I might be in the minority in this thread, but I think this remake is significantly worse than the original game, which I spent a lot of time playing as a teenager.
Edit to add: if you're one of the people who has never played Halo or has only played through it a couple of times, you might not care about or notice a lot of the below, and maybe you'll think this is a great game. But I am not one of those people.
Minor spoilers below.
The prequel missions (the ones Halo Studios aka 343 actually designed) are an abomination. They are so bad. The story (if you can call it that) is unintelligible trash. The level design is equally bad…repetitive and soulless. The stupid girl boss ODST character is just unbearable, and she is actually antagonistic towards Master Chief, the literal hero and protagonist of the game, for no apparent reason. At one point she even calls herself a "badass." We get it, 343….you want us to pretend that female combat soldiers are just as capable as men. They aren't. **** off. Without giving too much away, let's just say I was very happy with how her character arc concluded…and not in the way 343 was going for.
The dialogue is absolutely atrocious throughout the entire game. I laughed out loud several times. The "banter" between Chief and Johnson in the new missions just feels casual and cheapens the entire experience. I played the prequel missions first and was looking forward to getting back to the original campaign by the end because the dialogue was so bad. Then I was very unpleasantly surprised to hear the re-recorded dialogue, which absolutely butchers the original and again just cheapens the whole experience.
Speaking of girl boss characters, this is actually kind of a theme. The female marines (which didn't even exist in the original) have way more health and are like 3 times harder to kill than the male marines. When I got to the original campaign and queued up the cutscene before the Pillar of Autumn, I literally laughed out loud when I saw they replaced the white male pilot (who was famously a digital recreation of one of the Bungie employees) with a butch black woman who has a shaved head. Foehammer is also a black woman now, for no reason at all. God forbid we have a ****ing video game remake in 2026 without a bunch of DEI puke in it. That would just be asking too much.
The enemy AI is BAD bad…way worse than in the original. I don't know how that happens in a remake. It seems like they compensate for it by just throwing more enemies at you on the higher difficulties and having them spawn in total chicken **** places like right behind you. Really disappointing.
This is a common complaint I've read, but it is very true. The art design is just way too over-the-top detailed and shiny, especially indoors. It feels like 343 forgot that these forerunner structures have been abandoned for like tens of thousands of years and were only just re-discovered by the covenant. Halo feels too alive and lived-in, like you expect to see the forerunners pop out and say hello as they walk through polishing the floors. It doesn't feel like a mysterious, abandoned, barren ringworld.
The vehicles handle kind of weird, almost too tightly. Not sure how they screwed that up. The guns don't feel right to me either and they sound muted…the pistol especially just doesn't feel right when it recoils or when you reload. I don't understand why the SMG is even in the game. The needle rifle is an ok add but is barely available to use. I will say the assault rifle is way better and more fun to use now, although it's very overpowered. You can zoom in and it's super accurate at range for some reason…not sure I like that from a balance standpoint.
Various gameplay changes that I think overall make the game worse….lots more crap in your on-screen HUD most of which is unnecessary, way too many objective markers that make the game feel more linear, and the addition of sprint (although you can turn it off). I noticed that sprint really detracted from that feeling of dread you get when discovering and fighting the flood because you can just run away from them now (and then turn around and kill them all at range with the new OP assault rifle). I guess this could be a good thing if you really hate fighting the flood. I also don't know why every gun lying on the ground needs to be lit up so you can see it…doesn't really bother me but it's just unnecessary graphical clutter.
On that note, two things I have to mention that are so bad it's truly hard to believe. At certain points in the game where there are active camouflaged elites, you will now hear somebody inform you that they are camouflaged, and GIANT RED OBJECTIVE MARKERS will appear over their heads. What is the ****ing point of the camouflage? Also, in 343 Guilty Spark and the Library, those levels were especially challenging because you had left Cortana in the Halo control room, so she was not there to provide any waypoints for you, and it was easy to get turned around. Now there are waypoints in these missions being provided to you by….magic I guess. Just two concrete examples of how 343 thinks the players are idiots and has no understanding of the details that made the original so great.
I've seen a few complaints about getting rid of health packs because people think it makes the game less strategic. Maybe so, but I think this is one change that is for the better. They didn't have health packs in Halo 2 or Halo 3 either, and those were the pinnacle of the series. I was annoyed when they brought them back in Reach, and I don't miss them here.
The cutscenes are very awkward, and it's compounded by the atrocious dialogue. Sgt. Johnson looks like Steve ****ing Harvey. Cortana looks like maybe she's modeled after a trans dude. Extremely strange choice. The Blur cutscenes in the Halo 2 Anniversary remake from 2014 are significantly better. Like, it's not even comparable. The cutscenes are also choppy as hell on Xbox and it's distracting. They should have had Blur do the cutscenes if they're still around.
And possibly my biggest complaint…the music is barely audible. I think they redid the entire score for this game and you can't even hear it. It really detracts from every major moment (or what are supposed to be major moments) in the game. I own all of the original three soundtracks and was really looking forward to that aspect of this remake.
I could probably go on for another dozen paragraphs about areas where this game misses the mark. Here's one positive thing I will say…the outdoor environments look very good. I'm not going to complain about those. The first part of 343 Guilty Spark in the woods is pretty cool and a nice change from the stupid bright lights they added in the remaster back in 2011 or whenever it was. Some pretty significant changes to the Library also make it less frustrating, which is a positive. Also, there are a lot of options to customize the campaign with skulls and various difficult modifiers, which could add replay value, but I haven't dived into any of that and probably won't.
Conclusion:
If I had to sum it up, it feels like this is a game that is pretending to be Halo. It feels cheap, from the enemy AI, to the dialogue, to the cutscene directing, to the gun play, to the vehicle handling. It feels like a better-looking knockoff made by a studio that just happens to have access to better graphics technology 25 years later, but couldn't have made a game as good as the original if their lives depended on it.
I was playing through Assault on the Control Room last night and had a moment where I went around a corner and already knew where every enemy was going to be from memory, and indeed they were all right where I knew they would be. I actually paused the game and asked myself, "why did I buy this game." I can play the original any time I want, and while the graphics are dated, it has better gameplay, more atmosphere, and more soul than this remake.
Overall disappointing.
