“Halo… It’s finished.”

Hello and welcome to Darkspire Games, today I’m going to be poking a hornet’s nest with a stick. There will be spoilers from hereon.

So, the new Halo game released. It’s been out for a couple days, and just last night I finished my playthrough of the main campaign; I have yet to play the three extra missions, but given that I’ve played through the “meat” of the game, as it were, I want to give my thoughts on it since there’s a lot of very loud thoughts on the internet in the Halo sphere and I want to say something that’s maybe a little more helpful than the average mouth-foaming Halo fan.

I want to preface, since that last line was very inflammatory, that I am not saying that we as consumers should accept mediocrity; this game has some major flaws that bother me very deeply. I love Halo, and I try to give each game a fair chance – let’s talk about it.

Background

Halo: Campaign Evolved is a remake of the first Halo game, Halo: Combat Evolved. It would be the second time that 343 Industries, or Halo Studios as they’re now called, have attempted to refurbish the classic Xbox game, much to the chagrin of the Halo community. It was kind of a surprise — it was dropped on the community rather quickly and after the apparent disappointment with the prior release Halo Infinite, it was looked at with the Halo community’s usual mix of cautious optimism and blind, rabies-adjacent fury.

The first question that would come to mind with this context is, “Is Halo: Campaign Evolved better than Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary?” I would say the answer is a resounding yes, with the caveat that that is a very low bar to clear. Halo: Anniversary was a hastily scraped together mess of reused assets and a lack of artistic understanding of the original game it was claiming to be an improvement on, and just purely by nature of Campaign Evolved not being a complete eyesore, it clears it by a mile.

What’s wrong with it?

As I stated in the opening, this game does have some pretty major flaws, and because I believe in journalistic integrity, I’m not going to bury the game in gushing before I address them.

This game makes some pretty asinine creative choices in regards to central characters. Cortana in particular was made so unbelievably annoying, all of her sarcastic charm  was stripped away in favor of giving her a much more kiddish and light-hearted personality, couple that with her constant, and I mean CONSTANT obvious hints to the player telling them about lore and where to go that she is now just Omochao from Sonic Adventure.

On top of this, the cutscenes in the first half of the game are very poorly directed, both in the voice acting and in the actual movement of the camera – after seeing the level of quality of the Blur Studios Halo 2: Anniversary cutscenes, it’s really disappointing to see these uncanny, ugly faces that barely resemble the characters that they’re supposed to be.

The story in general has been made more obvious, important moments are spelled out so clearly that it can at times feel mind-numbing. It sometimes felt like I was playing a game for children. Certain parts of the game have lost their visceral impact as well, and the enemy animations leave something to be desired compared to the animations of the original, which were full of so much character by comparison. The Microtransactions feel unnecessary and scummy, although my brother did quite like some of the skins available for the armor and weapons, which definitely are cool, but I don’t think they justify the $20 price tag.

So it’s Bad?

[Image Credit: Microsoft]

No. For all the lore, story, and direction problems that the game has, the gameplay part is done extraordinarily well, better than Infinite, to be sure. The core gameplay loop is undeniably Halo,  and it was fun seeing what aspects from the later games would be inserted into the game – I was ecstatic to be able to use the SMG in the second level, and the performance and animations of the weapons are fantastic, the graphical fidelity of the game is absolutely incredible, and the animations rarely had any form of glitch. My brother and I have a tradition that whenever we play a game and encounter a glitch, one of us shouts “F****ing Raw!” like Gordon Ramsay, and we only said it about three or four times in the whole campaign.

Every level is packed intensely with detail, and unlike Anniversary, this detail is welcome, and preserves the original vibe of the game, especially in 343 Guilty Spark, which was an utterly fantastic adaptation of the level and remains one of the best levels in the entire Halo series, only made better by the details. The following level, the Library was also made so much less boring and sluggish by the new, Halo Reach-esque combat and new enemy types that made each encounter much more interesting.

The vehicle handling is hit or miss; I thought the Banshee felt a little sluggish whereas I felt the Scorpion seemed a little bit fast – but the Warthog did not offend at all, and the Warthog run in the final level had some fantastic improvements over the original that truly made it feel awesome.

Both Captain Keyes and Sergeant Johnson had new voice actors, but both grew on me after a while, though I admit there were new additions to the mission “Keyes” that bothered both me and my brother; the newly added dialogue from the Captain felt very out of place and made the story feel very ham-handed, which is a pretty consistent issue throughout the entire experience.

I would say the game frontloads its issues, and because of the narrative and direction problems, the Pillar of Autumn level really ends up being incredibly weak; the entire game really improves as it goes along, especially when the Flood are introduced, the game becomes much better, and it seems the game eases up a little bit on the handholding – my brother and I were genuinely relieved when we got lost during Two Betrayals, which is a total highlight of the experience, by the way. It felt like being in the middle of a massive conflict.

Okay but those Forerunner structures though.

Yeah, okay. The newness of the Forerunner structures especially in The Silent Cartographer did get bothersome — it does sap their mystery and I would prefer them to return to the older, Bungie-era brutalist aesthetic; however, in levels like 343 Guilty Spark, they use the futuristic designs to aid the atmosphere and it does work. The Halo Art style change in Halo 4 never really bothered me, it only started to miff me in Halo 5 when they started overcorrecting from people complaining about the greebles to make everything look like plastic; I think this entry really manages to nail the proper Halo aesthetic with the cassette-futurism and enemy designs – the Hunters in particular were a big standout; their designs were absolutely fantastic.

Conclusion

Halo: Campaign Evolved is a flawed, but fun Halo game. I hope that Halo Studios moving forward will be able to learn from their shortcomings and produce a better game. I think this is a step, if a shaky one, in the right direction for the series. It IS worth playing if you’re a Halo fan, but it is not better than Halo 3, because nothing ever will be, and if you expect it to, you will live your life in disappointment and depression.

SCORE: 6.8/10.

This Blog was not written with the use of generative AI. -Optimal