Halo: Campaign Evolved, review of a classic remake

They all return: once they were ex-boyfriends, today they are successful video games, destined to cyclically reappear in new guises. Whether it's a remake or a remaster, there isn't a great classic, a commercial success, or a belated rediscovery that has escaped this rule. In the case of Halo: Combat Evolved, we are already in the second cycle of this loop. The previous remaster, Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, dates back to 2011, which would then pave the way for Halo: The Master Chief Collection, a remastered collection of the entire saga (or almost). 

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With an additional decade plus on the original Master Chief adventure's shoulders, the time has come for Microsoft to refresh the legend of its greatest icon with a new narration of its origins, rewriting them from the ground up. While Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary re-proposed the game for the first Xbox in its original form (even graphically, with the ability to instantly switch between two different graphics engines), Halo: Campaign Evolved rebuilds it entirely, brick by brick, in Unreal Engine 5. 

A New Master Chief

As evident from the title, Halo: Campaign Evolved is a remake focused on the single-player campaign of the original Halo; thus, the multiplayer component is excluded, or rather its competitive soul, because the possibility of tackling all missions in co-op is not only present but also expanded to 4 players and open to cross-platform play (while couch co-op is only allowed on consoles). The graphical leap on Xbox Series X is remarkable even compared to the new graphics of the remastered (still 15 years old), but it alternates between very suggestive scenarios and others less impactful. 

We are not facing a graphical remake like the one admired a few weeks ago in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, to be clear, but Unreal Engine 5 does a good job overall and, above all, does not suffer frame rate drops even in the most frantic situations, where it is called upon to manage a large abundance of particle and physical effects from several rapid successive deflagrations. In some ways, however, the graphical aspect of Halo: Campaign Evolved indirectly pays for the philological choice made by Halo Studios in maintaining almost intact the look of the original title, necessarily sparser than what we are used to today. So, if the entire original game (albeit rebuilt and remodeled in every element in the new graphics engine) is still entirely present in Halo: Campaign Evolved, this does not mean, however, that there are no new features. 

Master Chief is Still Master Chief 

The most striking new feature of Halo: Campaign Evolved is undoubtedly the new mission, which expands Master Chief's story, taking him and Sergeant Johnson to explore the depths of a Covenant vessel. More than a prologue, it's a connecting point between Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo: Campaign Evolved, an introduction to the small gameplay variations that differentiate the remake and its source of inspiration. For starters, you can sprint by pressing the left stick, as we are now accustomed to, which was not the case in the original. And then there's the regenerating health bar. Modernizations, perhaps indispensable given the gaming habits of today's Halo community, undoubtedly positively influence the gameplay, making it fresher, thanks also to a whole host of other small and less obvious improvements concerning enemy positions, their attack timings, and many other details necessary to make the new approach work. The cutscenes, however, are entirely new, also rebuilt here with a philological approach, without sacrificing spectacle or new voice acting, also used to introduce new in-game dialogue lines that better clarify assigned objectives. 

Halo, however, went down in history primarily for its revolutionary approach to FPS, with its battles in vast valleys that offered imaginative tactical and strategic variants, fueled by the far-from-trivial enemy AI. And all of this returns intact in Campaign Evolved, perhaps even smoother and more refined than ever, along with a much higher average difficulty than the standard we are accustomed to today. But also returning (always due to the philological approach) are backtracking and long sections of identical interiors that do little to aid orientation. But all of this is essentially just a taste of the Campaign Remix mode, which, after finding at least three skulls, allows you to apply a long series of modifiers to the entire campaign, more or less influential on gameplay, to adapt each game to your tastes.

Finally, on the technical side, the work done is good, despite some imperfections (on Series X, some stuttering is strangely detected during cutscenes), unfortunately also extending to the save system, which on more than one occasion crystallized the last checkpoint a fraction of a second before certain death, forcing us to repeat entire sections.