactly as you’d expect them to in the current era, with Grunts, Jackals, Elites, and Hunters looking convincingly recent rather than rehashes of creatures from a quarter of a century ago. Everything looks immaculate, but not in a soulless way. At least not for me. In the recent engine, it functions as a cohesive art-focused space. I appreciated that the voices of the main actors (read: Steve Downes and Jen Taylor, at least) were re-recorded and the mocap was redone for cutscenes built from scratch.
But let’s talk about my biggest concern with this demo: the classic Halo experience. Moving, aiming, jumping, controlling vehicles – it all needs to feel like a semi-smooth Halo, and I’m ecstatic to report that even at this very early stage, Campaign Evolved is already well on its way. They will no doubt continue to improve it in the coming months – this release, by the way, has no official release date beyond “2026”, but I’d be amazed if it doesn’t launch on or very close to the 25th anniversary of Halo: Combat Evolved next November – but there are some gameplay improvements here that have been carried over from subsequent Halos to this remake, and while purists may bristle at this, most of them seem like they are the best first-person shooter release of 2026.
Firstly, vehicles can now be entered and destroyed, as has been the case in subsequent Halo games. This means that the Ghost can no longer torment you indefinitely, and in the Scorpion tank you are not effectively indestructible. By the way, the fourth player can now sit on the Warthog’s back. Oh, and while I didn’t get to try it out in The Silent Cartographer, the Wraith is now also controllable, just like it was for the first time in Halo 2. You can also employ any of the weapons the bad guys wield. As such, the Energy Sword is now in your toolbar if you take it from a Gold Elite corpse. Halo Studios says Campaign Evolved will feature eight weapons that aren’t recent to Halo, but can be used for the first time in Master Chief’s first adventure. In terms of movement, sprinting has also been added. It is not under renewal; you can run endlessly. I can see this upsetting Halo 1 purists the most, but the developers not only say you can turn it off, you can also just… not employ it. This came in handy when I was running along the beach back to my mission objective after I had stepped away to look at more of the recent spaces rendered in Unreal Engine 5.
This made me think about pricing. Would it be the full version for $70 (or maybe even $80 by launch, since Microsoft has already tried to break into that price point this year)? Or maybe its price will be lower – especially since it applies only to the campaign? The Halo Studios team didn’t tell me when I asked them directly, so that remains to be seen. Personally, I think that PLN 50 will be appropriate, but that’s just my opinion. I also think $20 a month seems like the right price for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate…
OK, so there’s no multiplayer, but there is one significant addition that I’m really excited about: a recent three-mission prequel campaign that revolves around Master Chief and Sergeant Johnson. This could be extremely frigid, but unfortunately that’s literally all we know for now. In fact, Halo Studios didn’t even tell me whether it was available out of the box or if you had to complete the campaign to unlock it. I also asked if they would employ existing music from the Halo 1 soundtrack to score these missions, or if they could commission something recent (I dare to dream that they would contact Marty O’Donnell himself!), and they didn’t find an answer for me there either.
Back to the gameplay, I must say that I still had fun roaming the beaches of the Silent Cartographer in the warthog, with my UNSC Marine buddies in the passenger and gunner seats helping to mow down the Covenant bad guys while I tried to turn them into hood ornaments using the front bumper. Just like elderly times. At one point I also manned a gun tower to test the cordial AI and… it still needs work. Someone on the development team actually admitted this later, without me bringing it up, so he’s obviously aware of it. Honestly, it’s not something I’m even worried about with (probably) over a year of development time left. The same goes for framerate: no doubt some people went straight to the comments to note any inconsistencies they noticed (because I definitely noticed them), and while it’s certainly crucial, it’s not something I’m bothering with this far from the end of the project.
Oh, I should also mention that Halo Studios is adding Skulls to Campaign Evolved. Lots of them, actually. The word “dozens” is used, with the emphasis being that this remake has the most Skulls of any Halo campaign in history. The studio’s clear focus here is on replayability – which is understandable given Halo’s wealthy history in this department, as well as the lack of adversarial multiplayer – and hopefully Skulls will add some variety to Xbox players as they play through the game again and again.
As such, I couldn’t lend a hand but wonder whether PlayStation 5 players playing Halo for the first time would actually care about it in a way that would turn many of them into recent fans of the series. This is a genuine question; I have a lot of personal history with Halo, so I simply can’t answer that question. For someone who doesn’t miss Master Chief, will players find Campaign Evolved as fascinating as I found Combat Evolved? And if so, what? Will Halo Studios remake Halo 2 on Unreal Engine 5? And then 3? 4? 5? Reception? ODST? Infinite? Or will they just port the Master Chief and Halo Infinite collection to PS5 to catch up with these players? I asked the band about this and, again, received a very media-savvy response: “There’s an opportunity for us to grow our fan base,” executive producer Damon Conn told me. “We think we’re bringing the most players ever to Halo. So development is what we’re really interested in, which I mentioned again before paving the way for future stories and Halo.”
So as you can see, there are still a lot of unanswered questions about this remake project. But to Halo Studios’ credit, this early demo answered some key questions about how good Halo could look and feel. So far it’s good there. I’m very excited about the recent three-mission prequel campaign featuring Sergeant Johnson, as it will be the first recent single-player content for Halo in five years. Can Campaign Evolved reignite the Halo spark? This is the most crucial question of all and will have to remain unanswered for some time.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive previews editor and host of IGN’s weekly shows on Xbox, Podcast unlockedas well as our monthly interview program, IGN without filter. It’s from North Jersey, so it’s a “Taylor ham,” not a “pork roll.” Chat with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.
