Kampanjen Evolved lanseres i dag med delt skjerm-samarbeid på PlayStation for første gang noensinne

Halo: Campaign Evolved launches today on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC, and PlayStation owners get something Halo has never offered them before: two-player split-screen co-op through the entire campaign. The second player only needs a controller, not their own copy of the game. Online co-op scales up to four players with crossplay across all three platforms.

The whole campaign has been rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5, with every environment, character model, animation, and cutscene reconstructed from scratch. The Pillar of Autumn, the ring itself, and the Covenant fleet all got redesigned lighting and effects the original 2001 hardware couldn't render. Master Chief can now sprint, movement runs smoother across the board, and Halo Studios kept the original combat sandbox intact rather than rebalancing it around modern shooter conventions. Skulls and a Campaign Remix system let players adjust the run, and a third-person camera option sits alongside the classic first-person view.

Longtime players get new story content on top of the remaster. Operation: Meteorite, a three-mission prequel pack set one year before the original campaign, follows Master Chief and Sergeant Johnson raiding a Covenant research vessel. It adds new enemy variants, extra weapons pulled from across the Halo franchise, ground combat against armored Brutes, a Covenant Phantom space mission, and a Warthog run in the classic mold.

Early reception backs up the remake's pitch. Critics gave Campaign Evolved an 81 on Metacritic and an 83 Top Critic Average on OpenCritic, with 88% recommending it and scores as high as 100 from VGC. Reviewers flagged the missing competitive multiplayer mode as the main gap, alongside a few design choices that show the original game's age. That reception lands at an odd moment for the studio behind it: Halo Studios cancelled two other projects earlier this year and currently has no new campaign or multiplayer title in active development.

I think the split-screen co-op matters more than the review scores here, since couch co-op on a AAA campaign has nearly disappeared from big-budget shooters, and Halo Studios chose to build it back in rather than let it stay a legacy feature nobody expects anymore. I'd read bringing it to PlayStation for the first time as a deliberate signal that this remake targets an audience wider than the Xbox base Halo has leaned on for two decades. Whether that audience shows up matters for a studio that just trimmed its other projects, since a strong launch here is closer to a mandate than a bonus.