So I sat down yesterday and started playing HALO: Campaign Evolved, and, having played through “The Pillar of Autumn” and about a third of the way into “HALO”, plus the first bonus mission, I have to say… what a bloody disappointment.

(Yes, MrUNIVAC, I did buy the thing as a digital download – but no, I did NOT pay for the Premium Edition. I’m not THAT stupid.)

Now, I have to be as fair-minded as possible, because it is a HALO game (sort of), and it does have a lot of good things going for it. Genuinely, there are many things to like about this game.

Even the most die-hard HALO fan has to admit that the game looks gorgeous now. It finally gets the high-fidelity graphical remake that it always deserved. The textures, lighting, scenery, and NPCs all look top-notch – with a couple of exceptions, and I will get to the big one of those shortly.

The cutscenes are stunning. The characters finally look like they have basically the right proportions – remember how distorted and weird the mouths looked in the HALO: CE Anniversary cutscenes? Captain Keyes and Sgt. Johnson both looked like they had undergone the kind of lip filler injections that khokholinas and Russian realdolls all go for, which makes them look incredibly ugly. Now, however, the same characters actually look human – though, again, with a couple of exceptions.

I am delighted to see the old loading wipe-screen back – you know, the one where they wipe a neon-blue Halo ring from left to right as the game loads a particular mission.

Overall, the gameplay feels familiar yet new. The same tactics, approaches, and ideas that used to work in the original game, still work now.

The enemies are tough, challenging, and rewarding to fight. I still got the same thrill of exhilaration and joy from beating the snot out of the Elites and Grunts that I did with the original game. And seeing the Brutes in the prequel missions is quite interesting – though they are DAMNED hard to fight, especially when they go into berserker mode. HALO Infinite sort of spoils you in this regard – even the Berserker units there can be killed if you shoot them the right way, but the ones in this game are just bullet sponges.

In the first prequel mission, I was delighted to see the return of the Needle Rifle, which was always one of HALO: Reach’s most underrated weapons. They make those prequel missions MUCH easier, because of the three-shot superstack combine.

I like the fact that there are lots more Skulls and Terminals to go after. There are new achievements to chase, new ways to explore the game, and new tactics to try out.

The introduction of perpetual Sprint mode is highly divisive, to be sure. Lots of OG HALO types hate the inclusion of Sprint, because it fundamentally alters the balance and feel of the game. I get exactly why that is. I recently played HALO Infinite first, and then HALO 4 on the MCC right after, in the space of a single gaming session, and it really struck me how fundamentally different, how much slower, how much more measured and precise, the latter felt after the almost enforced chaos of the former.

Don’t get me wrong, I love HALO Infinite, I think it is the best game in the series since HALO 3 – my candidate for the single greatest FPS of all time – but on occasion it is nice to play a less frenetic game where you really have to be careful about how you engage and disengage against AI NPCs.

Personally, I found the inclusion of Sprint in the classic campaign to be an unusual feature that does change the gameplay – in a positive way, as far as I am concerned.

The prequel missions show the bond between Johnson and Chief, in a way that really ties the story together, and makes you understand just WHY Chief was so torn up over Johnson’s heroic death in HALO 3.

And, although the cutscenes do change minor details – like how Keyes gives Chief his gun, and tells him to give it to his daughter, whereas in the original, he just said, “I don’t keep it loaded, son, you’ll have to find ammo as you go” – for the most part, the changes serve the function of weaving a tighter story.

So there really, truly is a hell of a lot to like about this game.

Unfortunately, there is also a enormous amount to truly loathe.

Let’s start with Cortana.

The evolution of Cortana from HALO: CE all the way through to HALO 4 was great fun to watch:

As far as I am concerned, the Cortana model in HALO 4 was the absolute peak of her looks. She was THICC in that game, and I do not deny that I liked it.

The chub was STRONG with that one.

In the modern remake, though…:

The stupid thing is, HALO Studios kept the thicc character model’s body, but gave it an incredibly ugly face. Cortana seriously looks like a troon.

This is, to put it mildly, hella confusing for your average teenage gamer – never mind for the OGs like people on this site, who have been playing the games for 20 years or more.

And this points to a serious problem that HALO Studios has now introduced, which is that the continuity with Cortana simply makes absolutely no sense any longer:

On top of that, the Sgt. Johnson model looks and sounds really weird – the Uncanny Valley thing is a real issue when watching cutscenes involving him. David Scully’s voice acting was one of many factors that came together beautifully to make the original game a true experience, but in this version, somehow he toned down his articulation and lines. His personality no longer shines through the way it used to.

As for the cutscenes themselves – how is it possible that they somehow look less cinematic than the ones that Blur Studios created for HALO 2 Anniversary?!?! That simply makes no sense, given the hardware is so much more powerful with Xbox SeX (and SeS, and PS5, for that matter).

There are other annoying niggles, too. I hate, hate, HATE the fact that the one-shot kills on the Hunters is gone. That really irritates me. Fighting them is not quite the nightmare that it is in HALO 5: Guardians – aka “the game which shall not be named”, because it was so appallingly bad – but it is much more annoying than it used to be.

Worse than that, though, the game genuinely feels dumbed down, somehow – with the levels of retardation making it quite frustrating to play:

As that video points out, this is just “modernity for modernity’s sake”. You literally get icons in the HUD telling you how to fire your weapon, right next to the weapon icon itself, and the ammo counter – as if people are too stupid to figure out that pressing RT (on the Xbox controller) is what you use to fire.

This game makes changing anything deliberately annoying and deliberately obtuse.

