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The remake of the game that started it all now has a date. Halo: Campaign Evolved launches on 28 July 2026, with up to five days of early access from 23 July for Premium and Collector's Edition owners. It's a faithful remake of the original Halo: Combat Evolved campaign, and a New Missions Trailer at the Xbox Games Showcase gave us our first look at its biggest addition.
Even more excitingly, there's a brand new content coming with the remake. Called, Operation: METEORITE, it's a three-mission arc set a year before the events of the first game. It follows Master Chief and Sgt. Johnson on a clandestine UNSC operation aboard a Covenant research vessel. What begins as a simple smash and grab predictably turns into something more complicated.
This is the part worth paying attention to, since it's genuinely new rather than remade. METEORITE adds new locations, new enemy variants, more weapons drawn from across the wider Halo series, and new ways to play within the sandbox. The trailer showed off fighting alongside UNSC forces, pushing through Covenant-held spaces, a new Brute Berserker enemy, and combat that even spills into space.
The story was developed with award-winning sci-fi author Troy Denning, whose Halo novels have shaped a fair chunk of the universe's lore.
Notably, Halo: Campaign Evolved is launching on PS5 alongside Xbox Series X/S, PC, cloud and Steam, with Game Pass and Xbox Play Anywhere support. For a franchise that was synonymous with Xbox for two decades, seeing Master Chief on a PlayStation storefront still takes a moment to register.
It's worth placing this in context, though. Like Fable, this looks like one of the titles tied to Xbox's earlier multiplatform commitments rather than its apparent newer direction. With CEO Asha Sharma recently signalling a renewed interest in exclusives, and games like Gears of War E-Day and Clockwork Revolution skipping PlayStation entirely, Halo arriving on PS5 may come to look like part of a transitional period rather than a permanent stance. For now, though, PlayStation owners get one of gaming's most storied campaigns.
Pre-orders are live across Xbox, Steam and PlayStation, with the Collector's Edition available via Halo Waypoint. There are three tiers: Standard, Premium and Collector's, and all of them include the full game, meaning the original 10-mission campaign plus Operation: METEORITE. Premium and Collector's buyers also get the up-to-five-days early access from 23 July.
Every pre-order, regardless of edition, includes the Foundry Armory Pack, which bundles a Classic 2001 Mark V armour skin, a Classic 2001 Assault Rifle skin, and Gilded Onyx styles for both armour and rifle.
Platforms and release
Halo: Campaign Evolved launches 28 July 2026 on Xbox Series X/S, PC, cloud and PS5, with early access from 23 July for higher-tier editions. It's on Game Pass and supports Xbox Play Anywhere.
