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It might have lost some of its lustre over the course of the last decade, courtesy of Halo Infinite and the Halo TV series, which both came and went, but Halo still deservedly holds icon status within the annals of video game history. Over the course of the original trilogy, it transformed what it meant to be a first-person shooter on console, was a lynchpin in the formation of Xbox Live, and was a global mega-seller and system mover.
Despite enjoying anniversary editions in past years, Halo is back again in the form of Campaign Evolved. Rebuilt using Unreal 5, it’s a much prettier version of the original game that defined Xbox’s loud entrance into the market over two decades ago, but it would appear the release is set to come with caveats. Not only is it going to mark the franchise’s first time releasing on PlayStation, based on its title alone, a clever riff on the original’s subtitle, it’s launching without its multiplayer suite. While it’s a shame, I do think the engine room for Halo’s online presence really spun up with its sequel, so spotlighting the game’s tremendous single-player campaign isn’t something I can be mad at. And, of course, the campaign itself can now be experienced in four-player co-op.
For the uninitiated, Halo is the game PlayStation tried to “kill” over and over, whether it was Killzone or the venerable Haze taking a shot at the crown, they never could quite box with God. Ironically, in the end, Halo managed to place itself in hospice, but its place as an industry-leading franchise for its time is etched in stone. It’s an epic space opera about a superhuman space marine, Master Chief, being roused from cryosleep amidst mankind’s war against the Covenant only to be jettisoned onto a ring-shaped world, absolutely teeming with allure and mystery.
While the Halo campaign is immaculately paced, save for perhaps one mission in particular, I’m glad they opted to show off the game’s fourth mission, The Silent Cartographer, for the purpose of showcasing this remake. It truly is the best of what makes Halo Halo. It opens with a spectacular beachfront landing that feels like the video game equivalent of Normandy before taking on a guided tour of this serene, alien world, all in search of the map room, which is largely considered key to mission success. When considering the changes they’ve made here with Halo, I’m glad they’ve left well enough alone with the moment-to-moment unfolding of the mission itself.
The core gameplay tenets, on the other hand, have been modernised, meaning Combat Evolved, like the later Halo games, now has a sprint and trigger-forced aim down sights. As antiquated as it was, I felt that clicking in the right analogue stick was quintessential Halo, and this homogenisation to make it basically play like Call of Duty has left me feeling at odds with the shift. Similarly, I feel as though Master Chief’s legend, as a veritable walking tank, is diminished slightly by having him send it around corridors like a featherweight not wearing a 400-plus kilogram suit of armour.
The cynic in me believes the changes are intrinsically tied to an inevitable multiplatform push for a bigger, packaged multiplayer title or suite.
I can understand their vision, but from a control scheme standard, nothing played like Halo did, and now Halo, seemingly losing part of itself, plays just like everything else. Although I didn’t get to really experience any of it within the context of this preview, I do like that they’re apparently adding enemies and weapons, like the energy sword, which was first usable in Halo 2, to Campaign Evolved. Even the inclusion of vehicle hijacking should provide a slightly altered routing through some battles that could, in addition to the extra firepower, make parts of the campaign feel more emergent.
My mind races about missions like Two Betrayals and Assault on the Control Room.
As someone who has a lot of nostalgia for Combat Evolved, I do think that, within the context of the level itself, the updated cinematics feel like almost a step backward, also. I always found the original perspective on the beach entry, seeing it through Chief’s eyes, gave the level’s opening a horrific, grounded feeling that, again, is lost here for the sake of an admittedly cool-looking hero shot.
Certain lines of dialogue have also been re-recorded to cater to these reshot cinematics. Jen Taylor’s opening mission brief certainly sounds like a different take when compared to the original. The remainder of the mission audio seems to be intact, so I suspect the decision to redo certain lines was to fit in with the cinematic recut. To be clear, Taylor’s performance is still as perfect as Cortana, but I do hope any other changes are up to her standard. Fortunately, it would appear that Marty O’Donnell’s original score, an integral piece of Halo’s identity, is present throughout, and it still hits as hard thanks to a hefty remaster; from the infamous monk chant to its rock-infused main riff, it stands the test of time as a legendary piece of composition.
I’ve established I’m not as thrilled with a couple of the core “upgrades” and modernisations to the control suite, so whether I think Campaign Evolved needs to exist hinges on its visual upgrade via Unreal, after Halo Studio dumped its proprietary engine after Infinite’s player drop-off. Campaign Evolved certainly is pretty.
The Silent Cartographer was a fine choice to prove this—it has great environmental variety as you deftly trot back and forth from its scenic beachhead vistas to its machine-like Forerunner installations, which have always had an allure to sci-fi fans. That said, with enough chips in its paintwork, I do think it still falls a few rungs short of other Unreal 5 titles; however, it is a work in progress, and perhaps I’m looking a little closely at things.
My interest in Campaign Evolved comes in the form of additional missions that pad out the story. It seems as though these will come in the form of prequel missions, which likely won’t add too much to the canon we don’t already know, but I’m glad they’ll fit within the framework that is the Combat Evolved campaign, which, as I mentioned earlier, is already paced so well.
In a world where the Xbox brand could disappear after a single, poor financial quarter, I have to wonder if Campaign Evolved needs to exist. The original game still holds up in my view, and is available within the Master Chief Collection, so I wonder if simply porting that to other platforms might have been the play considered better for business. There’s also the question of why, which stands to question the franchise’s long-term health.
Were the last and next potential efforts to expand the Halo empire considered so unconvincing that the only viable option was to retread an already well-worn path?
Whatever the reason, we’re getting Halo: Combat Evolved again, and I do anticipate old heads like me, who have reverence for the original, to be at odds with the modernisations. With that said, everything else that makes Halo what it is has been left well enough alone, or made marginally better, so Campaign Evolved could yet prove to be the definitive entry point to the series for those who’ve yet to embark on this most wonderful saga.
