Halo: Campaign Evolved

I don't care about the bad voice acting or stilted cutscenes. This game is nothing. Halo has had so much continuity between 2004 and now and almost none of it was used. Even barring Fireteam Raven there was not a single ODST in the game aside from one single character in the bonus levels which exists solely to berate the player and spout insipid banter. The bonus levels themselves are utterly devoid of interesting content or routes to take, featuring 90% reskinned enemies and the single worst implementation of brutes I have ever seen in a Halo game. Sure the space section is nice, except that it's ripped from Halo Reach. And it's even more boring and repetitive than it was in Reach. Which sums up the majority of new and changed content in this game. This game doesn't feel like Halo Combat Evolved. It feels like Halo Reach wearing the skin of Halo Infinite, which is effectively all it is. Don't think it gets by me that the new campaign weapons, the sentinel beam and energy sword, are ripped from Halo Infinite as well. Campaign Evolved is just boring. There's nothing to sink your teeth into. There's no score, there's no time attack, there's no playlists or online or firefight. It's just campaign. Campaign Evolved, that is. And those campaign levels are almost entirely unchanged except for The Library. The Library is fine, I guess. Except for tank forms which can't fight you on top of a slope and just sit there eating way too many bullets. Sure, it's nice to rip tank forms from Halo 3 with shiny new graphics, but there was zero consideration for how they might interact with Halo CEs level structure. In fact, there was little consideration for anything but producing a minimum viable product that could be pumped out for a quick buck. If you want a passionate reimagining of Halo CE, play Ruby's Rebalance. If you want to play Halo CE levels in Halo Reach's engine with pretty graphics and a choppy framerate then go ahead. I'm genuinely happy for you. I wish I liked this game. I wanted to like this game so bad it's unreal. I paid full price for this. Hell, I DO like this game. It's fun to click heads and make enemies explode. But it's impossible not to think about what could have been and be disappointed with what is. Halo has so much unused content that was just ignored in favor of spamming spec ops elites and removing hallways in Assault on the Control Room. The bonus levels are blatantly tech demos for what a Halo 2 remake might be. And it's all but officially confirmed a Halo 2 remake is in the works. If the brutes are anything like they are in this game going forward then Halo Studios will have failed to learn a single thing. But then again, when have they?

Something about it feels off like a fever dream. The AI is frustrating, I was constantly dying to grenade chain reactions and enemy burst damage. Environments are either claustrophobic or too big. Cutscenes feel like a parody of the source material. If xbox isn't going to be serious about halo they should either sell the rights to someone who knows what theyre doing or stop making new ones.

Worse than the original

Thank god I got my money back. What a big disappointment. Played it for like 20 minutes, and I couldn't stand sgt Johnson. Dude lines were cheesy in the wrong way, and he smiles in every damn cutscene which is creepy af. Then you have Cortana, it sounds like the voice actress was just having fun instead of making me feel like shes nervous and have the emotions of danger. I had enough after that. Then you have the marines. The most cheesiest thing about them is how they act when there ship is being overrun by the covenant. Specially after leaving reach. They should be focused and have some fear. Not this "hope" ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. This game is nothing but cringe.

Graphics good, the rest is garbage. If you think picking up this game, don't even think about it, just play the original it's 10x better than this pile of trash. Poor AI, reused assets from older games so if I think about it, it's really nothing new about it. Even the soundtrack is copy pasted from older Halos too. 0 interest and passion put in this game. When I got to the prequel missions I simply uninstalled, didn't even finish them. 3/10 made me vommit

If you're new to the series, Halo CEA $9.99 on Steam. Play that. Or the entirety of the Master Chief collection will get you far more game for the same price. If you're already a seasoned Halo player and want more Halo or CE with pretty graphics this is for you. Big Wins: - latter half of the campaign really improved level design - Warthog run greatly improved. - Models and atmosphere better match the original compared to anniversary - 4 player co-op - load of modifiers(skulls) My Biggest Gripes: - Handholding - Nav Markers everywhere - Upscaling can't be turned off in the settings. - Somewhat odd choices in voice directions - David Scully and Pete Stacker retired 😔. Two iconic voices recast. - Dialog from Elites sound like it was written by MS Copilot. - Really cruddy bonus missions.

