Watch 13 Minutes of the Unreal-Enhanced Halo In Action

A friend recently asked me to name my favorite video game, and without missing a beat, I replied with Halo. For two decades now, I’ve loved playing through the Master Chief’s adventures over and over again. I love the in-depth lore and worldbuilding, the various campaigns, the soaring music, and of course, the incredible game and level design, which still makes Halo fun to play even after all these years.

Sadly, the Halo franchise has recently fallen on hard times. 2021’s Halo Infinite wasn’t quite the success everyone hoped it would be, meaning we’ll probably never get to finish the fight against The Endless. Plagued by aging technology and brain drain, Halo feels like it’s been on life support for several years now. (And the less said about the Halo TV series, the better.) Thus, when Halo Studios announced that future Halo games would be built on Unreal Engine rather than their proprietary Slipspace Engine, it felt like both a natural evolution and a last-ditch effort to save the franchise.

Which brings us to Halo: Campaign Evolved, a complete rebuild of 2001’s Halo: Combat Evolved — the first Halo game — in Unreal Engine. To showcase the updates, Halo Studios released a 13-minute playthrough of “The Silent Cartographer,” one of the game’s signature levels as well as the player’s introduction to the mysterious Halo ring’s vast depths.

Not surprisingly, the Unreal Engine-powered 4K graphics and gameplay look great, but other updates have been made to make Halo: Combat Evolved feel like a modern FPS. The Master Chief can dash now, for example, while taking advantage of new weapons as well as the ability to scope on all of them. The Verge’s Tom Warren got a chance to play a Halo: Campaign Evolved demo, and had some high praise for it, calling it “a blueprint for future Halo games”:

I’ve been playing a prerelease demo section of The Silent Cartographer mission this week to get a feel for all the changes. It’s the same level that was used as the demo version of Halo: Combat Evolved for both Mac and PC, but this remade version opens immediately with updated cinematics, improved voice lines, and greatly overhauled visuals and animations.

It looks and feels distinctively Halo, but then I started sprinting toward a rebuilt Warthog that has an extra seat at the rear and I realized there’s a lot going on in Campaign Evolved beyond its Unreal Engine 5-powered visuals.

As you might expect, the comments on the above video are rife with nitpicking, from the Assault Rifle’s sounds and animation to the revamped level design (and what it could mean for Warthog tricks). We’ll find out for certain if all of the upgrades revitalize the iconic game franchise in 2026, when Halo: Campaign Evolved is released to celebrate Halo’s 25th anniversary. And in a further update to the franchise, it’ll be released on the PlayStation 5 as well as Xbox Series X/S and PC, as Microsoft moves away from console exclusivity for its flagship games.