I Played Halo: Campaign Evolved at Halo World Championship: Halo Studios is Trying to Solve a 25-year-old Problem

The room already had that Halo World Championship energy. Loud, slightly chaotic, half sports arena and half family reunion. People were still talking about clutches and brackets, still wearing team jerseys like they were uniforms, and then the whole weekend abruptly pivoted into something else. A nostalgia bomb with a release window.

Halo Studios walked out and said the quiet part out loud: they’re remaking Halo: Combat Evolved. Not a texture pass. Not “Anniversary, but shinier.” A ground-up campaign remake built in Unreal Engine 5, coming in 2026, and yes, it’s headed to PlayStation 5 along with Xbox Series X|S and PC.

And then they did the smart thing. They didn’t just announce it. They showed it.

The first long look was The Silent Cartographer, the mission every Halo fan can replay in their head like muscle memory. There’s a reason they picked it. It’s beach landing and wide-open chaos and that specific Halo magic where it’s always your choice whether to be careful or stupid.

Then I got in line and played it.

The Demo: 15 minutes of Cartographer, and a Whole Lot of Intent

The slice I played is basically the opening chunk of The Silent Cartographer. It starts right at the landing firefight and runs until Chief does a very specific, very Halo thing: he kicks a glowing rock into a deep chasm. It’s a clean stopping point, like a “that’s enough to know what this is” mic drop.

In between, you get the hits. Elites, Grunts, Jackals. The kind of skirmishes that look simple until you remember Halo is a game about space and rhythm, not just aim. There are also multiple Hunter encounters in this short slice, which feels like a deliberate flex. Like, “Yes, we know what you want to hear, and yes, we rebuilt the part where the Hunters make your spine vibrate.”

I spent a bunch of my time doing what everyone does in Cartographer: driving the Warthog like it’s a shopping cart with a rocket engine. The handling felt familiar, heavy in that classic Halo way, but the old “grenade under the bumper and launch into orbit” physics vibe didn’t really show up for me. That might be tuning. That might be the build. It might also be Halo Studios trying to keep the silliness on a shorter leash this time.

Also, minor but telling: the build felt like a show-floor build. My first run had a little latency to it, the kind that makes you notice how much Halo’s identity is tied to “tight.” The second run felt better, or maybe my brain just adjusted. Either way, it’s the one thing I walked away hoping they obsess over, because nothing kills Halo faster than floaty.

It looks new, but it’s weirdly committed to feeling old

Visually, this is the Halo fantasy in high fidelity. The environments aren’t just prettier, they’re more legible. Things pop. The lighting has that modern Unreal sheen without turning everything into plastic. And the cinematic language is clearly being redone, with updated animations and motion-capture, plus freshly recorded dialogue from returning cast. It’s the same story beat-for-beat, but presented like the team finally gets to use the camera the way their brains always wanted to.

The audio’s in the same category. They’re remastering the soundtrack and rebuilding the sound design, which matters because Combat Evolved is basically a museum exhibit for iconic game sounds. In the demo, the weapon audio hits with more punch, and the Covenant noise feels less “compressed memory” and more “actual thing happening in space.”

There’s also an interesting technical promise tucked inside all the marketing: the new Unreal Engine 5 presentation is layered over legacy Halo systems to keep the “Halo feel” intact. That sounds like PR until you play it and realize, yeah, the combat cadence still reads like CE. The sandbox still wants you to improvise. The grenades still want to be your plan, not your backup plan.

The changes are not subtle, and they’re trying to make the arguments survivable

Halo Studios is doing that tricky remake thing where they’re fixing the stuff people have complained about for decades, while also trying not to trigger the fanbase into civil war. So they’re leaning hard on choice.

Sprint exists. You can toggle it on or off. In the demo, sprint felt useful but not ridiculous, and there’s no slide. It’s not trying to turn Halo into a parkour shooter. It’s there to smooth out the moments where CE’s pacing shows its age.

They’re also expanding the sandbox with additional weapons pulled from across Halo’s history, including the Energy Sword and the Battle Rifle. This is a big deal for anyone who ever stared at a Covenant sword in CE and thought, come on, really? Now you can actually use it.

Vehicles are getting similar treatment. You can hijack enemy rides, including the Wraith, and the Warthog gets an extra seat on the back so a full four-player squad can pile in. That one tiny change says a lot about the project’s priorities. This is CE rebuilt around co-op chaos.

And yes, they’re going after The Library. Not just “we heard you,” but “we have 25 years of receipts.” The talk around it is wayfinding, layout, flow, pacing. The goal is to keep the dread and tension without the part where you realize you’ve been staring at the same hallway for twenty minutes and you’re not sure if you’re progressing or being pranked.

They’re even upgrading the Flood themselves by pulling lessons from later games, basically retrofitting the better versions of the Flood back into their origin story. That’s a real “we’ve learned how to make this fun” move.

Co-op is the Center of Gravity. PvP Isn't Here.

The headline feature, once you get past “Halo on PS5,” is co-op. Two-player split-screen on consoles is back. Four-player online co-op is in, with cross-play and shared progression across PC, Xbox, and PlayStation. They even call out online and networked co-op, which is Halo quietly reminding everyone it used to be a LAN religion.

But the other headline is the absence: no PvP multiplayer. The reasoning is direct. They want the remake to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the original, and they want to pour the effort into getting this one thing right. Co-op is the community hook. Campaign is the foundation. Multiplayer, for now, is not part of this package.

I get it, even if it’s going to sting for a lot of people. It also makes the demo make more sense. Everything about what I played screamed “campaign sandbox,” not “competitive pipeline.” This is Halo’s origin story rebuilt as a thing you play with friends again.

The Part that Made My Brain Short-Circuit: PlayStation 5

There’s no way around it. Seeing Halo presented as a PS5 game feels like walking into your childhood bedroom and noticing somebody moved the furniture. It’s not wrong, it’s just disorienting.

But after playing the demo, it clicks. This isn’t only a remake. It’s a reset point. The studio is trying to make the most approachable Halo campaign possible, built on modern tech, shaped by modern expectations, and designed for the widest audience Halo has ever aimed at.

And in the most Halo World Championship way possible, it did all that while a crowd of diehards cheered in the background for an entirely different Halo game.

That’s the vibe of Campaign Evolved in a sentence. It’s a reverent remake that also has the nerve to be a strategy.

I walked away thinking: the hardest part of remaking Combat Evolved isn’t the visuals. It’s the feeling. The confidence. The clarity. The sense that every fight is a small story you can tell later. In my short time with The Silent Cartographer, that feeling was there. It just needs the tightness to match the ambition.

Halo has tried a lot of ways to move forward. This one is choosing to start over, on purpose.