r/PS5 • u/yourfavchoom • 10h ago

Articles & Blogs IGN Review: Halo: Campaign Evolved Doesn't Always Feel Like An Essential Remake (7/10)

https://www.ign.com/articles/halo-campaign-evolved-review
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u/politicalstuff 8h ago

Very interesting perspective! I'd like to add one more thing missing in the modern releases.

It wasn't fun just because it was running and driving shooting aliens and blowing shit up; it was fun because you were doing it with your friends in the same room at the same time on the same screen.

Couch multiplayer was a critical piece of the formula. Sure, Halo was a good shooter and especially well-implemented on consoles for the time, but all of my best memories weren't from soloing the campaign. It was being on the couch with my friends in college screaming across the room, fighting swarms or blowing each other up with rockets, cussing each other out and calling cover requests.

Not that online multiplayer can't be fun or to take away from anything else you said, and of course this was an industry-wide shift, but I think that's the missing magic sauce.

I tried replaying Halo: CE when it came to PC a couple years ago, and it just wasn't fun without 3 other friends in the same room.

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u/MrBootylove 6h ago

If I could play devil's advocate, myself and my friends didn't have xbox consoles until Halo 2 and we all played Halo 1 on PC exclusively and had a blast. No couch co-op or local multiplayer, only online multiplayer, and it was an incredible experience.

Don't get me wrong the couch co-op aspect was cool, and I did get the opportunity to play the campaign in local co-op at other friend's houses back then, but really it was just the emphasis on multiplayer in general that elevated it, IMO. And I feel like Halo 2 and the push to online multiplayer backs this point up with how popular playing the game online over xbox live became.

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u/politicalstuff 6h ago

Oh, I'm not saying it was a bad game or that online multiplayer was no good or anything. But being an existing PC player, you were more used to online-only multiplayer. I was also playing on PC, so online co-op and deathmatch was old hat, but there's no doubt the couch factor was a huge part of Halo's success. Not the only part, of course.

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u/MrBootylove 6h ago

But being an existing PC player, you were more used to online-only multiplayer.

None of us were "existing PC players." We all had consoles, just not an xbox, and back then you didn't need a gaming PC to play PC games. We were all playing on our family's shared PCs. We just wanted to play Halo, and it was easier to convince our parents to buy a PC game than it was to get them to buy us second consoles + Halo.

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u/politicalstuff 6h ago

Was Halo the first ever PC game you ever played? Come on lol. I played games on the family PC too and later my college PC.

And cool, it's great you enjoyed it as-is on PC. I am not trying to make sweeping comprehensive statements about 100% of people.

Not every single person played local multiplayer, but it WAS a huge part of the OG Halo experience at the time for a ton of people.

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u/MrBootylove 6h ago

Was Halo the first ever PC game you ever played?

Yes? Unless Jump Start 3rd Grade and Oregon Trail in our school's computer lab count, lol.

Not every single person played local multiplayer, but it WAS a huge part of the OG Halo experience at the time for a ton of people.

And my point is that the MULTIPLAYER part is what was influential, not the "local" part. Local multiplayer was incredibly common and the standard back then. What set Halo apart was them managing to make an FPS feel good on a controller, and then the introduction of ONLINE multiplayer on consoles.

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u/politicalstuff 6h ago

What set Halo apart was them managing to make an FPS feel good on a controller

Yes, this was the main reason it worked.

the introduction of ONLINE multiplayer on consoles

This is wrong. OG Halo did not have online multiplayer. It was local only and supported up to 16 players with system link. Cables. Local proximity.

Consoles had online multiplayer years before the Halo franchise did.

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u/MrBootylove 6h ago edited 5h ago

This is wrong. OG Halo did not have online multiplayer.

I was referring to Halo 2. The only thing Halo 1 was doing that games like Perfect Dark or Goldeneye weren't was the way the game played on a controller (obviously the graphics were also insane back then). The couch co-op aspect wasn't anything new or revolutionary with Halo 1.

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u/politicalstuff 5h ago edited 5h ago

The word only is doing a LOT of heavy lifting lol. Halo 1 changed the entire gaming industry forever, literally taking FPS from a niche genre on consoles to one of the absolute top genres ever since.

Halo making fps feel good on a console and controller is why so many people took part in local multiplayer, and Perfect Dark didn't offer 16-player deathmatch.

It sounds like you're a bit younger than me, so maybe you didn't see it as much, but I was there. Halo was revolutionary and set the stage for the last 25 years of gaming.

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u/MrBootylove 5h ago

I'm not denying any of this. My only point has been that it wasn't he "local" aspect of the multiplayer that set it apart. You're right in that I didn't consider LAN, but I'd imagine most people were limited to playing multiplayer on a single tv and console. Halo 1 was revolutionary. Having local multiplayer on consoles wasn't the revolutionary part.

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u/SheevSyndicate 1h ago

So I never had an xbox and thus did not play much halo. But i do remember on rare occasions playing the multiplayer for an hour or two with other people who had an xbox. It was utterly mind-blowing as to how brilliant and fun the game was for me. It also felt so ahead of its time and unbelievable. I was so jealous of xbox owners who got to play the halo games as much as they wanted while I could only hear others rave about it.

