Yesterday, I went to visit a friend for game night. We decided to try the new-and-improved Halo: Campaign Evolved remake. We have been playing video games since before Halo: Combat Evolved first launched 25 years ago, so there's some history and a lot of shared memories. We dove into the split-screen co-op and... I have opinions, in case the post title didn't give it all away.
I should start with the good.
They kept one of the best soundtracks in the history of video games.
The updated designs for the characters and environments are well-rendered. Detailed. Sometimes quite nice.
It sounds like they kept the dialogue from Foehammer, the intrepid Pelican dropship pilot who helps our hero throughout the game. That was nice to hear.
They re-recorded dialogue for the Master Chief and Cortana, but at least they had the courtesy to keep the voice actors.
There are some changes I can accept. They added in a few guns from later titles in the series, which makes a degree of sense.
That's about it for compliments. It goes downhill fast from here.
Cortana's new lines are overly verbose, like she's explaining the story to children instead of the old dialogue saying more with less, and expecting the player to fill in the gaps. Her tone is also more flippant and bubbly. Sure, she was sometimes snarky, but this is a military A.I. in a military scenario with an existential threat to Earth at the beginning of the game, escalating to a galactic-level threat later on. She isn't at the mall with her valley girl friends, for crying out loud! OK, maybe that's unjustly harsh, but there is a real difference. I don't like it. And much as I appreciate the female form, I don't like how Cortana's model over the years has shifted from feminine computer circuit hologram to blue pinup girl.
Speaking of old characters done wrong, what the heck happened to Sgt. Johnson? There's a new voice actor, and he does not deliver his lines like a hardened soldier. The old voice was definitely a parody of every movie drill sergeant ever, but it worked. This new guy? He takes his jolly time using many words to say nothing even in the middle of a firefight, and to make it worse, it seemed like every cutscene had his character breaking the fourth wall. His lines were sometimes comic relief, but it still fit the character's tough-as-nails veteran demeanor, not a clown chewing the scenery and pulling a face as he looks into the camera.
The third character they butchered was the Warthog. In fact, that's just the most obvious example of how the vehicle physics, movement, guns, and even the lighting all felt off. Nothing handles right. Instead of updating the original engine like they did for the Master Chief Collection (MCC), they seem to have rebuilt the game in Unreal Engine, and something was lost in translation. I can forgive the urge to add vegetation, rocks, and detailed alien Forerunner structures, but not changing that much of the feel of the gameplay itself. The ultimate off-road military vehicle doesn't even like to be driven on slightly rocky terrain!
We swapped to the MCC version just to make sure we weren't imagining things. With the original game, everything clicked. 25 years of instinct locked in immediately, and we rampaged through the level we had previously completed in the remake and had a blast. But that also revealed another change for the worse. Right after we get the Warthog, there is a tunnel to traverse. It was changed. Then we activated the ancient bridge across a chasm, and they skilled the iconic cutscene showing the mechanism extending from both sides and turning on a glowing bridge of solid light. This was a superb scene focusing our attention on the power of these strange forgotten technologies and they brushed it aside.
And speaking of classic things they deliberately destroyed, the original anticipated gamer actions. At the start of the game when you first receive the basic pistol, you can murder all of the crew on the bridge of your own starship. You can also shoot or punch your teammate in co-op. In the remake, you can kill all the male bridge crew, but the women are bulletproof. Marines then confront you because you've gone rogue, and you can shoot the men, but the women are also bulletproof.
What.
The.
#$%@!!!
They could have decided to make the entire crew bulletproof and just omit that optional dark side of the story, but instead, they made a deliberate choice. It's stupid!
Halo: Combat Evolved is a game from 2001. It looks like a game from 2001. It has gameplay elements from 2001. I can understand the urge to update the game for a modern audience and bring it more in line with the way later Halo games play. However, the new team from Halo Studios, formerly 343 Industries, has never demonstrated a deep understanding of the game and fanbase. The original developers at Bungie did. There's a reason the player community vibes with the Gamestop which kept the Halo 3 window decor for at least 15 years because no one released a better game in the interim. I mean, I liked ODST and Reach, but Halo 3 was absolutely the peak of the franchise.
This Campaign Evolved release was apparently years in the making, but the new crew botched almost everything that could be botched along the way. The new dialogue is bad. The new voice cast is largely passable, but with some major jarring shortcomings. The scenery is pretty, but not a good sandbox for games. The "updated" mechanics feel tacked on and poorly balanced, adding more complication to nothing feeling like we expect. It's a disappointing look at what could have been if the developers cared about honoring the legacy of their franchise, but their urge to "reinvent" led to demolition with a pretty paint job covering the mess.
This is only scratching the surface of a massive disappointment. The MCC glow-up had its flaws, most notably a jungle level that lost its mystery and occasional visual changes that did not match invisible geometry, but it also allowed you to toggle back to the original look at the press of a button. Instead of learning from those errors and making a new game that was truly better with 25 years of technological advancement, they gave us a poorly-made campaign with half-assed split screen and no multiplayer maps.
Check out this late review of the original from a game reviewer, and then the review from a guntuber about the remake. My opinions about the original and remake may not be universal, but they are far from a niche view.
Dangit, I forgot to mention the stupid here's a waypoint immediate response instead of letting players explore and learn at their own pace, or the stupid seat-switching button in the Warthog that teleports you between positions like a Call of Duty vehicle, or the A.I. that somehow got worse a quarter century later, or...
Just play the original.
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