Another decade, another Halo: Combat Evolved

I have good memories of Halo: Combat Evolved. I played it with friends from the original Xbox release through its various ports, remasters and re-releases over the years. I have stormed that beach, crossed that bridge, rescued those marines and trudged through The Library enough times to qualify for a UNSC pension.

Halo: Campaign Evolved will be the first version I will not bother with.

I do not suddenly hate Combat Evolved. Microsoft has simply given me zero reason to pay £49.99 to play the same bloody campaign again, now covered in the generic Unreal Engine 5 look and missing the competitive multiplayer that originally came with it.

The Premium Edition was an even funnier £69.99, granting five days of “advanced access” from 23 July before the official release on 28 July. Paying another £20 to access a remake of a 2001 game slightly earlier was already ridiculous. Paying it only for Steam to repeatedly open the digital artbook instead of the actual game was almost performance art.

We now have one week of data since the official release and nearly two weeks since that £70 advanced-access joke began. The launch excuses have expired. The servers have had time to recover, the first enormous patch has arrived and the Steam rating has only become worse.

This was supposed to be Halo’s glorious return.

The glorious return of 343 Industries, sorry, Halo Studios:

After the Halo Infinite fiasco, 343 Industries renamed itself Halo Studios, abandoned its troubled Slipspace Engine and announced that future Halo games would use Unreal Engine 5. Microsoft presented the change as a complete new beginning, with different technology, leadership, workflows and development philosophy.

Its first major release under that shiny new identity was another remake of Bungie’s original Halo campaign.

The studio has openly described its Unreal Engine work as a stepping stone towards future projects. That makes Campaign Evolved feel suspiciously like a £50 training exercise, with customers paying Halo Studios to learn how to use its new engine while it rebuilds a game whose entire creative foundation was delivered in 2001.

This would already be audacious without Infinite. After Infinite, it becomes fucking hilarious.

Halo Infinite was publicly described as the beginning of the next ten years of Halo, a long-term platform that would grow instead of being replaced by another numbered sequel. It launched after a year-long delay without campaign co-op or Forge, later cancelled its promised local campaign split-screen and never received a single campaign expansion.

Its campaign was supposed to be another grand narrative reset after Halo 5. It introduced another ancient threat, another replacement for Cortana and another pile of unresolved mysteries intended to carry the franchise forward. None of it went anywhere.

The multiplayer was supposed to become Halo’s permanent live-service foundation. Instead, its last major content update arrived in November 2025, less than four years after launch, while Halo Studios moved onto other projects.

The campaign reset was abandoned. The ten-year live service lasted four. The custom-built engine intended to power Halo’s future was thrown away. Then 343 changed its name and announced another new beginning, hoping everyone would politely forget the previous one.

So much for Infinite.

Halo Studios’ triumphant return was apparently to take Bungie’s first campaign, transfer it into Unreal Engine 5, remove the competitive multiplayer and charge £50 for it.

Bungie had already done the difficult work. The ringworld, story, characters, enemies, weapons, encounters, music and campaign structure were all established twenty-five years ago. Halo Studios added three prequel missions, newer weapons, collectibles, expanded co-op and modern movement, but the actual design foundation was waiting for them.

They were given the safest possible assignment and still launched it buggy, unfinished and wrapped in the same corporate bollocks that helped poison Infinite.

Nobody joined the fight:

The publicly tracked numbers are embarrassing.

At the time of writing, Campaign Evolved has nearly 11,000 Steam reviews, with only around 64% positive overall. Its English-language rating is closer to 62%, leaving the game firmly inside the Mixed category.

Its Steam player count peaked at only 25,376 concurrent players. One week later, its daily peak had already fallen below 9,000.

A short campaign will naturally lose players quickly, but it needs players to arrive before they can leave. This was a major multiplatform release built around Halo’s 25th anniversary, promoted as the rebirth of Xbox’s former flagship franchise and launched on PlayStation for the first time in the series’ history.

