Halo: The Campaign Update Review – no longer does this | Hello

This 25th anniversary remake of the most popular Xbox shooter comes with symbolism. There will come a time when the entire Xbox gaming segment (and the gaming industry as a whole) they are in turmoil. It’s developed by Halo Studios, an outfit that arguably hasn’t recreated the magic created by Halo: Combat Evolved’s original Bungie, a studio now owned by rival Sony. It has been polished and optimized using Unreal Engine 5, making it look and feel very modern in terms of unique features: Halo now looks like hundreds of other games made with the same tools, while Bungie’s 2001 original, made with the famous engine, still looks very different. I didn’t want to be this person, but: maybe things he was better in the old days?

I doubted it after the opening episode, where the Master Chief’s super-hero fought off an alien invasion on a shipwreck. In the beginning this was an explosive technique: you wake up, you look around (sometimes a clever way to know if you need to turn the controls), and you go into it, shooting the best gun in the game that just shoots out bullets that scatter from your bullets. It is now overlaid with extended cutscenes and explanations. That Hello Studios have changed the course of Combat Evolved, it seems.

After that, however, I spent a lot less time thinking about what had changed, and more about what hadn’t. No one makes shooters like Halo anymore: stable, flexible, challenging. In 2026, we have many shooters of every kind imaginable; there is little reason for computer-controlled enemies to be clever and unpredictable, because we often play with other people, and they provide infinite variation. What we don’t have a lot of in 2026 are single space shooters like this, or Half-Life, or System Shock 2. First-person shooter campaigns like Call of Duty have been relegated to “movie” settings. Halo: Campaign Evolved reminded me of what we’ve been missing.

Advanced Elites are still the smartest enemies I’ve ever played against, and it’s been 25 years. They command me and run away from my fire, and they know how to surround me, when to rush me and how to match my attacks. Every time you die in the game, you go back to the fire station mixed up a little bit, making it more permanent; I didn’t want to go back to the research center, because it didn’t feel repetitive. In other shooters you just memorize enemy numbers and locations, but here you have to constantly change your gameplay, especially on higher Heroic or Legendary difficulties. And I somehow forgot about the Hunters. The first time those spiked monsters appeared, I did what happened decades ago: I turned and ran.

Unfortunately, we still have to deal with the Flood. After several levels of fighting intelligent enemies under the strange light of an alien sun, we are suddenly transported to a boring, claustrophobic zombie shooter. I still maintain that the middle parts of the game are the worst: shooting 400 parasitic baddies with a shotgun while waiting for a floating robot to open a door has never been my idea of ​​a good time. This is going to be a controversial opinion, but I was excited for the new directions that told me exactly where to go in the zombie-infested corridor that is the Library. It meant that the worst parts of the game were over quickly.

In co-op Halo is less, more atmospheric and smarter and more confusing. Especially when cars are involved, the game changes completely and adds other players, thanks to its flexible, open-ended nature and dynamic enemies. I played through the multiplayer with a friend – I still maintain that playing Combat Evolved with four players just feels wrong – and I was reminded why I spent hundreds of hours blasting the game with my friends as a teenager. Halo is still the best interactive shooter game out there.

Campaign Evolved is a great remake of the strategy game. There are things that are worse: I miss the Warthog’s mishandling and the old 00s aesthetics, which can’t match the modern pictures. For all its beauty, this also chugs sometimes – especially on split screens it can crawl slowly, and we didn’t complain about connecting different accounts on the Internet and connecting to servers when we liked the fast games of Halo in 2001. But the core of this game is impossible to mess up. For millions of young gamers, Campaign Evolved is a great, modern introduction to everything that was great about 00s shooters. For those of us who were there then, it’s a welcome return trip.