If you want to change the button layouts, you have to go into the Settings menu, and then wrestle with it for the rest of time just to get it into a configuration that makes sense. The default layout is very similar to Calladoody, with an Aiming Down Sights (ADS) feature using the left trigger. I absolutely hated that configuration in H5:G, and dispensed with it as soon as I could for something more similar to HALO 4 or HALO Infinite, where B is for crouching, RB is for melee, pressing LS is for Sprint, pressing RS is for sights, LT is for grenades, and so on and so forth.

That is all well and good – but why the hell did I have to go into a menu and then a sub-menu and then set all the layouts the way I wanted, on an Xbox Series X console?!?!? That is the kind of binding behaviour I would expect on PC, not on a console. Why could Halo Studios not have simply given me some preset layouts in “classic” mode that would have done the same thing???

I had to do something similar to switch off the subtitles. You only realise you have to switch them off, once you boot into the game and start it. But then you cannot switch them off in-game – you have to go outside it to do so.

The weapons still look and feel good – the headshot kills with the Magnum are loads of fun, for sure. The assault rifle feels heavier and meatier than it did in the original – though it has lost some of the deafening roar that you got in the Anniversary edition. But the kills somehow feel less satisfying, because now, on top of watching a death animation, you see a big red “X” appear over a killed enemy, like the game is telling you, “yeah, you killed it!”

Yeah, no shit, Sherlock, I KNOW I killed it, I don’t need YOU to tell me!!!

Another big question the game utterly fails to answer is: what is the point of its existence?

Seriously, why did we need a remake of a 25-year-old game? I am not against remakes on principle; personally, I would pay GOOD money to see a fully modernised, updated, high-tech remake of STAR WARS: Republic Commando, which as far as I am concerned is the GOLD STANDARD of squad-based FPS games, with fully cinematic cutscenes. I think that is a game which deserves the makeover treatment, with extra missions.

But the whole reason why HALO: Combat Evolved was such a smash hit, is because it was very nearly perfect from its inception.

If you look carefully at everything I wrote above that is good about HALO: CE2, you will note that most of it has nothing to do with the stuff Microslop and Halo Studios layered on top of it. The core dynamics of the game were amazing to begin with. All Microslop did, was to slap a fresh coat of paint on it all.

And all of this irritation and stupidity is before we get to the real problem with this game:

Lieutenant Williams.

Everything I had seen about her turned out to be true. She absolutely enraged me from the moment she appeared on-screen:

I got so irritated with her cuntish, aggressive, butch-dyke attitude, that several times in the second mission, I straight-up murderised her NPC. And I have no shame in admitting that. She respawns every time, unfortunately, and there is nothing you can do about that – she simply carries on throughout the Operation: METEORITE prequel missions being a thoroughly unlikeable superhuman girrrrrlboss who constantly demeans and puts down the Master Chief and Sgt. Johnson.

Keep in mind, these are two of humanity’s greatest heroes. The Demon literally saves all of humanity itself. Yet Halo Studios wrote the Williams character to be as deliberately abrasive and dislikeable as possible.

While we are on the subject of girlbosses – why the hell is every second soldier or sailor a woman?!?!?! From what I recall, there were no female Marines in HALO: CE, and then for no good reason we saw two of them appear in HALO 2 – voiced by Michelle Rodriguez and Aisha Tyler as I recall. The problem has simply gotten far worse since then, to the point where we have practically every third Marine in HALO Infinite being female, and like half the SPARTAN-IVs being female.

This is equalitarianism for its own sake, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with good storytelling or gaming.

In real life, we know damned well that women cannot hack the physical demands of real soldiering – the single best and most realistic examination of what an all-female unit would look, feel, and fight like, comes from the esteemed LTC Tom Kratman, who wrote all about it in The Amazon Legion, and as he pointed out, you simply cannot get away from the fact that female soldiers require special dispensations that males absolutely do not.

These jarring inclusions of STRAWNG INDEPENDENTISS WAMMENZES for their own sake, is stupid and pointless.

Worse, it tells us exactly where Halo Studios is going to take the franchise.

As LRFotS MrUNIVAC pointed out in his recent comment on my last Great Mondaydact Browser Smelter, this game is woke trash – with, admittedly, SOME redeeming features.

No wonder, then, that HALO: Campaign Evolved has engendered such a massive and violent fan backlash:

We now see, with HALO: CE2, EXACTLY where Microslop and Halo Studios are going to take the franchise. They are going to make it MORE woke, MORE diverse, and more just plain STOOOOOOOPID.

The problem compounds on itself, though, because it turns out that this is the only project the new Halo outfit is working on, after being reorganised from 343 Industries. Almost everyone from the old world, who helped make HALO the legendary gaming franchise that it was, is gone. The lore has been corrupted to the point where none of it makes any sense anymore – SPARTAN-II supersoldiers who very clearly died in the novels and extended media, are now somehow alive and kicking again, while the continuity has undergone so many revisions and retcons that nobody knows what the actual story is anymore.

Worse still… much of the fanbase has simply walked away.

We have endured too many years of failure and heartbreak. We have seen our most beloved characters torn down, deconstructed, emasculated, and pussified. We have seen too many failed releases emerge with massive technical debt and glitches.

And we have had enough.

I certainly have. I will continue to play this game all the way through, including the bonus missions, because it is still exciting and interesting enough to warrant the time and effort. But I did not go out of my way to buy HALO Infinite – partly because I couldn’t, and partly because I stopped caring after H5:G – and I will not go out of my way to buy the next game, either.

It may well redeem the franchise and the series. It might fix all the continuity bugs and live up to the open-world promise that HALO Infinite teased us with so well. But somehow, I seriously doubt it.

Halo Studios is now run by woketard leftists and trannies who hate HALO, hate men, and hate the masculine virtues. This latest game is simply a manifestation of woketardery on an epic level – and it is failing exactly as it should.