That historic PlayStation debut produced a muted fart.

Circana’s US engagement tracking placed Campaign Evolved at 29th on PlayStation 5 on its official launch day, with around 1% of active PS5 users opening it. It reached fourth on Xbox, where Game Pass removed the £50 purchasing decision, while Steam placed it fourteenth.

Microsoft finally carried Master Chief across enemy lines and discovered that barely anybody on the other side gave a shit.

Halo appearing on PlayStation should have been one of the largest moments in Xbox history. Microsoft dismantled part of the franchise’s value as an exclusive to reach a massive new audience, then introduced that audience to Halo with another version of its oldest campaign and none of the competitive multiplayer that made the series a console phenomenon.

There has not even been the customary corporate victory graphic. No “one million Spartans have joined the fight”, no record engagement announcement and no carefully selected statistic about Covenant kills, skulls discovered or Warthog kilometres travelled.

Xbox normally loves hiding behind engagement numbers when sales figures are less flattering. This time, even the engagement-number fanfare is missing.

Twenty-one gigabytes of finished product:

The advanced-access period began with Microsoft account-linking failures, server problems and Steam launching the Premium Edition artbook instead of the game.

Nothing captures modern Xbox more perfectly than charging people extra to play a single-player remake early, requiring them to connect another account and then accidentally showing them concept art because the game itself refuses to open.

The official release arrived with cinematic stuttering, audio desynchronisation, crashes, progression blockers and enemies apparently suffering from severe motivational problems. Destroying a Banshee at the wrong moment during Two Betrayals could prevent progression. Launching the executable directly from the installation folder could cause sign-in failures, severe performance problems or a complete freeze requiring Task Manager.

This is a linear campaign whose mission sequence and basic progression were settled in 2001.

One day after the full release, Halo Studios pushed out its first substantial patch. On Steam, it weighed 21 GB. Installing it also reset any current mid-mission progress.

The patch fixed Jackals standing around instead of patrolling, Elites refusing to engage, enemies walking into scenery, Hunters failing to attack consistently, crashes on AMD hardware and hitching caused by having too many friends on your friends list. It also added warnings for graphics-driver versions known to cause problems.

Halo Studios was not wrestling with some unprecedented simulation or revolutionary open world. It was remaking a linear Bungie campaign using an established commercial engine chosen specifically to escape the development problems of Slipspace.

They still needed a 21 GB patch immediately after release to persuade the enemies to notice the player.

This is low-effort UE5 remake garbage in the only sense that matters to the customer. Halo Studios reused the safest campaign in the franchise, omitted a huge part of the original package, applied the standard modern Unreal presentation, charged £50 and shipped it with enough known problems to populate an entire support site.

Half a Halo for the full price:

The complete absence of competitive multiplayer is absurd.

Halo Studios said it wanted to focus on the campaign, expand co-op and make that single component as polished as possible. The campaign then launched with broken authentication, progression bugs, idle enemies, crashes and a 21 GB first patch, so the sacrifice clearly bought very little polish.

The fan-made defence is that another multiplayer game would fracture Halo Infinite’s existing audience.

What fucking audience?

Infinite has already received its last planned major update. Its transparent Steam population has fallen from an all-time peak of 272,586 to roughly a thousand concurrent players during ordinary periods. Microsoft has spent years refusing to publish a clear multiplatform population figure that would suggest some enormous thriving community exists elsewhere.

Apparently, the remains of Infinite are simultaneously too dead to receive meaningful new support and too alive to risk giving players another Halo multiplayer game.

That explanation becomes even more ridiculous on PlayStation. PS5 owners cannot play Halo Infinite’s multiplayer at all. This was the first Halo release ever placed on a PlayStation console, and Microsoft introduced that audience to the franchise without competitive multiplayer, Forge, custom games or the decades of multiplayer culture that made Halo important.