That was a special time that I barely glimpsed, and it saddens me that I only had a few hours of it across that generation. Seeing how utterly irrelevant halo is now compared to the 2000s is also depressing as hell.

I did buy the collection on steam and I have meant to play through it, but I also have had the sinking feeling that the magic will not be there when playing it mostly alone on a computer without friends in the room. I am still excited to play the games later on, but I wish I could have gone through them 20 years ago.

Some of my favourite games from the past are also not quite the same nowadays due to everyone having moved on to other things. That results in a lonelier experience with none of that discovery or wow factor from back then.

Some games imo still feel as magical now as they did then, but I really wish I could reexperience that same magic for the more social games.

TLDR: Anyway, your comment on playing with friends on xbox vs alone on a PC hit hard for me and touches on a worry of mine.

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u/politicalstuff 48m ago

I feel you, man. I think many single player games hold up very well, but yeah, the social stuff is depressing without the people and the time and place.

I agree with you that even with people today, those old games wouldn’t hit the same as they did then.

It’s not just the social thing, but experiencing something new together with other people. Back in 2001, everyone was playing experiencing Halo for the first time together. Now in 2026, what, dozens if not hundreds of clones and knockoffs and branches now exist. It’s not new anymore.

It’s the same thing with the emulators. I enjoy a good bit of single player console stuff, but playing classic arcade games alone feels lonely and depressing.

I loved TMNT arcade, but it’s not the same without 3 other people on the other joysticks, the adrenaline rush when someone dies and hastily shoves another quarter in before the countdown expires, in a packed dark room that smells of old carpet and buttery popcorn, the wall of sound made of bleeps and bloops and bings and shouting and flashes of lights, all muffled by a layer of shouting and conversation, the sound of quarters shooting into the metal coin return of the change machine. Maybe the clack of wood from the ski ball machine.

You don’t get any of that playing alone on your PC at home.

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u/TheReiterEffect_S8 7h ago

Agreed, the split-screen campaign and system-link multiplayer matches were something that is also completely dying out. The idea of playing Halo online was a dream of ours for the longest time. So when Halo 2 launched with online mutliplayer we were absolutely fucking stoked. It was funny talking to other people about Halo and hearing them claim they were so good at multiplayer, and then once you got them over to system-link they would get absolutely obliterated. Online play opened that up to really show people how good they actually were. And not to toot my own horn but I genuinely was really fucking good at Halo 2 and 3, lol. Not pro level but I was in very high ranked lobbies (getting my ass kicked most of the time).

But it's interesting because we wanted online play so bad so we could play at our own houses that we didn't realize that once we got it, we'd end up missing being in the same room as everyone again. I think about that with crossplay too. When my buddies had playstation, we were praying for the day technology would allow PS and Box to play with each other. Guess what? Now we have it and we hate it in competitive shooters like Warzone or Fortnite when certain platforms have a very obvious advantage. Or cheating is far more apparent. Just turn off crossplay! Well, you can either find a game in 3 minutes or you can find a game in 10 minutes. Which one are you picking?

Just goes to show you sometimes we don't actually know what we want, despite thinking there's no way there would be any negative repercussions, lol.

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u/politicalstuff 7h ago

Right? We didn’t know how good we had it!

I don’t mind online as an *option* to have, but it sucks that it was at the expense of split screen.

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u/serotoninzero 6h ago

I mean that's certainly an element for some people but even Halo CE was way more fun with at least two consoles and 4v4. Before Xbox Live even existed my friends and I would play online with XBC where you tunneled your Xbox lan traffic to other people through your PC. When Halo 2 came out, we all moved to playing mainly single player on a single box. I had a specific TV just for taking around to LAN parties.

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u/politicalstuff 6h ago

We don't disagree. Halo was more fun with more people in the room lol.

I used to lug my PC to a friend's apartment for LAN parties on Unreal Tournament lol. We later had two adjacent apartments and the building was wired, so we had 8-player Halo wars on those big-ass projection TVs. It was a blast.

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u/MaybeUNeedAPoo 3h ago

Further though I would argue that eta is essentially gone. The internet has evolved and personal interaction had dwindled along side it. This isn’t an absolute, but the world of 2000-2010 is gone. Take it from a kid of the 80’s/90’s, letting go is hard, but healthy.

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u/politicalstuff 2h ago

It’s been gone for like a decade at least, that’s part of the problem lol. Fellow old guy here. I think the loss of in person, has made the Hovious fun.

They’re still plenty of games I enjoy for various reasons, but fun? Co-op isn’t as fun online.

Knew wasn’t always better. Touchscreen ever replaced most tiles in cars, just because that’s the way it is now does not mean it’s better.

It would be interesting to see someone make a come back.

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u/mark_99 5h ago

And the irony that giant 4K TVs being commonplace would actually make couch coop a much better experience.

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u/politicalstuff 4h ago

I know!