'Halo: Campaign Evolved' Releases July 28 And Here Is Everything That Is New

Halo Studios used the Xbox Games Showcase on Sunday to reveal the release date and first genuine look at the new content coming to Halo: Campaign Evolved, the ground-up Unreal Engine 5 remake of the 2001 original that defined the Xbox and that helped make Microsoft a player in the console business in the first place.

The game launches July 28, 2026 on Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 and PC. Premium Edition and Collector's Edition owners get up to five days of early access beginning July 23. Pre-orders are live now. Day one on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass.

The New Missions Trailer that debuted at the showcase confirmed something the fan community had been hoping for since the game was first announced last October: the three brand-new prequel missions included free with every edition of the game are not a footnote.

They are a genuine expansion of the original story, set one year before the events of Halo: Combat Evolved, following Master Chief and Sgt. Johnson on a clandestine UNSC operation aboard a Covenant research vessel, and culminating in at least one mission that takes the fight into space. Space combat. In a Halo campaign remake. On July 28.

Operation: METEORITE And What It Adds

The three new missions are bundled under the name Operation: METEORITE and they represent the most significant piece of new canonical Halo storytelling in years.

The setup is a UNSC black operation, Master Chief and Johnson going behind enemy lines, aboard a Covenant ship they were not supposed to be on, for a mission that starts as a smash-and-grab and escalates into something considerably more complicated than anyone planned for.

The Xbox Wire post that accompanied the showcase segment described what the trailer shows in motion:

"Fighting alongside UNSC forces, pushing through Covenant-controlled spaces, facing new threats like the Brute Berserker, and even bringing the fight into space."

The Brute Berserker is a new enemy variant that players have not encountered in any prior Halo game, the kind of addition that signals Halo Studios is using the new missions to expand the Combat Evolved-era fiction rather than simply illustrating what was already established.

The space combat mission is the detail that has generated the most immediate excitement from the portion of the Halo community that has been paying attention to the game's development.

The original Halo: Combat Evolved takes place almost entirely on the ring world's surface, the Pillar of Autumn's opening escape pod sequence aside, the game is fundamentally a ground combat experience.

Halo 2 introduced multiplayer space combat elements. The franchise has circled back to space-based gameplay periodically across its sequels. Having one of the three new prequel missions take the fight into the void, aboard ships, in zero gravity, in the Covenant-controlled space that the original's escape pods were fleeing through, is the kind of creative choice that makes Operation: METEORITE worth experiencing alongside the reimagined original campaign rather than as a separate piece of content.

All three missions come free with every edition. Standard Edition at $49.99. Premium Edition with the July 23 early access. Collector's Edition available through HaloWaypoint with the same early access and physical extras. Every buyer gets METEORITE.

The Remake Itself And What 25 Years Of Distance Enables

The original Halo: Combat Evolved was a 2001 game. It was extraordinary for 2001, the campaign structure, the sandbox combat, the enemy AI, the ring world setting, the mystery that accumulated through each mission of what exactly the Halo was and what the Flood were doing aboard it, but it was a 2001 game.

The Anniversary edition in 2011 added graphical updates and let players switch between original and updated visuals. Campaign Evolved goes further by rebuilding the entire thing in Unreal Engine 5 from the ground up.

High-definition visuals that represent what Unreal Engine 5 can do with geometry and lighting and particle effects. Updated cinematics. Remastered animations. Re-recorded voice lines from the original cast.

A remastered soundtrack that honors the music that players still hear in their heads when they think about the original.

Improved wayfinding that addresses the specific navigational frustration that anyone who played the original Library level with any regularity will recognize immediately.

Improved controls that bring the feel of the game in line with what players expect from a modern first-person shooter.

The broader arsenal, more weapons, more vehicles, more enemies than the original shipped with, and the return of the Skulls system, the optional gameplay modifiers that the Master Chief Collection made a beloved feature, give the game replayability beyond a single narrative playthrough.

The co-op infrastructure, two-player splitscreen on console, four-player online co-op on console and PC with full crossplay and cross-progression between Xbox and PlayStation, makes this the definitive version of a campaign that many of its most devoted fans have played exclusively in co-op.

The PlayStation Moment The Franchise Has Never Had

Master Chief is coming to PlayStation. That sentence would have been genuinely inconceivable for most of the franchise's existence.

Halo was the defining Xbox exclusive, the series that gave Microsoft a reason to exist in the console space, the franchise that launched alongside the original Xbox in November 2001 and that made the console worth buying in the same way that Mario makes Nintendo hardware worth owning.

Microsoft's full multiplatform strategy, the decision to bring Xbox's biggest first-party franchises to PlayStation and Nintendo hardware, has been unfolding progressively across the past few years. Forza Horizon came to PlayStation.

Gears of War came to PlayStation. Now Halo lands on a PlayStation console for the first time in the franchise's 25-year history.

The July 28 launch of Campaign Evolved on PS5 is not a port or a cloud gaming workaround. It is a native PS5 release of the same game, at the same time, with the same content as every other platform.

For the PlayStation audience that has never played a Halo game because it was never available on their hardware, Campaign Evolved is the ideal entry point. The original story.

The best version of it ever made. Three new prequel missions that add canonical content. Space combat. The Flood. The Forerunners. Sergeant Johnson and his cigars. July 28.

The 25th Anniversary Connection

The Xbox Games Showcase that revealed Campaign Evolved's July 28 date also unveiled the Xbox Series X25, the translucent green limited edition anniversary console launching in November 2026.

The two announcements are deliberately connected: the software tribute to 25 years of Xbox and the hardware tribute to 25 years of Xbox, announced in the same showcase, arriving in the same year.

The original Xbox launched November 21, 2001, with Halo: Combat Evolved as its signature game. The thing that made the console worth owning on launch day was the Master Chief's first mission on the Pillar of Autumn.

Twenty-five years later the game is rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5, expanded with three new missions including space combat, released on the platform that was once its greatest rival and available on Xbox Game Pass so that every subscriber can play it without an additional purchase.

July 23 for early access. July 28 for everyone. Pre-orders open now.