During the Halo World Championship 2025 broadcast, Halo Studios took to the stage to make the shocking announcement that Halo: Campaign Evolved is coming, and it will be remade with Unreal Engine 5.
Halo Studios dropped a bombshell announcement at the conclusion of the Halo World Championship 2025 broadcast! Halo: Campaign Evolved is returning to consoles as a full campaign remake of Halo: Combat Evolved using Unreal Engine 5 (instead of the now-defunct Slipspace Engine). That’s not all, this will be the first installment of the franchise fully playable on a PlayStation console with the PS5. It will launch with full crossplay between all platforms, and it’s coming with three brand-new campaign missions never before seen in the original (also, in Halo: The Master Chief Collection) campaign.
Before the announcement, I was able to dive into Halo: Campaign Evolved’s mission four, The Silent Cartographer, and it returns looking better than ever to this generation of consoles on the Xbox Series X. Squeezing the trigger on a Halo: Campaign Evolved Magnum has never looked better in the provided 4K visual upgrade, and Master Chief’s Mjolnir Mark V helmet now wears scarring from the battles Spartan 117 faced before the events of mission four. The soundtrack remains a bright point in the franchise, and longstanding fans of the series will notice that series mainstays Cortana and Master Chief are cast by their original voices: Jen Taylor and Steve Downes.
“Squeezing the trigger on a Halo: Campaign Evolved Magnum has never looked better in the provided 4K visual upgrade…”
The Silent Cartographer (from what I’ve played of it) remains largely unchanged from the original, but the visual fidelity is brought up to this generation of gaming’s standards. Halo: Campaign Evolved Creative Director, Max Szlagor, said this was by design, “Because this is a remake, we’ve been able to carefully rebuild almost every level and every encounter with more fidelity,” adding, “As we’re building the technology for this game, we’ve had to do it piece by piece, which included reevaluating all of the individual elements as we’re revisiting them in the original game.”
Due to this approach, the design ethos of the Halo: Campaign Evolved remake seeks to answer one question: “Does this still feel like Halo?” This is the driving question that helped the design team incorporate up to four-player co-op and include weapons that were previously unusable in the original.
Halo: Campaign Evolved will allow players to wield the Energy Sword (previously unusable in Halo: Campaign Evolved), the Battle Rifle, the Needle Rifle and six other weapons previously unobtainable by the player in the campaign, allowing your team to return the punishment the energy weapons bring back to the Covenant themselves. Players will also be able to hijack Covenant Wraith tanks for the first time in Halo: Campaign Evolved (without mods). Other quality of life evolutions in the franchise, like sprinting, have also been added, but players can turn them off if they want a more traditional experience.
Ultimately, Halo Studios is aiming to return Halo: Campaign Evolved to this modern generation 25 years later. They will serve a new generation of gamers the traditional Halo: Combat Evolved experience, but improved. The remake also gives those who may not have had a chance to play the first Halo in the past a chance to play now. Executive Producer Damon Conn says, “At its heart, Halo is about connection, we’re thrilled to meet a new generation of players on their platforms of choice to fall in love with Halo the same way we did. We’re not trying to rewrite Halo’s legacy – we’re trying to immerse you in it like never before.”
Halo: Campaign Evolved will be released in 2026 on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Steam and PlayStation 5. More information can be found on the official Halo Studios website.
