It is widely known that Xbox's big green mascot has landed on PlayStation. After decades of keeping its defining sci-fi shooter locked to Microsoft hardware, they have gone and done what used to be unthinkable and put Master Chief on a Sony console.
I should start this by saying I am a multi-format gamer. I do not care about modern console tribalism, but as an old Sega fan who lived through the original console wars, I know what it looks like when a company starts throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.
Firing up Halo on a PS5 feels alien. Not because of the Covenant you are shooting, but because it feels like running a bootleg ROM on a hacked system. It’s the same feeling I had when I first played Sonic on a Nintendo console. When that happened back in the day, it truly was the end of Sega making home consoles. While healthy competition is good for the industry, it is hard not to look at Xbox's hardware future with a lot of skepticism, and this particular move as a sign that Microsoft’s priorities have shifted beyond selling consoles.
That whole political circus aside, the actual game in front of us is a strange one.
You are getting the same 2001 campaign here with a new coat of paint and a few modern tweaks. The core gameplay remains largely identical to the one you played years ago, for better and for worse. Adding Master Chief's sprint ability from later titles does not really change things up very much. It just gets you to the next doorway or mob a bit faster. That said, the iconic '30 seconds of fun' combat loop, dodging plasma grenades, AR fire, and melee, still holds up here remarkably well.
Strangely, we have the addition of unlockable armor and weapon skins. Why waste development time implementing cosmetic customization when the only online feature is campaign co-op? You rarely even see your own character model during single-player play, making the addition of customization feel like a leftover feature from a multiplayer mode that got scrapped midway through development.
The beach assault during The Silent Cartographer is a legitimate visual showcase, which explains why Microsoft featured it so heavily in the previews. Watching the waves hit the shoreline while staring up at the Halo ring in the sky is close to breathtaking (you can’t kill the crabs that scuttle along underfoot, though). Outside of those big outdoor set pieces, though, the visual update feels like a third lighting layer slapped on top of the old Halo Anniversary remaster. Despite knowing this was fully remade from the ground up, it still feels like the same old Halo many of us have played several times over. I know the devs said they wanted to keep it this way; I had just hoped for something that felt totally fresh.
The new cutscenes add a new cinematic flair to the story, giving long-standing characters like Captain Keyes and Cortana much better emotional expression. But as soon as you get control back, the underlying age of the game comes rushing to the surface. The original 2001 corridor loops, repetitive level layouts, and dated enemy pathfinding pop up constantly. Levels like The Library remain just as tedious and monotonous as they were twenty-five years ago.
All that is fine and well. It is the 25th anniversary of Halo, and getting to experience the core exclusive title Xbox has flaunted for decades on PlayStation should be the moment for Microsoft to be able to plant their flag firmly and showcase what Sony fans have been missing.
Sadly, this doesn’t feel like the definitive Halo experience Xbox players have been enjoying all these years.
Now, while the original Xbox release of Halo didn’t have online multiplayer (you could play split-screen or via LAN-connected consoles though), we have been able to blast away the pesky Red Team on Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary for nearly 15 years now. That release also allowed switching between classic and Anniversary graphics at any time; between that and the online PVP that used the engine from Halo Reach to add in the maps, I would wholeheartedly recommend that version over this for a more complete package.
When you remove competitive multiplayer and lean so heavily on the single-player campaign, that campaign has to do more to justify the asking price. Instead, the studio got caught playing it far too safe, leaving the level design feeling hopelessly dated to anyone picking this up for the first time on a PlayStation controller.
The prequel missions sitting in the extra menu are clearly where the developers actually had fun. These levels offer fresh scenarios that make me wish there were more of them. You get to experience early skirmishes against the Covenant that flesh out the story but end just as they start to find their groove. Honestly, these missions are good enough that they should have been expanded into a standalone prequel campaign rather than tagged on as an afterthought. Tucked away in a side menu instead of being built into the main flow, they feel like something thrown together late in production once the decision was made to ditch competitive multiplayer.
The missing multiplayer is where the package takes its biggest hit.
Dropping the competitive modes removes a huge part of Halo’s appeal. It’s difficult to see a good reason for stripping out the very thing that put the game on the map in the first place. Playing Halo matches online was iconic for an entire generation of Xbox players. Releasing a standalone Halo campaign without multiplayer is like Call of Duty shipping with zero online modes. It is a disappointing omission that significantly reduces the package’s value and long-term replayability.
Xbox should have just ported over the Master Chief Collection with its full multiplayer suite intact rather than releasing this stripped-back version. Letting PlayStation players jump into classic deathmatches on Blood Gulch (my favourite map) could have been a massive win for Microsoft.
Cross-platform lobbies pitting PlayStation owners against Xbox veterans in the shooter that built modern console online play could have created genuine hype across the gaming community and brought new life to the franchise.
As someone who knows Halo inside and out and has played through every major release since the original Xbox, I cannot overlook the lack of multiplayer modes. Campaign co-op is fine for a weekend run with a friend, but PVP is where Halo shines. Unless Microsoft is planning a separate Halo Multiplayer Evolved release down the line to double-dip our pockets, then this is a massive missed opportunity to show a new audience why the series mattered in the first place.
If you already know the original campaign, there simply isn't enough new content here to justify full price. It is the best-looking version of Halo 1's story available today, but stripping out the multiplayer that made the series iconic leaves this PlayStation debut feeling surprisingly hollow.
Xbox players are still better served by The Master Chief Collection, while PlayStation players may find this an enjoyable introduction, even if it isn’t the complete Halo experience.
Microsoft had a chance to properly celebrate and showcase Master Chief on new hardware, but instead we got a compromised package that forgets why people fell in love with the franchise.
Halo: Campaign Evolved isn’t a “bad” game; it just feels like an incomplete package. While it is admirable to keep things exactly as they were, they should have just spruced up The Master Chief Collection (with Reach and ODST included) and given the other platforms a real taste of what Halo can do.
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