Campaign Evolved and My Never Ending Disappointment with Modern Games
So, I've had the "fortune" of playing Halo: Campaign Evolved (don't ask how I got my hands on it, you should be able to figure it out). I've had my eyes on this game since it first got teased with alongside the "new" developers Halo Studios. I kept my expectations really low, but I can't lie I remained hopeful.
I wasn't too thrilled by some of the initial showcasing. The game itself looked "good" in a pure graphical fidelity sense, but it lacked the art direction of CE. All the effort was put into making things look 'realistic', but not particularly interesting. Forerunner structures were WAY too shiny for structures that were supposedly ancient, everything was darker, elements didn't pop like they did in the OG or even in Combat Evolved Anniversary.
I couldn't help but be mildly annoyed at some of the decisions made in order to "modernize" the game, or add weird changes for seemingly no reason. Reducing the AR magazine size, sprint (I might write an article about my issues with sprint in Halo on my gaming blog), the aforementioned uninteresting art direction, etc.
The game runs like complete cheeks. I don't wanna hear "It RuNs FiNe On My 5090!". Yeah no fucking shit. You're basically driving a bodybuilder who can't grasp the fact that the 20lbs weight shouldn't weight 45lbs (I really couldn't think of a good analogy for this). Point is, if you have to get the best GPU from the current generation in order to run the game on somewhat stable framerates on high, it's not the guys with 3060s that are the issue, it's poor optimization.
This is a trend I'm noticing with games using UE5. The Oblivion remaster is prime example of this bloated garbage of an engine. Great graphical fidelity, has the framerates of a fucking powerpoint. If your game on low settings runs worse than Cyberpunk 2077 on High settings, we have a McProblem.
Oh, and don't even TRY to play this game on low settings. It doesn't look like they use lower-poly meshes or lower resolution textures, it looks like someone smeared vasoline over someone playing a DS port. It's basically like trying to watch a 480p video on a 4K tv. It's complete dogshit, what happened to optimization?
Graphics and performance aside, the rest of the game is just kinda... eh? CE is my least favorite from the Bungie era, but it's still a good game. Campaign Evolved doesn't feel like Combat Evolved. It feels like if an alternate universe, Combat Evolved was a new IP made in 2025. There's this uncanny valley effect to it. Captain Keyes doesn't look/sound like Captain Keyes from every depiction he's been in. Seriously were they allergic to at least making him look like his Halo: Reach counterpart? And Sgt. Johnson looks like fucking Steve Harvey. Oh and the eyebrows on the characters don't fucking move. Is there standard issue botox injections in the UNSC?
The voice acting is subpar, even from the OG cast. It actually amazes me how Halo Studios managed to make the voice delivery WORSE than the original. So many iconic deliveries are just sanitized. It's like their vocal queue was "unenthusiastic handjob". There were some lines I noticed that seemed to be added just to make the player soyjack and be like "ERMAGERD GOIS I UNDERSTOOD THAT WEFWENCE!". When I heard Keyes make a loose mention to Miranda Keyes, I audibly went "oh, fuck you". It's Marvel movie levels of pandering.
The audio design sucks ass too. All the covenant weapons sound like 'stock_alien_blaster_sound.wav'. The UNSC weapons don't have the same punch they do in the original. The magnum is where this is most obvious. They sound like they took gunshots from real life, but didn't even attempt to use a real counterpart (if the magnum sounded like a desert eagle, I wouldn't be complaining). Again, all focus on 'realism', but 0 focus on actually making things fit right.
As I went through playing the game, the best I could explain my playtime would be Chinese Water Torture. Seemingly innocent, but with each drop I started to get annoyed.
This marks the 2nd attempt at remastering Combat Evolved, and the 2nd failure in my eyes. Halo CE (2001) is in there somewhere, but it's being sapped of everything it once was. The dead horse is being beat so bad it's glue.
It speaks to my problems with the games being made today by AAA studios. Remakes are being made without any understanding of what made the original amazing. It's basically the Disney live-action remakes for gamers. All looks, no substance.
I get it's a bunch of tightwad suits making the decisions in these games. Which explains like 90% of this game's problems. You have people with 0 passion and 0 interest in actually making cool games, and just wanna bait people with nostalgia.
If you're a casual with 0 skin in what Halo was from it's inception and only care about "does game look good" and are one of those people who thought "wHy CaN't SuPeR sOlDiEr SpRiNt?!?" then this game will be fine to you, probably. If you've been a series fan since the Bungie days, you'll be disappointed. Unless you kept your standards so low they're in hell, then you'll love it! If you paid the $70 price tag for premium edition, you deserve to have "sucker" stapled to your forehead.
I genuinely hope this industry folds in on itself. Because we're paying for $1000 consoles to play $70 remakes of games released 20+ years ago, and they somehow are worse than the original. The only "good" AAA game studio right now is Nintendo, and they're barely toilet trained.
I'm tired boss...
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as of writing this...
I'll be leaving shortly for my weeklong vacation to California. Going to be a week of nothing but hanging with family and chilling at the beach. It'll be good to forget the BS aspects in my life for at least a little bit. I'm driving down with my Father-In-Law and we are planning on listening to Weird Al's entire discography for the drive down.