Ryan McCaffrey
Guest
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.
Vehicles are boardable and destructible now.
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.
What about co-op? After Halo Studios fumbled that in Halo Infinite, you’re probably wondering about it for the remake. Two-player split-screen is confirmed, though sadly it wasn’t available in my short preview build, and the development team also promises four-player online co-op with full cross-play and cross-progression support. As for proper competitive multiplayer, though? Unfortunately, the answer to that is right in the name of this remake: Campaign Evolved. There’s no multiplayer here, which is a shame because it’d sure be fun to see Blood Gulch or Sidewinder or Hang ‘Em High in Unreal Engine 5 with online cross-play support. I asked Halo Studios about this, and Executive Producer Damon Conn gave me an extremely media-trained answer, saying the team is “very focused on recreating the original campaign that started it all” and “[Halo] Infinite and [Master Chief Collection] provide really great experiences for multiplayer.” Sure…for Xbox and PC players. That doesn’t help new PS5 players fall in love with Halo’s glorious multiplayer, though. Presumably they didn’t want to pull any players away from MCC for this, and/or adding full multiplayer support would’ve likely meant the project couldn’t get done in time for the 25th anniversary. But it’s still disappointing.
That led me to wonder about pricing. Would this be a full-price $70 release (or perhaps even $80 by the time it comes out, since Microsoft already tried to push to that price point this year)? Or will it be priced lower – particularly since it’s campaign-only? The Halo Studios team wouldn’t say when I asked them directly, so that remains to be seen. Personally, $50 feels right for this, but that’s just my opinion. I also think that $20 per month feels like the right price for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate…
OK, so no multiplayer, but there is one significant addition I’m legitimately excited about: a new three-mission prequel campaign that revolves around Master Chief and Sergeant Johnson. This could be extremely cool, but unfortunately that’s literally all we know so far. In fact, Halo Studios wouldn’t even tell me if it’s accessible out of the box or if you have to complete the campaign in order to unlock it. I also asked if they’d be repurposing existing music from the Halo 1 soundtrack to score those missions, or if they might commission something new (dare I dream they reach out to Marty O’Donnell himself!), and they didn’t have an answer for me there either.
Getting back to gameplay, I must say that I still had fun hooning across the beaches of The Silent Cartographer in a Warthog, my UNSC Marine buddies in the passenger and gunner seats helping to mow down Covenant bad guys while I attempted to turn them into hood ornaments with my front bumper. Just like old times. I also manned the gun turret at one point to test out the friendly AI and…it still needs work. In fact, someone on the development team acknowledged this later without me bringing it up, so it’s clearly something they’re aware of. Honestly, though, it’s not something I’m even worried about when there’s still (probably) upwards of a year of development time left. It’s the same with the framerate: no doubt some folks went straight to the comments to note any inconsistencies they saw (because I definitely noticed some), and while it is certainly important, it’s not something I’m sweating this far away from the end of the project.
Oh, and I should also mention that Halo Studios is adding Skulls to Campaign Evolved. Lots of them, in fact. “Dozens” was the word they used, with an emphasis on this remake having the most Skulls of any Halo campaign ever. Replayability is clearly a focus for the studio here – which is understandable, given Halo’s strong history in that department as well as the lack of adversarial multiplayer – and hopefully the Skulls will spice things up for Xbox players running through this thing for the umpteenth time.
Halo Studios says this remake having the most Skulls of any Halo campaign ever.
On that note, I couldn’t help but wonder if PlayStation 5 players getting their first crack at Halo are really going to care about this in a way that turns a lot of them into new fans of the franchise. It’s a genuine question; I’ve got a lot of personal history with Halo, so I simply can’t answer this one. For someone with no nostalgia for Master Chief, will those players find Campaign Evolved as compelling as I found Combat Evolved? And if they do, then what? Will Halo Studios remake Halo 2 in Unreal Engine 5? And then 3? 4? 5? Reach? ODST? Infinite? Or will they just port The Master Chief Collection and Halo Infinite to PS5 to catch those players up? I asked the team about this and again got a very media-trained half-answer: “There is an opportunity for us to grow the fanbase,” Executive Producer Damon Conn told me. “We're bringing the most players, we believe, to Halo, ever. And so that growth is what we're truly interested in, and again, I hinted before this paves the way for future stories and Halos.”
And so, as you can now see, I’m still left with many unanswered questions about this remake project. But to Halo Studios' credit, this early demo did answer a couple of key ones about how good it could look and how Halo-y it could feel. So far so good there. I’m very excited about the new three-mission prequel campaign featuring Sergeant Johnson, as it will be the first new single-player content in a Halo game in, by that point, five years. Can Campaign Evolved relight Halo’s spark? That’s the biggest question of all, and it’ll have to remain unanswered for a bit longer.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of both IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.