Can a remake be both better and worse? Halo: Campaign Evolved answers that with certainty. It’s the second time that 343 Industries, now called Halo Studios, has attempted to remake the original Halo game in their image. Halo: Anniversary may have been categorised as a remaster, but the stark differences in art direction were more than what most remasters do. Campaign Evolved is their next attempt at reimagining the first game without any technical or artistic limitations. Unfortunately, it doesn’t commit to delivering a definitive take, instead muddying the waters with their selection of “improved” mechanics that are borrowed from later games.
Note: This review will contain minor spoilers. TLDR: Play the original, or at least be familiar with it, before playing the remake or reading this review.
From its opening moments, it’s both awe-inspiring and off-putting how Halo Studios sees this game. The cinematics have a metallic sheen, the camera is more dynamic, the characters are more defined, but the camera’s movement and cutscene direction are borderline amateurish. Why is Sgt. Johnson staring into my soul, body turned away from the UNSC soldiers, while he’s giving his pep talk? No idea. Hire a continuity supervisor.
There’s an immediate disconnect between how the game looks in cutscenes and how it actually plays. You’re shown an expansive battlefield with warring alien factions and their futuristic technology, yet you move like an Xbox character from 2001. I mean yeah, you are an Xbox character from 2001. The addition of sprint makes things better, but the game just feels heavy in its presentation, in a way that stands diametrically opposite to what its themes, story, and original game design want you to feel. The previous entry, Halo: Infinite, was already the franchise’s best-feeling game, so I don’t know why Halo Studios didn’t try to replicate that. This limited ambition continues to peek through in the remake’s approach to level design, atmosphere, and everything else.
Let’s talk visuals first, because that’s any remake’s key selling point. Generally speaking, if you don’t care about the art design of the original, you’ll like how Campaign Evolved looks. I think, at a glance, Halo Studios has done a fantastic job translating and reinterpreting the original’s intentionality, with its environments in a new engine. It looks so good, in fact, that in fact fool you into thinking it’s more than just staged environments with clear bounds. The Halo ring loses its sense of mysticism when it looks this shiny and lush. Again, Halo Infinite had the right idea. As great as the outdoors looks, it’s the indoors, save for a few missions, where things conceptually start to fall apart.
Halo has never aimed for realism. Its characters and worlds have always been stylised, and the franchise has never shied away from making its alien enemies look ridiculous. The clash then comes when you pair that original idea with more human-like appearances using modern rendering techniques. A realistic Captain Keyes stuck within the Flood’s goopy entrails is a harrowing sight, but five minutes later you’re fighting aliens that look like they came out of a cartoon. Ancient Forerunner structures now look like they’ve come out fresh out of the factory.
The good thing is, it mostly sticks to what works, and improves in areas where it needed to. The implementation of the Flood, including the slow buildup to their reveal with environmental diversity and their contrasting behaviour compared to the Covenant, is recreated very well. The Library is now a fun mission. It still feels great to shoot and melee enemies. Flying a Banshee is still some of very satisfying. The changes, though, are questionable. I appreciate porting the ability to hijack vehicles, as well as bringing in other weapons like SMGs, plasma rifles, and energy swords. But they don’t always serve the design of the original game, which has largely been kept intact.
Other issues in the remake are its writing and changes to scene direction. While most of the voice direction and new lines are good, the deviations stand out in stark contrast. There are many moments where a give scene’s tension is completely evaporated, and that’s all thanks to the pacing and editing of the scenes. The awkward pauses are too awkward. The tight timing of punchlines has been loosened. Overall, while it’s working with most of the same dialogue, the scenes just don’t hit the same because it’s not edited for the lines it has. There are too many unnecessary, and sometimes worse, changes to the cinematography, which drastically change the intended impact of certain scenes.
The bigger atrocity here is the three prequel missions. I hate prequels. They usually taint the original piece of art by unnecessarily adding in contradictory details. Unfortunately, Halo: Campaign Evolved’s prequel missions do the same. Not every cutscene needs MCU-like quips. Not every new character needs to shout out loud their motivation and intentions while berating Master Chief, throwing away any sense of subtext. The biggest disappointment here is the mission design. I like shooting the Covenant in Halo. I hated the boxed-in encounters in the prequels. It’s just arenas after arenas with the same damn enemies and same dynamics with the same limited level design. At least it culminates in a cool space battle sequence where you pilot a ship, but even that starts to feel exhausting after the objective loop keeps repeating.
Halo: Campaign Evolved PC Performance
I played the game on an RTX 5070 with an AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D. As expected from an Unreal Engine 5 title, performance left quite a bit to be desired. It wasn’t bad, and it has improved with updates. But it’s hard to understand why this game runs this heavy while looking the way it does. Cutscenes are locked at 30fps, and they don’t come close to matching the ambition, nay, the aura, of the cutscenes made by Blur Studios for the Anniversary editions of Halo: Master Chief Collection.
Frame generation is broken, affecting cutscenes as well and dropping the frame rate to near single digits with ugly artefacts if you don’t configure it well.
At 1440p and 4K, with DLAA, I got around 50fps with the Ultra settings on my PC. Dropping the settings preset down offers no meaningful uplift. A combination of DLSS and frame generation can get performance above 100fps. That’s fine for a game that is aiming for the level of fidelity this game is, but not so much when you factor in how hilariously low the load of its actual game logic likely is.
Verdict
Halo: Campaign Evolved is neither as ambitious as it could have been nor as committed to the original as it should be. There are slivers of meaningful changes, but most of that is overshadowed by confusing changes to art, scene direction, and writing. This may be completely fine for a first-timer, but it doesn’t live up to Halo’s legacy as a generation-defining sci-fi shooter.
DISCLAIMER: REVIEW COPY PROVIDED BY XBOX.
Halo: Campaign Evolved is available on PC, PS5, and XBOX Series X|S.
