Halo: Campaign Evolved Review

A campaign remake built around co-op, with the multiplayer deliberately removed

Short verdict: if you want two people on one couch playing a proper shooter campaign, this is the best thing to launch in years, and on Xbox and PC it is included with Game Pass so a lot of people should not buy it at all. If you were expecting Halo multiplayer, stop here - there is none. Halo Studios shipped this as a campaign product only, and that single decision determines whether it is worth your money.

Halo Studios describes it as "a ground-up remake of Halo: Combat Evolved's genre-defining campaign". It launched on July 28, 2026, with Premium Edition pre-orders getting up to five days of early access from July 23, and it is the first Halo campaign to ship on PlayStation. That last part matters more for this site than anything else in the release: the split-screen shooter has been an Xbox-only category for two console generations, and it is not any more.

What you actually get

All 13 campaign missions from the original, rebuilt - Halo's own page is explicit about the count - plus three brand-new missions. Those are billed as Operation: METEORITE, they are built around Sergeant Avery Johnson, and they are set before the events of Combat Evolved rather than after it, so they are a prologue rather than a sequel hook.

The remake is not a resolution bump. Nine weapons from across the wider franchise have been added to an arsenal that originally had far fewer, you can now hijack enemy vehicles, and the Wraith tank is fully drivable for the first time in the series. Cinematics have been redone with new motion capture, and the soundtrack and sound design were rebuilt. Whether that is faithful enough is a debate for Halo forums; what matters for a co-op purchase is that the encounters have more toys in them than the 2001 version did, which is exactly what a second player wants.

The co-op, in specifics

Two shapes, and the difference between them is the whole buying decision.

Two-player split-screen, console only. Both Xbox Series X|S and PS5 run the full campaign in split-screen for two players. This is the headline feature and the reason it leads our new split-screen games list. It is also strictly two - there is no four-player split-screen here, so a room of four needs a different game.

Four-player online, everywhere, with crossplay. Up to four players online across console and PC, with what Halo Studios calls seamless cross-platform play and shared progression between all platforms. That combination is rarer than it sounds: plenty of co-op games have crossplay, far fewer carry your campaign progress with you when you switch machines.

The two mix, which is the genuinely useful part for a group. Two people on one couch can play split-screen while two more join from other houses on other platforms, and the campaign progress belongs to all of them. Our split-screen games you can also play online page exists for exactly this shape, and there are not many entries on it.

Three costs nobody puts on the box

PC gets no split-screen. The two-player local mode is console only. If your plan was two people on one gaming PC, this is not the game - our split-screen on PC page covers what actually works there, and it is a short list.

On PS5, each split-screen player needs their own PlayStation account. Halo Studios put it plainly: "Local splitscreen co-op requires a PlayStation account for each player but does not require a PlayStation Plus account." So no subscription for couch play - but a guest cannot simply pick up pad two, they need an account on your console first. That is a five-minute job the first time and a genuine surprise if you find out about it with friends already sitting down.

Online co-op needs a paid subscription on console. PlayStation lists PS Plus as required for online play, and the Xbox equivalent applies on that side. Local split-screen does not touch it.

The thing it does not have

There is no competitive multiplayer. Not a reduced version, not a later patch that has arrived - the game shipped as campaign and co-op only, and Halo Studios has been open that the team concentrated on the campaign specifically so it could get four-player online co-op, crossplay and cross-progression right. Every official page for the game describes campaign content and nothing else.

For a competitive Halo player that is a dealbreaker and it should be. For the audience this site is written for, it is closer to the opposite: the studio spent the multiplayer budget on the co-op, and it shows in the crossplay and shared-progression support, which are the two things co-op releases usually skimp on. Just buy it knowing which game you are buying.

How long it lasts, and what extends it

It is a finite campaign, not a live service. Sixteen missions in total once the new three are counted, and when they are done the game does not keep issuing homework. Whether that is a strength depends entirely on your group - our co-op campaign games page exists because a large number of people specifically want a story with an ending rather than another seasonal commitment.

What extends it is the difficulty layer. There are dozens of Skulls - modifiers you turn on to change the rules - and 16 of them together make up LASO, the all-skulls-on run that awards the MYTHIC achievement for a full completion. One Skull is worth knowing about before a co-op night because it changes what death means: with the Iron skull active, "dying in co-op resets you to your last checkpoint, dying while solo restarts the level". Co-op is the forgiving way to attempt it, which is a nice inversion of the usual rule that co-op makes hard games harder to coordinate.

There is also Remix, which Halo's own coverage describes running with a lobby of four players. Treat it as a replay mode for a group that has finished the campaign rather than a reason to buy.

Who should buy it, and who should buy something else

Buy it if two of you want a real shooter campaign on one television, or if a group of up to four is spread across Xbox, PlayStation and PC and wants a campaign that carries progress between them. On PlayStation specifically it has close to no competition - a two-player split-screen shooter campaign is not something the platform has had in a long time.

Buy Borderlands 4 instead if you want the same two-on-a-couch, two-more-online shape but a much longer game, and you are not attached to Halo. It does the same console split-screen trick and runs far longer, at the cost of being a looter-shooter rather than a designed campaign.

Buy Helldivers 2 instead if the group is four people who all have their own screens and want something they will keep coming back to. No split-screen at all there, but it is the stronger four-player pick for a squad that plays weekly.

Buy Deep Rock Galactic instead if the budget is the constraint. It is a fraction of the price and gives a four-player group more hours than anything else in this comparison - just check the platforms, because its crossplay covers PC and Xbox but not PlayStation.

And if what you actually need is not a game at all but a second controller, that is a cheaper problem to solve - our second controller guide covers which pad to buy for which machine, and split-screen has never needed a second copy of the game.

Where this sits on the site

Halo: Campaign Evolved is the top pick on new split-screen games, appears on split-screen games on Xbox and split-screen games on PS5, and is the reason the 2026 split-screen list is worth reading at all. For the wider category start at split-screen games, and for four-player shooters rather than two-player campaigns, co-op shooters is the better page.