Halo: Combat Evolved is a sacred video game. If you’re reading this, chances are your first experience with the seminal first-person shooter came at a young age and the image in your head whenever you imagine it is a larger-than-life space opera with sprawling battles and an excess of epic stakes as Master Chief races to save the galaxy.

25 years later, this is all still true. Combat Evolved still plays like a dream on every platform, while the playgrounds it sets you loose in to eliminate evil aliens and pull off killer tricks on a Warthog are still bigger than most other games in the genre. Bungie worked some serious magic on the original Xbox, and it used the primitive nature of graphics back in 2001 to its advantage, even if at the time they were better than anything we’d ever seen.

The lack of detail across sprawling grasslands or amidst alien architecture allowed the huge installation you crash-landed upon to feel truly alien, filled with technology humanity had not encountered before and must proceed with extreme caution when navigating it.

Master Chief was a stranger in a strange land, and everything you interacted with came with its own risks. Would pushing this button open a nearby door or unleash a Pandora’s Box of truly genocidal proportions? There was no way to know until we tried, and that mystery went on to define so much of Halo’s visual identity.

An identity it would never recapture again no matter how hard it tried, which is what makes it so precious in the eyes of players all these years later. So whenever Microsoft says it is time to bring Combat Evolved back to life, we get the fear. The upcoming Campaign Evolved will be no exception.

What’s The Deal With Halo: Campaign Evolved’s Graphics?

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As the first project from the newly branded Halo Studios, Campaign Evolved is a complete remake of the shooter masterpiece using Unreal Engine 5. As expected, it makes use of top-of-the-line graphical features to update the original game while also introducing an avalanche of new gameplay features such as the option to sprint, superior aiming options, and a couple of new prequel missions to boot. The vanilla experience is still there for the players who truly want it, not to mention The Master Chief Collection is on Game Pass and can be downloaded in a heartbeat (or several, depending on your internet connection).

Campaign Evolved hopes to update the geometry of open-ended missions like The Silent Cartographer, offering more gameplay avenues and even influencing how vehicles and/or characters move across and react to terrain. The placement of items, how Chief reacts to certain things in the environment, and so many other little things have been changed. It’s making me excited to play through the campaign for the first time in years, even if I will be missing the otherwise muted presentation of the original.

It seems the damage values of certain enemies have been altered on every difficulty setting too, which will alter the overall challenge of some levels. Some stages have also been redesigned in some respects to reduce repetition fans hated about the original.

General reactions to Campaign Evolved coming out of Summer Game Fest appeared to be positive — especially regarding how it addresses the excessively busy execution of Anniversary and how it stuffed environments with additional bells and whistles purely because it could. Much of the art direction was painted over as the visual personality was butchered, a sin I don’t think Campaign Evolved is guilty of.

Unfortunately, Halo Studios stepped on an intergalactic rake this past weekend following a video it uploaded that showcased the main menu for six whole hours. You know the one, it features the iconic ring slowly rotating towards the screen as the opening theme plays out. Sadly, it seems much of the subtlety in its design has been lost.

The outside is bulky, filled with a number of extra features, bright lights, and geometry rather than maintaining the flat look of the original installation. Again, it likely adopted this look back in 2001 due to obvious technical limitations, but in doing so it became a statement of iconic minimalism.

The main menu takes that away and is literally the first impressions thousands of players are going to have of a remake they’re already extremely cautious about. I wish it kept the flat look of the original because it felt like we had stumbled upon a ring-shaped planet only to find out it was created by an ancient civilization, instead of being able to guess that right away just by looking at it. The mystery and intrigue is gone whenever you decide to add extra details, and this is going to impact the remake regardless of how faithful it intends to be.

All of this was also an issue when another iconic space opera, Mass Effect, was given the upgrade treatment.

But despite how poorly executed this main menu is compared to the original, there are plenty of things that Campaign Evolved does well. The lighting is on-point, character models seem both accurate and supremely detailed, while watching Digital Foundry wonder around myriad beloved levels has me convinced that Halo Studios knows what it’s doing.

Maintaining the minimal approach that Bungie took all those years ago, but so does knowing how to expand upon that visual direction and push it further than ever. Campaign Evolved is, from what I can tell at least, learning from the mistakes made by Anniversary and trying all it can to avoid repeating them. But with a game as precious as this one, it was always going to be an impossible task to please everyone.

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Halo: Campaign Evolved

FPS Science Fiction Shooter Multiplayer Systems Released July 28, 2026 Developer(s) Halo Studios Publisher(s) Microsoft Studios Multiplayer Online Co-Op, Local Co-Op Cross-Platform Play Yes - all platforms Cross Save Yes - all platforms
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DIGITAL
Genre(s) FPS, Science Fiction, Shooter, Multiplayer Powered by Expand Collapse