Halo: Campaign Evolved is a modern-day remake of an Xbox classic, with all the ostensible improvements that you’d expect. Compared to the 2001 original and its 2011 remaster, Halo: Campaign Evolved looks prettier, plays smoother, and features a handful of gameplay changes that are intended to modernize its decades-old gameplay but might prove divisive. For instance — and this fact will either delight you or enrage you, depending on where you land regarding one of the Halo community’s eternal debates — Master Chief can sprint now.
Following the 2011 remaster for Xbox 360, Halo: Campaign Evolved is the third re-release of Bungie’s 2001 Xbox shooter Halo: Combat Evolved. (Fourth if you count its 2003 port to Windows PC. Fifth if you count its inclusion as part of 2014’s Master Chief Collection.) This latest iteration is a bit different, though: Rather than being built with a proprietary game engine, as previous Halo games have been, developer Halo Studios is making Campaign Evolved with Unreal Engine 5. And it’s a full remake, not just a graphical overhaul.
This positions Halo: Campaign Evolved at something of a crossroads. By the time this remake comes out — it’s currently planned for a 2026 release on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X — the original Halo will be 25 years old. So Campaign Evolved has to accomplish two things. It has to serve as a vehicle for nostalgia, reminding longtime fans what they loved about the original Halo. But it also has to appeal to new audiences; this will mark the first time Halo has been playable on a PlayStation console, opening the series up to a body of players who’ve never left Sony’s ecosystem. For those players, a new Halo game has to feel at least somewhat modern.
Earlier this week, Polygon went hands-on with Halo: Campaign Evolved at an in-person event at Halo Studios. The demo covered the first half of Halo: Combat Evolved’s “The Silent Cartographer” mission, right up to the point where Master Chief kicks the rock off the ledge — if you, like me, have played that original campaign so many times that you’ve memorized all of its beats and that context grounds you.
Nostalgia can often mean viewing things through rose-colored glasses, but this version of the campaign looks exactly like how [age redacted]-year-old me thought it looked like in 2001. The boxy gray structures and muddy beaches of “Silent Cartographer” are no longer, replaced instead by shiny steel architecture and sand so defined, you can practically count the individual grains. But these improvements to fidelity don’t sacrifice the sci-fi Brutalism that’s defined Halo’s art style for 25 years. Put another way: If Halo: Combat Evolved is an eye chart, Halo: Campaign Evolved is that very same eye chart but viewed with the corrective lenses you’re supposed to have. Whatever devil’s bargain Halo Studios struck to conduct its technical wizardry here, I don’t want to know; the extent to which Halo: Campaign Evolved actively feels like a Halo game is mind-boggling.
The beloved Halo: Combat Evolved pistol hasn’t gone anywhere, and remains a completely unbalanced hand cannon. Grunts still scream, “No, not again!!!” when you stick them with a plasma grenade. This time-capsule effect is only accentuated by re-recorded vocal lines from key actors, including Steve Downes (who plays Master Chief) and Jen Taylor (who plays Cortana), which lends to the sense that this is still Halo, just fancier.
But beneath the shinier veneer exists a raft of minor changes that Halo devotees will pick up on right away. That rock I mentioned earlier? It’s not a rock in Campaign Evolved. It’s a plasma pistol. You can wield an energy sword in this remake, according to Halo Studios, though that feature was not playable in the portion of the demo made available. You use the left trigger to aim down the sights, standard for modern shooters but practically sacrilege for classic Halo (though it’s worth noting this was the default control scheme for 2021’s Halo Infinite). Health packs have been removed entirely. You can hijack vehicles. And, yes, you can sprint.
Debates around sprinting have divided the Halo community since Bungie first added it to the series in 2010’s Halo: Reach. Beyond arguments over its impact on competitive integrity in multiplayer modes, players have defended its absence in the campaign stages as well, often coming at it from a narrative perspective. That you couldn’t sprint in the original Halo trilogy contributed largely to the sense that you were playing as a supersoldier wearing near-impenetrable space armor. You didn’t need to move quickly. You were invincible. You could take the hits. Other fans contend that argument with, Well, you can do it every game. Why not Halo?
At first blush, Halo: Campaign Evolved is the answer to “Why not Halo?” Geographically, “The Silent Cartographer” is a small mission, taking place entirely on a circular island that you can drive a Warthog jeep around in a matter of minutes. Letting you sprint makes it feel even smaller. Battlefields full of enemies, including some of the toughest in the game, are now just obstacles you can run past. (I played through the demo on both Normal and Heroic difficulties.)
Hunters, gigantic worm hiveminds with rock-hard armor and rocket launchers for arms, are generally considered the hardest enemies in Halo. The trick to defeating them, in the original Halo: Combat Evolved, involved carefully circling around their backs and shooting through an exposed portion of their armor — the joke being that this tiny little weapon could take down the toughest enemy in the game. In Campaign Evolved, though, your pistol rounds bounce off of them. That too is a consequence of letting you sprint. Can’t have players just running around them for a one-shot kill.
In fairness, there are settings that allow you to deactivate sprinting in Halo: Campaign Evolved. And for what it’s worth, I barely noticed the addition of sprinting in the level’s tighter areas, so I’m curious to see how it affects some of the game’s more claustrophobic missions, like “The Library” or “Pillar of Autumn,” if at all.
Halo: Campaign Evolved is shaping up to be a stunning visual achievement, but some modernizations may work against the soul of Halo. It’s a more presentable version of the game that leaves less room for what I’ll affectionately refer to as “fucking around.” The original Halo: Combat Evolved featured a popular exploit known as the “Warthog jump,” where you could position a grenade underneath a vehicle, then hop into the vehicle just before it exploded, allowing the blast to catapult you great distances. Now the grenade just kills you.
There are some apparent ways to solve these concerns, though. Halo: Campaign Evolved will feature more skulls — gameplay modifiers that ramp up the challenge, like doubling the velocity of explosions or removing your minimap — than any previous Halo campaign. Representatives for Halo Studios declined to share the effects of all unlockable skulls, but told Polygon that one such modifier makes vehicles invincible, thus allowing players to replicate the Warthog jumps of yore. How this will work in action remains unseen, but that such a modifier even exists in the first place suggests a level of customization that could bring 2026’s Campaign Evolved closer to the chaotic physics of 2001’s Combat Evolved. Why they’re necessary in the first place, though, is another matter entirely.
In sanding off the rougher edges of a wooden chair, you can get a more comfortable piece of furniture, but go too far, and you run the risk of eroding the wood. What I’ve seen so far of Halo: Campaign Evolved — a brief portion of a single level, at a demo conducted in a controlled environment — is by no means enough to assess how Halo Studios will handle this balancing act. I’m eager to see how Halo: Campaign Evolved shapes up. If they can indeed pull it off, I won’t walk to it on launch day. I’ll sprint.
Halo: Campaign Evolved is out in 2026 for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.
