I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect when I sat down in front of an Xbox Series X to play an early demo of Halo: Campaign Evolved, the just-announced Unreal Engine 5 remake of the original-Xbox killer app (and yes, it’s a proper remake, not a remaster like Halo Anniversary was). And I’m honestly still not sure exactly how I feel about it after playing it. I definitely wanted to be blown away by the visuals, in the same way that the original Halo: Combat Evolved knocked my socks off back in 2001. Heck, we know Unreal Engine 5 is fully capable! I also didn’t want Halo Studios (nee 343 Industries) to mess with too much. Or did I? Would Halo 1 just feel old no matter what? And will PlayStation 5 gamers even care about this 25-year-old Xbox classic when it hits Sony’s consoles for the first time ever, day-and-date with Xbox and PC? So I went in with lots of questions, and I left with, well…some answers. Let me explain.
I suppose we might as well start with the obvious: how it looks. Is my face properly melted? No. But maybe yours is? I’ll be curious to read the comments on this one. Anyway, Campaign Evolved does look very nice, no doubt. It certainly doesn’t look like it’s two decades old anymore. I played a chunk of the legendary Silent Cartographer mission from early in the campaign, and the skybox is beautiful, the water looks great, the trees look very nice, and the terrain texture looks sharp and clean. Once you get indoors, the alien architecture has a unique sheen to it that the original obviously never had. Meanwhile, the weapons all look exactly how you’d expect them to look in the modern era, and the Grunts, Jackals, Elites, and Hunters all look convincingly new rather than reskins of quarter-century-old creatures. Everything looks clean, but not in a soulless way. At least not to me. It works as a cohesive art-directed space in the new engine. I appreciate that VO from the principal actors (read: Steve Downes and Jen Taylor, at the very least) has been rerecorded, while mocap has all been redone for the rebuilt-from-scratch cutscenes.
But let’s talk about my biggest concern coming into this demo: the classic Halo feel. Movement, aiming, jumping, vehicle controls – it’s all got to have that semi-floaty Halo feel to it, and I’m pleased to report that even in this very early state, Campaign Evolved is a good bit of the way there. No doubt they’ll continue to tweak it over the coming months – this release has no official release date beyond “2026,” by the way, but I’d be stunned if it’s not timed to release at or very near the 25th anniversary of Halo: Combat Evolved in November of next year – but there have been some gameplay modernizations implemented here that have been ported back from subsequent Halos into this remake, and while purists might bristle at it, most of these seem like they’re for the best for a 2026 first-person shooter release.
For starters, vehicles are boardable and destructible now, as they were in subsequent Halo games. That means a Ghost can no longer torment you endlessly, nor are you effectively invulnerable in a Scorpion tank. On a related note, a fourth player can now sit on the back of a Warthog. Oh, and though I didn’t get to try it out on The Silent Cartographer, the Wraith is drivable now, too, as it first became in Halo 2. Also, any weapons the bad guys wield, you can too. As such, the Energy Sword is now in your toolbelt if you take one off the corpse of a Gold Elite. Halo Studios says there will be eight weapons in Campaign Evolved that aren’t new to Halo but are usable for the first time in Master Chief’s first adventure. On the movement front, sprint has also been added. It’s not on a cooldown; you can run endlessly. I could see this one annoying the Halo 1 purists most of all, but not only do the developers say you can turn it off, but you can also just…not use it. I found it handy when running down the beach back towards my mission objective after wandering off to go stare at more of the new Unreal Engine 5-rendered spaces.
