Introduction

Halo: Campaign Evolved is Halo Studios' ground-up remake of Halo: Combat Evolved, the 2001 shooter that launched the original Xbox and defined the console FPS experience for a generation. Twenty-five years later, the campaign has been rebuilt from scratch in Unreal Engine 5—but this is more than a straightforward remaster. Alongside completely overhauled visuals, the developers added three new prequel missions called "Operation: METEORITE," set a year before the events of the original and starring Master Chief and Sergeant Johnson, plus nine additional weapons from later Halo games, four-player online co-op, and a Campaign Remix mode. Notably, this also marks the first time a mainline Halo game is available for the PlayStation. You once again step into the armor of the Master Chief, battling the Covenant and unraveling the secrets of the ancient ringworld Halo.



This is the first Halo game built on Unreal Engine 5—the series historically ran on Bungie's and 343's in-house Blam/Slipspace engines. With a modern engine needed, it makes a lot of sense that Halo Studios leaned on UE5, supporting Lumen for dynamic global illumination and Nanite for virtualized geometry. As expected, the only rendering API supported is DirectX 12. Lighting is handled by Unreal Engine 5's Lumen, and there is no in-game option to disable it or toggle between software and hardware ray tracing. The upscaling support is very complete: NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS are all present, and each vendor also gets frame generation. Low-latency modes are covered for everyone too—NVIDIA Reflex, AMD Anti-Lag and Intel XeLL. Ultra-wide 21:9 is supported and there's an adjustable field-of-view slider. One caveat: Intel XeSS is only available in the Steam version, not in the Xbox app/Microsoft Store build.

This review will evaluate the performance of Halo: Campaign Evolved across a wide range of contemporary graphics cards, compare image quality settings, and analyze the game's VRAM usage to provide insight into the hardware requirements needed for an optimal experience.