Halo did not become Xbox’s prestige franchise through campaign alone. Campaign, co-op, split-screen, LAN parties, custom games and Xbox Live all formed the identity of the series. For millions of players, competitive multiplayer was not some optional side mode attached to the real Halo experience. It was the fucking experience.

Microsoft is charging £50 for half of Combat Evolved while The Master Chief Collection already includes six campaigns, several generations of Halo multiplayer, Forge, Theatre, mods and the previous Combat Evolved Anniversary, often for a fraction of the price.

Halo Studios has produced another version of a campaign people already own while giving them less Halo for more money.

Another Cortana has entered the Teams meeting:

Another Halo release naturally means another redesigned Cortana.

343 Industries spent its entire tenure changing Cortana’s face, body, colour, clothing, personality, role and eventually her entire existence. Halo 4 redesigned her. Halo 5 turned her into an armoured AI dictator. Infinite killed her off-screen and replaced her with the Weapon. Now Halo Studios has returned to Bungie’s original game and redesigned her yet again.

This may be the most aggressively PR-safe Cortana so far.

She looks as though every remotely provocative or memorable feature was passed through legal, human resources, regional marketing and several rounds of Microsoft brand approval. The result is technically detailed, conventionally pretty and completely devoid of sex appeal.

She resembles a corporate AI spokesperson preparing to explain responsible data use in a pre-recorded Teams presentation.

The point is not simply that Cortana needs larger breasts. Her sexiness came from the entire character: the confidence, teasing delivery, sharp expressions and obvious enjoyment she took in being smarter than everyone else in the room. She was playful, dangerous and fully aware of the effect she had on people.

Even the low-poly Cortana from 2001 had more presence than this expensive corporate mannequin.

Halo Studios claims the new appearance was an exercise in “refinement, not redesign”, balancing the purple of the original game against the electric-blue holographic look associated with later Halo releases. That sentence alone sounds like several meetings took place to determine which shade of Cortana would survive international brand testing.

They averaged together two memorable designs and produced Microsoft Copilot wearing her skin.

Bungie had already done this work as well. Cortana’s visual identity existed. Her personality existed. Her relationship with Chief existed. This is a remake of the game that established all of it, yet Halo Studios still could not resist putting another corporate-approved face over the character.

Another Halo game, another Cortana redesign. Halo Studios cannot maintain a storyline, a live service or apparently the same woman’s face for two consecutive releases.

See you in the same sequel again:

Completing Campaign Evolved on Legendary unlocks a new joke ending in which Sergeant Johnson looks directly towards the camera and says, “See you in the sequel.”

Yes, really.

The original game’s Legendary ending was already a non-canonical gag, but Halo Studios has replaced Bungie’s silly final joke with a fourth-wall-breaking advertisement for its next remake. The additional scene then begins setting up Halo 2, because apparently even the final reward needed to become a trailer for another £50-£70 product.

The tease raises a more obvious question: where is the actual next Halo game?

Halo Infinite’s campaign released in December 2021. Nearly five years later, Halo Studios has not announced its continuation, a replacement storyline or any other original mainline campaign. It says multiple projects are being developed, but the only one it has publicly revealed is the remake it just released.

Infinite ended by introducing the Endless, bringing Atriox back, stranding Chief on another broken ring and setting up yet another beginning for the franchise. Then nothing happened. No campaign expansion arrived. No sequel was announced. The studio moved engines, changed its name and went back to remaking Bungie games instead.

Now its apparent plan is to follow the remake of Halo 1 with a remake of Halo 2. At this rate, Halo Studios may finish recreating Bungie’s entire trilogy before discovering what happens after its own last campaign.

Perhaps Halo 2 will arrive exactly as teased. Perhaps the weak response to Campaign Evolved will trigger another leadership reshuffle, another revised strategy and another sudden outbreak of corporate amnesia. A new logo will appear, a new timeline will begin and somebody will once again promise the future of Halo.

Cortana will naturally receive another face.