[b]TL;DR: The point of a videogame remake is to recreate the experience of the original game while elevating it to modern standards. Unfortunately, Halo Campaign Evolved is nothing more than the Frankenstein monster of the Halo franchise. It borrows plenty of ideas from the original and other Halo games, yet adds almost nothing original or meaningful to justify its existence. On top of that, it completely lacks the iconic Multiplayer mode, making it not only an inferior version of the 2001 original, but also far from the modern standard a Halo game should strive for.[/b] The first few missions were OK. They weren't nearly as bad as the internet made them out to be, but after a while I started to realize something was off. First of all, the voice acting is horrible. Cortana sounds like a schoolgirl with no direction and very little faithfulness to the original character. Secondly, while the first few cutscenes stay fairly close to the original, some of the later ones genuinely made me shake my head in anger because of how poorly they were written and acted. There's also something about the characters' faces that makes them uncomfortable to look at, although I can't quite explain what it is. The intro cutscene to The Library completely ruins the game's biggest plot twist, and it does so in such a lazy way that I was genuinely baffled. Likewise, the Assault on the Control Room scene where Cortana discovers Halo's secrets was terrible. It's clearly inspired by Blade Runner, and it quietly introduces this "Evil Cortana" angle solely to justify Halo 5's awful story. Overall, the cutscenes and voice acting were simply bad. They felt like a collection of Unreal Engine fan-made cinematics you would find on YouTube. The soundtrack is literally the original 2001 score, which by itself shouldn't be a negative. The problem is that the audio mixing is so bad that I could barely hear the music during gameplay. On top of that, several tracks play during scenes where they simply don't belong, reinforcing that Frankenstein-monster feeling I mentioned earlier. The Halo main theme even played randomly during certain cutscenes—probably due to a bug—completely undermining their intended emotional impact. The score itself remains as legendary as ever, but pairing it with the new visuals creates an oddly uneven experience. Now let's talk about the visual art direction. It's not as bad as Anniversary, but Halo Studios still doesn't quite understand the visual identity of Halo CE. The original game was conceived as a spiritual successor to Bungie's Marathon, so its interiors should feel claustrophobic, cold, dark, and mysterious. Meanwhile, the outdoor environments should feel vibrant, colorful, and filled with wonder. To the game's credit, it gets some of this right: The Covenant once again has its signature purple color palette, the outdoor areas are bright, and the Forerunner architecture has regained its classic blue-gray tones. However, the pursuit of graphical fidelity comes at the expense of atmosphere. Halo's natural environments no longer feel isolated or cold; instead, they look like random valleys on Earth. Likewise, the Forerunner interiors are now shiny and pristine, stripping away the ancient, forgotten feeling they once had. Halo Studios clearly prioritized graphical fidelity over visual storytelling. "Epic," "Ancient," and "Mysterious" were the three words that defined Halo CE back when Bungie created it, and this remake captures none of them. To make matters worse, Sprint is practically unlimited, so you never have a chance to appreciate the visuals the way you did in 2001. You're no longer walking through the woods while admiring the majesty of the Halo ring. Instead, you're simply sprinting toward the next combat encounter. Speaking of Sprint, let's move on to the gameplay. First of all, there's nothing new here. Absolutely nothing. Every mechanic has been lifted from previous Halo games, whether it's Sprint, holo-aiming, or vehicle hijacking. It feels like Halo Studios wanted to streamline Combat Evolved until it played exactly like the future Halo titles they have planned. Rather than modernizing CE, they simply turned it into something much closer to Halo Infinite. Secondly, the enemy AI is clearly based on Halo Reach, and you can immediately tell you're no longer playing Combat Evolved. Enemies are relentlessly aggressive. They always know where you are, even while you're using Active Camo. They can spot you from absurd distances and will chase you nonstop, even if they're already fighting another faction. Some encounters are also ridiculously overcrowded. There were moments when I genuinely got stuck because I had no weapons, almost no ammunition, and was facing thirty or more enemies at once. My only viable option was to sprint past entire encounters. To me, that's just lazy design. Instead of rewarding players for engaging with combat, the game encourages them to skip it altogether. I spent more time looking for ways to bypass enemies than actually fighting them. The Flood are the biggest victims of this design, as they simply can't keep up with Sprint. I ended up running past nearly every Flood encounter. Without the original health system, you're actually rewarded for avoiding fights because you no longer have to worry about preserving your health. Sprint trivializes the entire experience. Ironically, despite Sprint making movement faster, the player's actions feel painfully slow compared to the enemies, especially the Elites. They can rush you down and instantly kill you with a melee attack while all you can do is hope they miss. Weapon swapping, picking up weapons, and even reloading all have this strange delay that makes your Spartan feel clunky, sluggish, and honestly helpless. Sometimes you can't even fire immediately after meleeing or swapping weapons. It almost feels as though Halo Studios intentionally kept the clunky mechanics of the original game just to remind players they're still playing Combat Evolved, while simultaneously speeding up every enemy around them. The result is another example of that Frankenstein-monster design philosophy. Many of my deaths on Heroic weren't caused by intelligent enemy placement like in the original game, but by these awkward mechanical inconsistencies. The difficulty simply wasn't well designed. Throwing hordes of enemies into cramped spaces while starving the player of ammunition isn't challenging—it's lazy. This game is clearly a development exercise for Halo Studios who are experimenting with Unreal Engine and want to understand what Halo is about. It's clear that this wasn't a passion project but one that was locked in a drawer, incomplete. They just packed it, put some skins over it and sold it to the world. This game is not a Remake or a Remaster but I tag it as a third category: a Remix. It has ideas from previous games without adding anything new or exciting beyond pretty graphics and a few new missions while making it inferior to the original in every single other aspect. In my opinion, this is the worst game 343/HS has ever made. They don't have the experience and passion Bungie had in 2001 when they created Halo CE. This is nothing but a cash grab to make the most blinded nostalgic fanboy happy while they wait their next inferior Halo main title. Halo is dead.