Halo: Campaign Evolved

Halo: Campaign Evolved is a 2026 first-person shooter developed by Halo Studios and published by Xbox Game Studios, released July 28, 2026 for Xbox Series X|S, PC, and PlayStation 5. It is a ground-up remake of the campaign from Halo: Combat Evolved, the 2001 Bungie game that launched the original Xbox, rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5 with three brand-new prequel missions, a full second helping of weapons and enemies borrowed from later entries, and 42 collectible Skulls feeding into a new randomized replay mode. It holds a Metacritic score of 86 on Xbox Series X, 80 on PS5, and 77 on PC, and an OpenCritic average of 84, rated “Mighty.”

Two things make this remake different from the last one. First, unlike 2011’s Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, which was a graphical overlay running on the original engine underneath, Campaign Evolved is rebuilt from the ground up, redesigning missions rather than reskinning them. Second, and more historically significant, it is the first Halo game ever released on a PlayStation console, ending twenty-five years of the series being tied exclusively to Xbox and PC.

Technical Specifications

A New Studio’s First Project

In October 2024, 343 Industries rebranded itself as Halo Studios and announced it was abandoning the proprietary Slipspace Engine built for Halo Infinite in favor of Unreal Engine 5, citing Unreal’s Lumen and Nanite rendering technology as opening up more interactive environments than the studio could build in-house. Campaign Evolved is the first product of that transition, and studio head Pierre Hintze described the rebrand itself as an attempt to “change the recipe” of how Halo games get made. The project was first teased under the codename Project Foundry at the 2024 Halo World Championship, then formally announced a year later alongside a live 13-minute demo of the mission “The Silent Cartographer.”

What Halo: Combat Evolved Was

The original Halo: Combat Evolved launched alongside the Xbox console in November 2001 and became the reason a lot of people bought one. Master Chief, a genetically enhanced supersoldier, and his AI companion Cortana crash-land the UNSC Pillar of Autumn on a mysterious ring-shaped megastructure while fleeing an alien coalition called the Covenant. The ring turns out to hide something worse than the Covenant themselves: the Flood, a parasitic species that any faction, human or alien, has good reason to keep buried. It remains one of the highest-rated shooters ever made, holding a Metacritic score of 97, and is widely credited with popularizing the console-native dual-analog shooter format that FPS games still use today.

Rebuilding the Pillar of Autumn

Where 2011’s Combat Evolved Anniversary was, by Halo Studios’ own framing, essentially a new graphics layer draped over the unchanged 2001 engine — complete with a button to instantly toggle back to the old visuals — Campaign Evolved redesigns the ten original missions rather than repainting them. The team specifically cited the seventh mission, “The Library,” as a target for rework, since its repetitive Flood combat was one of the most common complaints about the original game for over two decades. Under the hood, Halo Studios kept portions of Bungie’s original Blam engine code running physics and enemy AI, wrapping Unreal Engine 5 around it purely as a rendering front end, in an attempt to preserve the specific feel of Combat Evolved’s combat rather than rebuild it from assumptions. The voice cast mostly returns, including Steve Downes, Jen Taylor, and Tim Dadabo as Master Chief, Cortana, and 343 Guilty Spark respectively, all newly re-recorded, alongside a fully remastered version of Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori’s original score. Sgt. Johnson is the one major recast, with Keston John stepping into the role following original actor David Scully’s retirement in 2013.

Operation: METEORITE

Beyond the original ten missions, every edition of Campaign Evolved includes Operation: METEORITE, a three-mission prequel arc set one year before the events of Combat Evolved. It follows Master Chief and Sgt. Johnson on a UNSC infiltration mission aboard a Covenant research vessel that starts as a straightforward smash-and-grab and escalates from there. The story was developed with input from science fiction author Troy Denning, brought on specifically to ground the new missions in the military sci-fi tone longtime readers of the Halo novels expect.

