The latest trailers and gameplay footage for HALO: Campaign Evolved have all dropped over the past few days, and I have to say… it looks – to use a highly precise technical term – SUPER DOOPER AWESOMESAUCE AMAZEBALLS!!!!!, as the kids say these days:

I am not particularly convinced about the Cortana redesign. As far as I am concerned, HALO 4 represented peak Cortana design, thanks to her epic bluebs, so to speak. H4tana was THICC, and I am not the least bit ashamed to say I like that sort of thing.

That stupid non-HALO game, of which we shall not speak, turned her into a flat-chested fembot, and HALO Infinite, which undid so much of the damage Microslop inflicted on the series, unfortunately did not fix that issue.

But… all things considered, this new version, or reimagining, or whatever it is, looks fantastic.

I know a lot of HALO fans are not happy about the inclusion of sprint and other new capabilities in what was a very different game 25 years ago. The purists will always be annoyed about such things. And I get where they are coming from. When you play through the older games, you realise just how much the franchise’s gameplay has changed over the last quarter-century. I played HALO 4 again on PC recently, after spending a lot of time playing HALO Infinite for many months, and it really showed me just how significantly the gameplay has sped up, how much more frenetic it is in the latest games.

Compared to HALO Infinite, or even… that other one before it, the “classic” games feel much more measured and slower. This is by design. When you do not have sprint, or armour abilities, or various other gizmos and gadgets to fool around with, you have to play VERY differently than when you have a grappleshot, a drop-shield, a threat sensor, and a jet-thruster to alter the dynamics.

It will be interesting to see how this new spin on the legendary series-starter feels, given the entirely new physics and graphics engines. The original HALO: Combat Evolved had a very unusual feel to it, because of the somewhat wonky physics; if you so much as tapped an NPC with a Warthog or a Scorpion, you MURDERISED it, yet you played in the skin of a character that could flip a 60-tonne main battle tank just by pressing “X”.

And of course the new version gets rid of the one-shot kill for Hunters that so many of us enjoyed in the original; now, you actually have to work to kill a Hunter, and that is NOT fun.

There is also the plain old fact that all the time and effort and resources that Microslop put into re-re-re-releasing the original game, could have been put into making a truly great sequel to HALO Infinite. That game did so much to rebuild the trust and faith of the community, after so many years of letdowns and failures, but it also failed to deliver on much of its promise. Infinite shipped basically half-finished, with immense technical debt due to the new Slipspace game engine, and it never truly measured up to its potential.

Today, it stands as a stark reminder of what HALO could have been, if only Microslop had stopped bloody interfering with the lore and the world-building, and had not tried to ram politically correct nonsense into the franchise.

Sadly, HALO will probably never go back to what it was. All you have to do is to look at the people heading up HALO Studios – basically, the new 343i – and the Xbox Division at Microslop, to know that gaming there is doomed.

But, in the meantime, at least we can enjoy a new take on one of the greatest games ever made, with a fresh coat of paint and some amazing new missions.