Halo: Campaign Evolved review: Unreal Engine remake delivers more than just visuals

The Master Chief’s first encounter with a Halo ring was already revisited in 2011 with the Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary edition remaster, celebrating its 10th birthday. Now, it’s time for another encounter to celebrate the game’s 25th anniversary, and Halo: Campaign Evolved is the result. This is a complete remake of the original game on Unreal Engine 5. Made by Halo Studios (formerly 343 Industries), the title isn’t aiming to just rebuild the Bungie experience but also to add new elements and shave off some that weren’t exactly popular even back then. At least, that is the target.

For this review, I got access to the PC version from Microsoft and have spent more than a few nights going through its content. Funnily enough, this is the second time I’m reviewing the Combat Evolved campaign within the last five years, as I also took a look at the PC release of the Master Chief Edition in 2020.

This time, there’s a whole new PlayStation audience this remake is landing for, and it will probably become their first Halo ever, putting a lot of pressure on Halo Studios to make it a good showing. The remake certainly makes the classic campaign look like a whole different game, but how does it play and feel? Read on to find out my thoughts on Halo: Campaign Evolved.

A Remade Sandbox

Considering the age of the storyline, and this being a remake, I feel there is not much point going over Master Chief and Cortana’s adventures again in the main campaign. It’s still a must-play if you’re a newcomer to the series. The setup of fighting advanced alien races as a walking tank and figuring out the mystery behind the Halo structures is a fantastic sci-fi hook that I haven't seen another franchise do so well. Let’s not forget about the U-turn mid-game as The Flood gets introduced as a completely new kind of threat that’s both terrifying to look at and to fight.

The studio has done a great job at backporting features from later Halo games for the remake. Getting to use more Covenant weapons and the Master Chief’s newfound ability to sprint fit in seamlessly, giving a much-needed boost to the gameplay variety and combat options I had at my disposal. When first approaching it, the engine change to Unreal 5 did have me a little apprehensive about how the gunplay and movement will feel here, but I’m happy to say that I couldn’t find any instance where I was surprised by how the game physics or entities interacted with each other. Gunplay felt tight and responsive, with both the classic and the newly backported weapons behaving exactly how I expected them to. Even aspects like driving and flying felt the same, with plenty of accidental flips and explosions just like I remember.

Several levels that I used to be annoyed at because of their convoluted designs and endless identical corridors have been reshaped for better pacing. Halo Studios says that most of those weirdly zig-zagging maps were due to memory and loading issues of the original hardware, and those tricks are no longer needed. Even with the new objective markers disabled, the maps were much easier to get around in using environmental markers and Cortana’s guidance.

At the same time, the amount of backtracking in each level and boring corridors for shooting through are pretty high up still in this remake. Even though I wish all these missions and objectives were revamped, the old bones can’t be too changed up. Bringing a campaign from the early 2000s to modern times is no easy task. Change too many things, and it becomes a brand-new game, change too little, and the old-school designs can drag it down.

Halo 2: Anniversary still has my favorite cutscenes thanks to Blur Studios’ stunning work, but Halo: Campaign Evolved possesses some impressive cinematic cutscenes of its own. There aren’t many of these scattered throughout the campaign, but the animations and models, especially on humans, are top-notch.

It’s after finishing the main campaign that I was really missing the multiplayer portion. There are replayability-focused features like a remix mode to randomize encounters, co-op play being upped to four-players, and more gameplay modifiers (Skulls) to collect. However, I’m not someone who hunts for achievements or replays too many games, but I would always jump into the multiplayer of a Halo game for extended periods.

Operation: Meteorite

Starting a new campaign in Halo: Campaign Evolved also offers a new option unseen in the original and remastered versions. There is now a set of bonus missions that I’d like to describe as a mini campaign. Picking this Operation: Meteorite direction first as a newcomer is probably a bad idea, as it unceremoniously hands you a bunch of guns and pits you against a whole lot of Covenant enemies without any guidance. However, as a Halo veteran, this was a blast to play through in a couple of hours.

Throughout these behind-enemy-lines missions, alongside Master Chief is Sgt. Johnson, the battle-hardened marine that becomes an iconic character in the original trilogy. It’s not entirely clear why Sgt. Johnson would embark on this mission alongside the super soldier that is the Chief, but his corny voice lines and cigar-chomping attitude make up for that confusion quickly.

These missions are almost completely focused on action, letting Master Chief flex his skills on the unsuspecting aliens on one of their massive battleships. This one is so massive that one of the missions entirely takes place in a desert biome that’s all somehow present inside the behemoth ship. Another interesting element here is the introduction of the Brutes, an enemy that only appeared in Halo 2 onwards. This is a special variant though, one that has a built-in anger management module that’s very easy to break. These formidable foes go berserk when that happens, attacking even their Covenant allies if they get in the way. I had a good time using them almost like long-range weapons that would weaken nearby raiding parties by the time I reached their location.

As another surprise, an entire space combat section is even included in these missions. Halo: Reach fans may be quite familiar with the concept. The area available to fly the ship is smaller than I expected, as I even bumped off the invisible walls at some points while dogfighting. Still, the section was a good break from the regular Halo gameplay as the Chief takes the skies to battle Covenant gunships from the outside.

