Halo: Campaign Evolved review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

Halo: Campaign Evolved was announced last year to what I would call “conflicting anticipation”. Everything they showed looked good, but… there were concerns. This would be a remake of Halo 1 from a studio that did not make the original. Not only that, but they will be adding new story content to it. And finally, they announced it was to be an Unreal Engine 5 remake. If there’s one thing the industry has shown us over the last few years of increasing prominence of Unreal Engine 5, that is this: very poor performance is in our future. Now here we are, a completely remade classic finally out, Unreal Engine, new content, and all. Were the concerns valid? On some accounts… I’d give a “probably”. I’ll explain.

Having played through Campaign Evolved now, I am left… there’s no word available besides “disappointed”. I will use this word a lot throughout this article. A classic that shines through the rough edges still feels like the classic it once was, but… there’s just something about it. It doesn’t feelright. The voice acting at times feels rough, almost coming through as if the actors could not hear the other characters they were supposed to be replying to. Delivery was often awkward, especially, but not exclusively, in the new missions. Sgt Johnson keeps mugging the camera, speaking through with fourth wall-breaking eye contact like a cliche action shot you’d expect from a parody movie, but delivered in full earnest. Johnson’s “Are you ready to get to it?!” one liner delivery in the very beginning of the first new prequel mission has all but cemented itself within the lexicon of my friend group as a funny in-joke for us to repeat ad-nauseum. The reason being that it was almost so absurd in the moment that it was hard to intake as something other than a completely out of place, oddly uncanny comment placed with eyes locked to the camera and then the scene just… ends there. Certainly memorable, but I’m not sure in the way that Halo Studios intended when they wrote the scene.

That feeling prevails throughout Campaign Evolved from beginning to end. The dialogue is cheesy, which isn’t too out of place for Halo as a series, but it’s leaning quite a bit into “corny” instead. This isn’t really helped by the cutscenes. I have some good things to say about the cutscenes too, so know this isn’t all complaints, but following up on what I mentioned in the previous paragraph; the cutscenes are just… weird. A lot. Animations on characters feel very rigid and oddly confined. Covenant in a gunfight with Master Chief are just idly standing in place, weaving and ducking, but never searching for cover. Never spreading out, never flanking, never… acting like they are anything other than a prop. The illusion of life behind their bodies is missing entirely. They move like a bad improv crew pantomiming a shootout on a stage. And it’s not just them. Chief, Johnson, Cortana; all of them are equally odd in their cutscene movements. It’s animated in a way that you might expect from a well intended but low budget game trying too hard to be a AAA game. But it’s not, is it? This is THE first party game for one of the major console manufacturers. A remake of the pinnacle in their legacy for the series that forged their history. I am going to repeat this line throughout: this shouldn’t be acceptable for the release of a flagship title of one of the largest game studios on the planet.

It’s all made even more confusing by the fact that in Halo: Campaign Evolved, every single cutscene is completely pre-rendered. But none of the things you see justify that fact. They failed to even take advantage of one of the biggest arguments in favor of pre-rendered cutscenes: since they are just a video file, pre-rendered cutscenes allow for visuals beyond the expectations of the hardware being used to play the game. But that’s not the case here. The cutscenes are all flatly delivered in 1080p 30FPS. There’s just no excuse for this. Pre-rendered cutscenes, especially in the low volume they inhabit within a game such as Halo: Campaign Evolved, should be 4K. They should be at least60 fps. They should not be pushing out 1080p cutscenes, even when accounting for consoles. Both the Series X and PS5 run the game at 60FPS on performance mode, so for a lot of people, even the console experience is being brought to a worse motion than if you had just made these cutscenes in-engine. Not to mention that it has been 7 years since the majority of TVs sold on the market were 4K and today, it’s basically impossible if not entirely pointless to make an effort to get a TV at any other resolution. Why are we wasting resources pre-rendering cutscenes when we don’t even take advantage of the benefits offered by pre-rendering? This shouldn’t be acceptable for the release of a flagship title of one of the largest game studios on the planet.

Which is all doubly disappointing because… Halo as a series has always had in-engine cutscenes as a primary; even after 343 took over and started dipping their toes into a few pre-rendered cutscenes here and there. Everything was dynamic, and it has always looked and felt good. Hell, in Halo: Reach, you were allowed to customize your spartan and see your custom armor in cutscenes. It’s only so wrong that it’s nearly funny to consider the fact that due to the fact that cutscenes are pre-rendered, you don’t even get to see your own custom armor in Campaign Evolved. It only goes on to be an extra slap in the face when you look back through Halo Studios’ announcements and press releases to see them say themselves: “for the first time in the series, new armor customization can be utilized in co-op games to personalize and differentiate Spartans on the battlefield.”. It’s almost the ultimate irony that they have apparently forgotten Bungie’s last foray into the series so far as to proudly announce they’re introducing something they already did 16 years ago when you recount the tagline from the game:

Remember Reach.

