Halo: Campaign Evolved

There's a version of this review that only talks about the campaign, and in that version, Halo: Campaign Evolved is close to the gold standard for how you remake a twenty-five-year-old shooter. There's another version that has to reckon with what "Halo" actually meant to the people who made it a franchise, and that version has a much harder time getting past what's missing. Both versions are true, and the gap between them is the whole story here.

What a remake should look like

Halo Studios — 343 Industries under a new name, having rebuilt itself around Unreal Engine 5 after nearly a quarter century on Bungie's proprietary Slipspace lineage — deliberately kept code from the original Blam engine specifically to preserve how the game feels: the physics, the vehicle handling, the Covenant AI's specific brand of aggression. Layered over that foundation, Lumen and Nanite do what they're good at, and the ringworld Halo has never looked like this. It's a genuinely rare combination: a remake that changes almost everything visible while working hard to keep what was underneath it intact.

The combat sandbox is meaningfully bigger too. Nine weapons pulled in from later Halo games, drivable vehicles including a Wraith tank, a toggleable sprint for players who want it and an option to play it exactly as stiff as 2001 for players who don't — none of this feels like padding. "Operation METEORITE," three new prequel missions set a year before the main campaign, is the clearest sign the team wasn't just polishing an existing thing; they added a new one. Forty-two Skulls, some of them straightforwardly absurd (a permanent third-person camera, an instant-death "Floor is Lava" mode), give the campaign a reason to run it more than once even after the story's been seen.

The returning cast matters more than it sounds like it should. Steve Downes and Jen Taylor re-recording dialogue rather than having AI or a soundalike fill in, over Martin O'Donnell and Michael Salvatori's faithfully remastered score, keeps this feeling like the same story rather than a company's idea of what the story used to be.

The half that isn't here

Here's the problem, stated plainly: this remake removes competitive multiplayer entirely. Every scrap of Halo: Combat Evolved's original online play — the maps, the Team Slayer that turned dorm rooms and LAN parties into franchise-defining memories for a generation of players — is simply gone. What replaces it is four-player online co-op for the campaign, with crossplay and local split-screen on consoles, which is a genuinely good feature and not a substitute for what it's standing in for.

For a lot of the audience this remake is aimed at, that's not a missing side dish. Competitive multiplayer is, for many longtime fans, half of what "Halo" has ever meant, and its absence is almost certainly the single biggest reason critic scores (76 to 84 across platforms on Metacritic — solidly positive) and Steam's own Mixed rating from its actual buyers tell such different stories. Critics reviewing a campaign remake as a campaign remake liked it. Players who bought a Halo game and expected a Halo game, in the fuller sense, are telling a different story with their reviews.

What else is worth knowing

Requiring an Xbox Network account to play on PlayStation or Steam is a small but real friction point that's drawn its own complaints, and worth knowing about before you buy on a non-Xbox platform. The install is sizeable — 100GB — and the recommended spec (an RTX 2060 Super or better, 16GB of RAM minimum) is heavier than you might expect for what is, underneath the new engine, still fundamentally a 2001 campaign.

This is also a genuinely significant industry moment on its own terms: Halo's first release on PlayStation after twenty-five years of Xbox exclusivity, arriving alongside a broader Microsoft shift toward putting its games on every platform rather than using them to sell hardware. That context doesn't change how the game plays, but it's very likely part of why this release has drawn as much attention as it has.

Final verdict

Judged as what it explicitly says it is — a remake of Halo: Combat Evolved's campaign — this is excellent work: gorgeous, expanded, respectful of what made the original worth remembering, and genuinely replayable through its Skull system and new missions. That's worth a strong score on its own.

It settles at seven rather than higher because a Halo game without any competitive multiplayer is missing something that mattered enormously to why this franchise exists at all, and NZ$99.95 is a lot to ask once that absence sets in. If you want the campaign and only the campaign, buy it with confidence. If part of what you're nostalgic for is Blood Gulch, know clearly that it isn't here.

Price and platform details checked 30 July 2026.

If your idea of a good campaign is one that never actually ends, Wanderer keeps running long after the credits would have rolled.