Halo: Campaign Evolved

Woke ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Never buying a halo game again. ♥♥♥♥ these alphabet people ruining everything with their mental disorders.

Halo: Combat Evolved holds a very special place in my heart, and I genuinely loved revisiting it through the Master Chief Collection. MCC managed to modernize the graphics while preserving the original experience, including the ability to switch between classic and Anniversary visuals, achievements, skulls, and plenty of other quality of life features. This game feels like a huge step backwards. The graphics are technically good, but they lose much of the visual identity and charm of the original, with no option to switch back to the classic presentation. The levels and environments haven't been meaningfully improved enough to justify what we're getting either. The one thing I genuinely loved was the 4 player co-op. Getting a group of friends together to play Halo CE again was fantastic. Unfortunately, the game surrounding that experience is incredibly disappointing. the difficulty changes are insulting, the AI is just broken with many times covenant and flood standing licking the walls or following you without threat. Not sure who thought it was OK to release this without multiplayer, but they do not know Halo. And the price makes it even worse. For half the price, MCC gives you Halo CE, Halo 2, Halo 3, ODST, Halo 4 and Reach, with better preservation of the original games and significantly more features. I really wanted to love this. Instead, it feels like a polished husk of a game I already own

Remaster so bad the studio closed

I'm unable to even play it,the link it sends me for linking my account doesn't lead me anywhere

I don't care about the bad voice acting or stilted cutscenes. This game is nothing. Halo has had so much continuity between 2004 and now and almost none of it was used. Even barring Fireteam Raven there was not a single ODST in the game aside from one single character in the bonus levels which exists solely to berate the player and spout insipid banter. The bonus levels themselves are utterly devoid of interesting content or routes to take, featuring 90% reskinned enemies and the single worst implementation of brutes I have ever seen in a Halo game. Sure the space section is nice, except that it's ripped from Halo Reach. And it's even more boring and repetitive than it was in Reach. Which sums up the majority of new and changed content in this game. This game doesn't feel like Halo Combat Evolved. It feels like Halo Reach wearing the skin of Halo Infinite, which is effectively all it is. Don't think it gets by me that the new campaign weapons, the sentinel beam and energy sword, are ripped from Halo Infinite as well. Campaign Evolved is just boring. There's nothing to sink your teeth into. There's no score, there's no time attack, there's no playlists or online or firefight. It's just campaign. Campaign Evolved, that is. And those campaign levels are almost entirely unchanged except for The Library. The Library is fine, I guess. Except for tank forms which can't fight you on top of a slope and just sit there eating way too many bullets. Sure, it's nice to rip tank forms from Halo 3 with shiny new graphics, but there was zero consideration for how they might interact with Halo CEs level structure. In fact, there was little consideration for anything but producing a minimum viable product that could be pumped out for a quick buck. If you want a passionate reimagining of Halo CE, play Ruby's Rebalance. If you want to play Halo CE levels in Halo Reach's engine with pretty graphics and a choppy framerate then go ahead. I'm genuinely happy for you. I wish I liked this game. I wanted to like this game so bad it's unreal. I paid full price for this. Hell, I DO like this game. It's fun to click heads and make enemies explode. But it's impossible not to think about what could have been and be disappointed with what is. Halo has so much unused content that was just ignored in favor of spamming spec ops elites and removing hallways in Assault on the Control Room. The bonus levels are blatantly tech demos for what a Halo 2 remake might be. And it's all but officially confirmed a Halo 2 remake is in the works. If the brutes are anything like they are in this game going forward then Halo Studios will have failed to learn a single thing. But then again, when have they?

Absolute garbage. DO NOT BUY THIS GAME! this is an obvious cash grab from microsoft. they literally ripped everything from the original halo, slapped it into this garbage and added a couple of visuals and weapons. playing halo remasted is better than this garbage.

I prefer MCC

343/Halo Studios misses the mark again. Unreal Engine 5, the engine that they touted as being the thing that would refresh and revive Halo, ironically, is the thing that kills this game for me. The Slipspace Engine in Infinite ran so well, and had Infinite FEELING like Halo. Unreal Engine leaves Campaign Evolved feeling like its missing something. Every aspect of this game feels like a pulled punch. The music just isn't quite there. It's too quiet and lacks soul. It feels like they just used AI to make the score. The guns feel just not quite right. There is no oomf in the gunplay at all. The enemies' AI feels not quite there. There is no satisfaction in headshotting grunts and jackals. This game feels like there was no unifying vision. It feels like everything was outsourced to the cheapest labor. OH WAIT! IT WAS! Unreal Engine 5 is all flash and no soul. Every single surface in this games is reflective and shiny, and every single particle effect is dialed up to 12. It makes this game incredibly difficult to run without tuning all your graphical settings down to Medium at minimum, and the sensory bombardment does little to hide what lies underneath. Campaign Evolved feels like a literal polished turd, except the polish makes the game not even playable. They gave this game the landlord special and just painted over all the rust and dirt with Unreal Engine 5's graphical choices. 343 decided they'd make a playable benchmarking program rather than a game. The input lag and stuttering this game has is inexcusable. Was I excited for this? Yes. I was excited for a reboot where some of the choices Bungie made during Halo 1's development could be righted. Things like the Library, and the warthog run's infamous tiny bridge on the Pillar of Autumn. We received those things, but it came in a crusty cardboard box that they decided to paint gold and call a treasure. I haven't beat this game yet. I will, and I will see if this review changes. If 343/Halo Studios likewise releases performance patches, too, I will also change this review. Halo games are supposed to be easy to run, and always have been. At what point do we have diminishing returns in graphical fidelity to game playability? This culture of trying to make games shinier and shinier with tech that is sooo resource-expensive to run is hurting gaming. This game does not look that much better than Infinite or even Reach for that matter, yet it is 100x more difficult to run.

Just get the masterchief collection this isnt worth the money