Halo: Campaign Evolved Reviews Hit 4/5 With Sprint, ADS, Four-Player Co-op, and Halo Studios' First PS5 Game

Halo Studios' Unreal Engine 5 remake of Halo: Combat Evolved just dropped its review embargo, and the verdict from the outlets posting first is mostly good, but not the unqualified victory lap Microsoft would have wanted. Eurogamer scored the game 4 out of 5, calling it a 'curiously enjoyable makeover' that pulls off the impossible trick of feeling like the original without being the original. The wider Western press followed within minutes, and the consensus looks like a polite, well-earned thumbs up with a few raised eyebrows. Behind the scenes, one of the most important people who made the original Halo is not on board, and has not been quiet about it.

What Halo Studios Actually Added to the Ringworld

The headline pitch is simple. Take the 10 missions Halo fans have been playing since 2001, rebuild them in Unreal Engine 5, ship them on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X and S at once, and add enough new toys to justify a 30 dollar remaster. Halo Studios went bigger than that. Sprint returns as a default L3 press. Aim down sights is on every weapon now, although damage still descopes you, so camping with a sniper is still a bad idea. The Warthog finally has twin-stick vehicle controls by default, with the old look-based steering preserved for purists. Health packs are gone and both shields and health regenerate, with health recharging slower than shields to keep the pressure on. Active Camo and Overshield are no longer auto-fire pickups. You bank them and trigger with R1, which is a small but genuinely smart change.

The bigger additions are the co-op and the story. For the first time, the campaign supports up to four players online with crossplay, and Halo Studios rebalanced weapon spawns, vehicle placement, and level pacing to handle the extra bodies. The Assault on the Control Room mission now lets all four Chiefs roll in Ghosts, Wraiths, and a Scorpion at the same time, which sounds like chaos and is, in practice, glorious chaos. On top of that, the team added a three-mission prequel arc called Operation METEORITE, which follows Master Chief and Sergeant Johnson on a covert raid a year before the Pillar of Autumn hits the ring. It is written with input from Troy Denning's Halo novels, and it gives Chief a real sparring partner in Johnson, which the original campaign never quite had room for.

The Skulls Are Different, the Skulls Are Bigger, and One of Them Is in Third Person

Skull placement is fully reshuffled, so veterans cannot just speedrun to the same corners they have known for 25 years. The classic modifiers like Iron, Black Eye, and Thunderstorm are all there, and the developers added new Skulls to find. One of those new Skulls unlocks an optional third person mode for the whole campaign, which is a free love letter to longtime fans who have been asking for it since Combat Evolved Anniversary. Collect any three Skulls and you unlock Campaign Remix, a mode that randomizes enemy types, randomizes weapon placement, and forces every enemy faction to fight alongside each other against you, which is the kind of unhinged modifier loadout that should not work on paper and absolutely does in practice.

Original Designers Are Pushing Back, and Jaime Griesemer Is Leading the Charge

The shadow over the launch is the people who built the original. Halo's lead encounter designer Jaime Griesemer went public back in October 2025 with a long thread about the changes he dislikes, and Eurogamer's review now links to it as exhibit A. His biggest complaint is that the new sprint and the crated debris paths let you Warthog-rush encounters he had deliberately shaped for on-foot combat. Griesemer placed rocks in specific spots during the original game's development to force players to dismount and fight Hunters as they were meant to be fought, and the new traversal options blow that up. He also called out trees being added to the landing area of the WooHoo Jump in Assault on the Control Room, which is the kind of small, sacred geometry change that only someone who placed every polygon by hand would notice, and only that person would be right to be mad about.

This is a bigger deal than a single designer venting. Halo: Combat Evolved is the game that defined the console first person shooter. It shipped on a launch Xbox with no loading screens, no regenerating health, two weapon slots, and the kind of encounter pacing that influenced fifteen years of shooters after it. When the people who authored that pacing are publicly saying the new version sands off the friction that made the original feel meaningful, that is not a footnote. It is the central tension of the project. Eurogamer's reviewer landed on the same point. The new game is more fun, more approachable, and more cinematic, and it is also less of a masterclass in player-led encounter design than the 2001 original, and you cannot get one without losing a little of the other.

How the Reviews Are Landing Across the Board

Beyond Eurogamer's 4 out of 5, the early consensus is positive without being ecstatic. Eurogamer's German arm scored it a 'remarkable' Unreal Engine 5 remake. The Spanish edition went with a measured write up. ZTGD's reviewer called it a welcome return to the original campaign with modern conveniences. WhatCulture Gaming went louder, framing it as Halo being 'so back' and the gregorian chants being earned. The critique that keeps showing up in every write up is the same one Griesemer raised. Combat feels great, but it also feels like an action game that remembers it used to be a puzzle game. The Flood sections, which were always the original campaign's weakest stretch, get a remix that mostly helps, although the new wayfinding arrows in The Library feel a little hand-holdy for veterans.

The Critical Pixel Take

A Halo remake that is also a Halo Studios debut on PS5 was always going to be the most important single launch Microsoft has shipped this year, and Halo: Campaign Evolved is good enough to clear that bar without embarrassing anybody. The Unreal Engine 5 work is a generational jump over the 2011 Anniversary Edition. The prequel missions feel like Halo that respects its own lore instead of just borrowing from it. Four player co-op with a Scorpion tank is a daily driver feature. The problem is that Halo Studios, like every big publisher right now, has decided to optimize the original game for the widest possible audience, which means cranking fun, cranking approachability, and quietly lowering the encounter-design ceiling. The original Halo asked players to think. This one mostly asks them to move. Both are valid, and the people who loved the original will feel the loss even when they are having a great time.

Halo: Campaign Evolved is out now in early access for Premium Edition buyers on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X and S, with the full launch landing on July 28. If you are new to the series, this is the best entry point the franchise has ever shipped. If you are a lapsed Halo fan who bounced off Halo 5 or Halo Infinite, this is the reason to come back. If you are the kind of person who remembers precisely where every Skull used to be, prepare to be irritated, but also prepare to find new ones, and to play the best four player Warthog mission in series history. The ring still hums. Master Chief still holds. The new fight over what Halo is supposed to be is just getting started.