This game is a faithful recreation of the original. The story is the same and the level design remains largely untouched. Weapons missing from the original have been added (needle rife, smg, beam rife, etc) and weapons you couldn't pick up in the original are now able to be used (fuel rod cannon, energy sword). The graphics are good and I'm able to run them on my hardware, which at this point is a couple years out of date. Chromatic Aberration and film grain were recently given an on off toggle in an update which turning them off makes the game look 10x better. The gameplay is fun and feels good. Elite AI is unfortunately not all the way there, elites may fail to seek cover or bum rush you with a sword with no attempts to evade shots but in my experience this is rare. Sprint is in this Halo, which I know is a problem for some, but in my opinion has minimal impact on the gameplay. The story is good as it's the original story, although the voice acting could use some work. One major problem I do have with the game is the addition of voice lines that weren't in the original. Chief and Cortana will make small quips to each other, or in certain cases dialogue has been added to cutscenes that weren't in the original, and while I have no problem with this in theory I feel like the added voice lines don't fit this version of Chief. Halo Studios/343 spent a lot of time working on humanizing Chief in their games, which is fine, but when added to the original does feel out of place and tasteless. How they will explain the sudden change in Chiefs personality between Halo 1 & 2 I'm not sure, but until we get an answer I must say those changes were a poor decision. Campaign remix is fun and the new skulls add multiple different ways to approach missions adding replay value. However, the three skulls required to be on are annoying. I can't tailor an original campaign experience with updated graphics when weapon and enemy spawns are randomized, and I do feel that forcing some skulls to be active takes agency away from the player to make "the perfect run." As for the new missions, their fun and do bring interesting questions up about who this weird wing of the covenant are. The new missions add enemies from the later games which is nice to see. I do find the writing however to be mid at best and poor at worst. Level design is good, and in my opinion the new missions are fun to run through, but are disappointing to anyone looking for a substantial story although I admit that's not what their supposed to be. The new missions also add a new female character, whom while annoying isn't the "woke death of Halo" everyone claims her to be. As with every time that somebody has screamed that Halo is "going woke," it isn't, a character can be written poorly without it having to do with their sex, and the notion they can't is frankly tired and an useless criticism. TLDR: Game is a mostly faithful recreation of the original, but it does have some issues that should have been ironed out in development. For the average Halo fan I would recommend buying this game on a discount, for people new to the series I would recommend Campaign Evolved with the understanding that this game does have issues, but that you will get the original story with some extras added in.