With all of that, I hate that I feel compelled to write so much negative commentary because honestly the game does legitimately look really nice. Cutscenes have a lot left to be desired, but they are pretty if you can get past the shoddy resolution and frame rates. Like, don’t get me wrong, all of the information above is still true, but visually; the explosions, the landscapes, the flora, anything at all seen in a screenshot; it’s all gorgeous. But it all amounts to creating a trial in disappointment for me: to observe what should be a great opportunity squandered on yet another case of AAA studios rushing to get something out and releasing it half-baked. But having just enough substance to still make it hard to swallow. It isgood. It looks good, it plays good; and this is it’s strongest point. It legitimately does play well.

It was a little weird at first, experiencing Halo CE in a new engine with modern sensibilities, but as I got more used to it, the more it felt right. Arguments can be (and believe me, definitely are) made against the addition of a universal sprint, or the fact that the crosshair is centered rather than traditional lower ⅓, but if you let your need for the translation to be literal from 2001 to 2026 wash over you for a bit, I do think it grows on you. At least it did for me. The gameplay did feel smooth, and the gameplay is most of what you are doing in Halo, but the story is an important glue that holds it all together. The gameplay can only do so much lifting when the cutscenes, performance, and voice acting are like an anchor on the chain of success.

Which I haven’t even mentioned yet, but… yes, the worries about performance were valid, at least on PC. The era of Unreal Engine 5, DLSS, and Frame Generation have infected every crack in the corner cutting department of every AAA studio these days, and Campaign Evolved is no exception. Expect that unless you’re okay with lowering your resolution, even with a 4090 like I had, you will be required to utilize DLSS and/or frame gen in order to keep Campaign Evolved running at or above 60FPS. This near-requirement for frame gen also comes with an odd issue to keep in mind for anyone playing here as they still haven’t patched it out: despite the fact that the cutscenes are pre-rendered, frame gen also applies to them, but not in the way you’d expect. Vanilla behavior has frame gen being enabled cause the cutscenes to be turned down to 15FPS and then automatically returned to 30 via frame gen. Which… boy does this look awful. If you want to use frame gen to keep your game stable, your cutscenes are going to be a blurry mess with artifacts galore. Luckily modders had a fix for this on Nexus mods within a few days of release that actually ups the cutscenes to 60FPS instead. You know where this is going: this shouldn’t be acceptable for the release of a flagship title of one of the largest game studios on the planet.

Here are little things like this everywhere throughout Campaign Evolved. Glaring bugs that there’s no way weren’t caught in QA but left nevertheless. Things like the aforementioned frame gen in cutscenes, or the fact that it reverts all custom keybindings every time you restart the game. Little details missing that amount to things that someone should have stopped and said something about. The list of skulls is in no particular order and hard to navigate. It doesn’t remember what skulls you were using when you return to the menu. LASO doesn’t even use most of the hardest skulls on the list. The main menu uses as much of your GPU as it possibly can despite the fact that the background is also a pre-rendered MP4 (upwards of 90% usage on the main menu for my 4090). Timers aren’t present. Campaign scoring isn’t present. Chapters don’t tell you what difficulties they’ve been completed on (all of which are series norms). I can go on, but I think you get it. It once again adds up to what I keep repeating: this shouldn’t be acceptable for the release of a flagship title of one of the largest game studios on the planet.

All that comes together to say this: I don’t hate Halo: Campaign Evolved. To be honest, in a vacuum, I think it was okay. But “okay” doesn’t cut it when we’re talking about bringing one of the most noteworthy games of all time forward to the modern day. I’m just… disappointed. The gameplay is enjoyable, as Halo ever is, but it just marks the continued decline of the series over time. This was their chance to show that they’re still a real player in the game that is the AAA space, but instead it was released as another half-baked, rushed, and underpolished game like any other. Feeling like it was dropped when it was “good enough to fly” instead of waiting for it to become something actually great. Banking on the nostalgia factor to carry it upward while the underlying base is only “good enough”. Which isn’t right. Halo is Microsoft’s hallmark, their proof of legitimacy, their legacy left on the video game industry. The game that normalized and popularized the very idea of using two joysticks to move and aim simultaneously. It should not have been released in this state. But even in this state… it is still enjoyable. Because they’re right; the nostalgia and remembering what it was DOES carry it upward, at least enough to get through it. But by the end, you might find yourself just left sitting there, thinking about how much better it could have been if they just bothered to care about the game that made gamers flock to them in the first place.

Note: Xbox Game Studios provided us with a Halo: Campaign Evolved code for review purposes.

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