Borrowing From the Sequels

A large part of what separates this remake from a simple visual refresh is how freely it imports mechanics and hardware introduced by later Halo games into the original’s 2001 setting. Sprinting, introduced in Halo: Reach, is on by default but can be toggled off for players who want the original’s fixed movement speed. Vehicle hijacking, first playable in Halo 2, now works throughout, and Covenant vehicles are destructible in real time. The Warthog has been redesigned with a fourth rear seat, letting a full four-person fireteam ride at once, on-screen or in co-op. Enemy variety is expanded to include the Jiralhanae “Brutes” and the “pure” Flood forms from Halo 3, and the arsenal grows by nine weapons pulled from Halo 2, Halo 3, and Reach: the Energy Sword, Sub-Machine Gun, Battle Rifle, Fuel Rod Cannon, Sentinel Beam, Spiker, Beam Rifle, Brute Plasma Rifle, and Needle Rifle.

42 Skulls and Campaign Remix

Skulls, the series’ collectible gameplay-modifier system introduced in Halo 2, return in the largest number any Halo campaign has offered: 39 are hidden through the game’s 13 missions (three per mission), with three more, Adaptation, Reload, and Armistice, unlocking automatically once any three of the standard 39 are found. Some are returning fan favorites like Grunt Birthday Party and Mythic; others are new to this game, including Perspective, which switches the entire campaign to third-person, and The Floor Is Lava, which damages the player on contact with the ground. Collecting three Skulls also unlocks Campaign Remix, a new mode that replays any completed mission with randomized enemy factions, randomized weapon placement, and a stack of additional Skull effects layered on top, in solo or co-op. Since the game shipped without any competitive multiplayer, Remix is effectively Halo Studios’ answer to the question of what keeps players coming back after the campaign ends.

No Multiplayer, But Four-Player Co-op

As its subtitle implies, Campaign Evolved drops the original’s competitive player-versus-player multiplayer entirely, a deliberate choice the team defended as a way to focus resources on the campaign and its co-op systems instead. What remains is four-player online co-op with full cross-platform play and cross-progression across Xbox, PC, and PS5, plus two-player split-screen for console players, a mode executive producer Damon Conn said the team wanted to preserve specifically for the sense of shared-couch community it built into the franchise’s identity in the 2000s.

The First Halo on PlayStation

Halo has been Xbox’s flagship exclusive since the console’s 2001 launch, so a PlayStation 5 release is a genuine first for the franchise. Xbox’s Content and Studios head Matt Booty framed the decision as going to where players already are rather than trying to pull them onto Xbox hardware, and Halo community manager Brian Jarrard announced the PS5 version on stage while wearing a PlayStation-branded t-shirt, stating that future Halo releases are expected to follow the same multiplatform approach. Coverage of the announcement leaned heavily on the symbolism: outlets described it as evidence that the traditional console-exclusive model was winding down industry-wide, and it’s the kind of moment that gets covered as much for what it says about the industry as for the game itself.

Reception

Critical response has been positive but notably more mixed than any prior Halo release: 81 on Metacritic across all versions makes Campaign Evolved the lowest-scoring mainline entry in franchise history, edging below Halo 5: Guardians‘ 84. Reviewers consistently praised the faithfulness of the visual and combat overhaul, the depth of the Skulls system, and Campaign Remix’s ability to make a 25-year-old campaign feel unpredictable again. Criticism centered on three points: the three Operation: METEORITE missions being described by multiple outlets as more of a taste of new ideas than a substantial expansion, some sections of the original ten missions — Metacritic reviewers specifically flagged the late-game backtracking in “Two Betrayals” — still showing their age regardless of the visual work, and technical issues at launch, particularly on base PS5 hardware, where several reviewers reported significant framerate problems in roughly half the campaign’s missions. A number of PS5 owners also noted the game requires a persistent internet connection and cross-account linking between PlayStation Network and a Microsoft account, despite shipping without any PvP multiplayer to justify it.

Editions and Where to Play

The Standard Edition includes the full campaign and Operation: METEORITE. The Digital Premium Edition adds five days of early access, six weapon skins, five cosmetics from the “Alpha Halo Armory Pack,” a digital art book, and the short story Halo: Hungry Buzzards, which expands on the new prequel missions. A physical Collector’s Edition adds a Dark Horse-designed 12-inch Master Chief statue, a light-up Cortana data chip replica, a steelbook case, concept art prints, and a physical manual modeled on the original 2001 game’s instruction booklet. All pre-orders include the “Foundry Armory Pack,” featuring a “Classic 2001” armor skin modeled on Combat Evolved’s original Mark V MJOLNIR design. The game is available at launch on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass, with availability on lower Game Pass tiers expected within a year.