It Feels Wrong For Halo To Feel Better Than Ever On PS5

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There's something that almost feels sacrilegious about playing Halo on a PlayStation console. The sci-fi shooter franchise feels quintessentially Xbox, and while you've been able to play Halo: The Master Chief Collection on PC with a DualSense controller, there's something extra odd with playing a version of Halo covered in a PlayStation-oriented UI and seeing PlayStation Trophies pop with every completed in-game accomplishment. And yet, despite how weird it is to be playing Halo on a PlayStation 5, it's still Halo. And so it's really fun. Not to be confused with Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo: Campaign Evolved (because why would they make the title acronyms different and make things easier for me?) is a remake of the very first Halo, and it's also the first Halo game to be playable on one of Sony's consoles. Unlike the 2011 remaster Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary--which provided a graphical upgrade and added co-op gameplay and brand-new collectibles like lore-filled terminals and gameplay-modifying skulls--Campaign Evolved is a much more drastic transformation. In the first Halo game, protagonist John-117, aka the Master Chief, awakens aboard a starship after it's been attacked by an alien alliance known as the Covenant. As a super-soldier called a Spartan, Master Chief is tasked with escaping the doomed ship with its artificial intelligence, Cortana, to a nearby moon-sized ring that humanity has never seen before. Cortana quickly learns that this ring, referred to as Halo, is important to the Covenant, and Master Chief sets out to learn what it is and why the Covenant want it, while also helping the various human survivors who made it to the ring's surface and are contending with Covenant forces. Developed in Unreal Engine 5, Campaign Evolved's visuals are a huge jump from 2001's Combat Evolved. And as the name suggests, the actual story campaign has changed too. There are three brand-new missions that take place one year prior to the events of the main story, the levels in the main story have been redesigned in certain sections in terms of both layout and mission objective, and brand-new cutscenes further flesh out the characters and stories with references that longtime fans will recognize are now early teasers for Halo 2. The gameplay has been overhauled too, implementing changes to make the first Halo play more like Master Chief's later adventures. Some of these changes radically alter how it feels to play the first Halo--like the ability to sprint, or aim down sights on all weapons--while others feel much smaller. A mechanic like vehicle hijacking was not added to Halo until the second game in the series, so its addition in Campaign Evolved is technically new, for example. But vehicle hijacking doesn't feel like an extraordinary game-changer because the number of times you have the opportunity to use it are few and far between. While the much larger (and visually gorgeous) environments, grander firefight arenas, and newly added "hold-the-line" encounters make for an altogether longer game to both explore and fight through, playing Campaign Evolved feels like the memory I have of playing Combat Evolved. The changes to the story and gameplay are noticeable to anyone who has familiarity with the first Halo, but the remake's adjustments don't feel like a complete departure from its source material. If anything, Campaign Evolved makes the story of Combat Evolved feel more in line with the lore and overall story developed in the games, books, and animated series that were released after the first Halo. Everything is just better connected--bringing the Brutes into Halo 1 erases the confusion as to why they're in Halo Reach and Halo 2, but not the game that canonically takes place in between them, for instance. And Captain Keyes' daughter, Miranda, is also now mentioned multiple times, setting up her in-game introduction in Halo 2. The original Combat Evolved doesn't acknowledge her existence because she didn't exist when that game was made. But she's now a major part of Halo 2 and Halo 3 (as well as several books) so it makes sense that her dad would at least talk about her in Halo 1. Are any of these details crucial to the story told in the first Halo? No. Do these changes make the overall story of Master Chief's first game better flow into the second? Yes. The changes are so much better that Campaign Evolved feels like the new gold standard for playing through the first Halo--I'd recommend this over Combat Evolved Anniversary. Every change feels like an improvement on what came before. While the three new prequel missions don't rise to the same dramatic highs that make the main story of Combat Evolved so memorable, their inclusion does improve the overall experience and I recommend anyone who picks up Campaign Evolved play these new missions first (the game counts them as a separate story that you can choose to play at any point). These new missions see Master Chief and fan-favorite Sergeant Johnson infiltr

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J

Published

July 23, 2026