by Anthony O'Connor
Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Intro:
… fast-paced, engaging and very slick looking, although there are fundamental gameplay and story elements that very much feel of their time.
In 2001, back in the ancient times, the console wars raged with a vengeance. The three antagonistic factions were Playstation with their beloved PS2, Nintendo with their flash-looking GameCube and Microsoft with their scrappy new kid on the block, XBOX. The battles surged, at the cash register and online, and while Sony was the undisputed winner, for a time at least, XBOX had turned a lot of heads, particularly with its rather dishy FPS offering, Halo: Combat Evolved.
Developed by talented devs Bungie, Halo offered a peerless shooter campaign set in an imaginative sci-fi world with oodles of goopy aliens, cool tech and unmatched gunplay. It was a massive hit, critically and commercially, and set up XBOX to soon lap everyone else in the next generation with the Xbox 360. And Halo? Oh, it came along for the ride, with plenty of sequels to keep Team Green ascendant.
Time, however, is a cruel and fickle mistress and XBOX eventually lost its way, as did the Halo franchise, and they eventually resorted to flogging some of their beloved IP to other consoles. Hence why, in 2026, Halo: Combat Evolved has come to the Playstation in the guise of Halo: Campaign Evolved, a bells and whistles remaster.
So, does it work? For the most part, yeah, although there are a few caveats that need to be addressed.
Halo: Campaign Evolved takes place in the 26th Century and involves an ongoing interstellar war between humanity and the narky Covenant, a collection of advanced alien races. When the humans discover a gigantic ringworld structure known as HALO, the race is on between bold homo sapiens and chittering extraterrestrial wankers to unlock its secrets and gain the upper hand. Enter Master Chief, a helmeted Spartan super soldier with the strength and shooty shooty prowess to complete the mission, with the help of his silky voiced, half naked AI assistant Cortana of course. But when a new alien menace, The Flood, enters the fray, the fate of the whole universe might just be at stake.
So, look, here’s the thing: Halo: Campaign Evolved is a beautiful-looking game with schmicked up graphics, sound and improved quality-of-life and gameplay elements that none of us could have imagined sitting in bong smoke clogged loungerooms in 2001. It’s also, undeniably, a remaster of a game that’s a quarter of a century old, and no amount of new missions and remixed elements can disguise that fact.
The action, while slick, is very repetitive and involves a lot of backtracking and fighting samey enemies over and over. The story, while engaging enough, is a generic hodge podge of overused sci-fi tropes and the gameplay isn’t very evolved at all. It’s fun, for sure, but if you’re new to the series and don’t have a nostalgia boner over the original entries, there’s a very good chance that you’ll find the charms of this revered FPS somewhat elusive. And while the game does feature co-op mode, it completely eschews the beloved multiplayer offerings that kept so many of us engaged and cheerfully abusing one another over chat all those years ago.
Ultimately, Halo: Campaign Evolved is a solid game, albeit one that feels slightly surreal to play on the PS5. It’s fast-paced, engaging and very slick looking, although there are fundamental gameplay and story elements that very much feel of their time. Still and all, sometimes it’s nice to revisit the classics and when they’re gussied-up as well as Campaign Evolved, it’s not hard to enjoy a brief but diverting blast from the past.
