My Cultural Diet

Given my love for Halo’s world and mythology, buying Halo: Campaign Evolved was a total no-brainer. It’s pretty much what it says on the tin, though, an “evolved” version of the original Halo: Combat Evolved campaign from 2001 built with Unreal Engine 5. Which means there’s nothing fundamentally new here, shiny graphics and reworked levels aside. (“The Library,” for instance, is no longer quite so tedious or annoying.) And in some ways, that’s enough. There’s a reason why the first Halo game is so fun and iconic, and to their credit, Halo Studios don’t really try to fix anything that wasn’t broken. (Although I do wish that some of the character designs, like Cortana’s, had received a few more rounds of polish.) But even with all of the reworked graphics and visual updates, it’s hard not to feel like the entire thing is a bit superfluous and unnecessary, like it was an extended tech demo made simply to prove that Halo can, indeed, run on Unreal. I don’t want to come off like I’m damning Halo: Campaign Evolved with faint praise, because let’s be honest: if Halo Studios releases similarly “evolved” versions of Halo 2 and Halo 3, I will almost certainly buy those, too. But if you already own the Master Chief Collection, which gave Halo: Combat Evolved a glow-up all the way back in 2014, and you don’t care about the novelty of playing Halo on a PlayStation, then this is far from a must-have.

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