There is a story element to these missions too, but it was too short, and the sole new character it introduced was too generic to make it a memorable plotline. I was simply happy to get new levels and enemies to blow up. The bonus missions almost feel like a test run of all the things Halo Studios wanted to try on the new engine, just to see how it would work out and if fans would like content like this. I wouldn’t be surprised if more content like this arrives in the future as DLC.

Performance, Visuals, Audio

The Unreal Engine upgrade has certainly done wonders to the world of Halo. The outdoor environments and skyboxes are a feast for the eyes. The Silent Cartographer mission might be my favorite from all the levels just for the beach parts, which were a joy to explore and mess around in. This is also the first time we get to see The Flood up close with the power of modern development tools too, and they remain as disgusting and horrifying as ever.

Seeing environmental lights and explosion sparks bounce off the metallic walls and the Chief’s armor is gorgeous to witness. Unreal Engine 5 is no slouch when it comes to the quality of effects. The energy blasts from opposing forces, explosions from the grenades I’m throwing, the shimmer of shields as they absorb impacts, the burst of spores as the Flood tries to infect everything, and more give out just the right sense of sci-fi.

I could also see where the developer decided to hold back on making too many modernizations to the designs. Despite all the texture and model upgrades, the classic looks of the Covenant, human soldiers, The Flood, and ship designs peer through without clashing with the modernized elements. If the studio had gone for a photorealistic look for any of these, which the engine is clearly capable of, I think the remake would have given a weird atmosphere.

The PC I reviewed Halo: Campaign Evolved on has an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB (Adrenalin 26.6.2 driver) paired with an eight-core Ryzen 7 3700X and 32GB of RAM. I was playing at 1440p resolution on a 180Hz monitor. I decided to max out every setting and disable upscaling options to see how the game performs on this hardware. Unfortunately, the frame rates were not very consistent across levels or even in different rooms.

I would be happily shooting aliens in the face at 90 FPS in one room, go through a door, and suddenly drop to 60 FPS for the entire fight here. The number of enemies and vehicles in an arena matters heavily for how much performance I would be receiving. In the end, I decided to drop the settings to High and put FSR Ultra upscaling to keep the FPS above 80 for almost every scenario. Even though 60 FPS is usually playable, the wild swings aren’t very enjoyable to experience in first-person shooters. Thankfully, I didn’t notice any visual downgrades with the changed setup.

There’s a healthy amount of graphics options included in the settings menu on the PC version, and they're not just graphics settings either. Everything from the UI and difficulty to the field of view (first and third person both) is fully customizable. However, the lack of a toggle to disable the chromatic aberration setting was a big pain point for me. Having sides of the screen have shifted colors on textures is an eyesore in my view in any game, and it’s one of the first settings I always turn off. I hope an update, or a user modification, will deliver this at a later date.

While I did not encounter many bugs during my solo playthrough, there was one time when the enemy behaviors broke completely and wouldn’t respond to anything I would do. This didn’t repeat at any other level, thankfully. Another bug reared its head when I was trying cooperative play with a PlayStation player, where after a cutscene, my character was stuck in place while the host could continue the mission. This fixed itself after a minute right before I was about to restart the game.
Coming back to positives, I must obviously mention the timeless soundtrack.

Whether it be punching grunts or driving through an exploding ship, everything is raised up a notch or two when the iconic Halo theme rolls in. I don’t think there’s a single bad track in the entire selection either, so I thoroughly enjoyed jamming to the tunes during my hours with the game. Voice acting is another plus. Everything has been redone for the remake, and I couldn’t find any fault in the delivery of the iconic returning and new voice actors. The way all the alien types react in shock to Master Chief’s entrance or as he decimates entire platoons is always a joy to listen to.

Conclusion

Halo: Campaign Evolved delivers exactly what it promises. Master Chief’s original introduction with a new look, some tweaks, but largely the same experience. Even with the changes, it feels like a very safe release that tried not to go too far into adding new elements or modern niceties. The sprint, new levels, streamlined old levels, and remade visuals are all plus points, but I would have liked to see more being done on this front.

Halo Studios has made changes to some of the painful classic levels to improve them somewhat, but the exasperating backtracking issues and winding hallways still remain for most of the game. It’s a design decision from ages past and removing all that would simply make it a different game than a remake, so it’s an understandable compromise.

Despite the co-op upgrade to four players, it’s the lack of any multiplayer that really hurts this package in my eyes. The $50 price tag does make things fairer, but a revamped Blood Gulch alone would have me glued to Xbox servers for many more hours. With PlayStation players also being a target this time, the remake is definitely the way to go if you haven’t experienced the original start of Master Chief, Cortana, and the Halo rings mystery. However, if you have the Master Chief Collection already and aren’t looking for another nostalgia drive, this is a harder recommendation to make.

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Halo: Campaign Evolved is releasing on PC (Microsoft Store and Steam), Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5 on July 28, 2026, for $49.99. It will also be a part of the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass subscriptions at launch. Premium and Collector’s Edition owners can play with advanced access starting today, July 23.

This review was conducted on the PC version of the game provided by Microsoft.