Halo has always been about more than Master Chief, alien armies and spectacular science-fiction firefights. For Clay and Eric, the series became a durable meeting point: a shared language carried from teenage bedrooms and university dorms into adulthood, careers, marriages and parenthood.
After 25 years of playing every Halo together, the lifelong friends reunite online to tackle Halo: Campaign Evolved, a remastered version of the original campaign. Their return is part review, part friendship audit and part attempt to discover whether an old game can still create the same kind of chaos.
The pair previously examined their long-running co-op history in a collaborative Halo 5 review. More than a decade later, the question is different: can a new version of the first game reconnect two friends whose lives have steadily moved apart?
For Australian players considering a dedicated setup for classic co-op shooters, the appeal sits less in raw hardware than in the room it creates. A proper arcade machine can turn a game night into a shared event, while the arcade machine buying guide can help compare the practical choices before creating one.
A friendship built around the first Halo
Clay has played every Halo with Eric since the original arrived in November 2001. They played on futons with Saves The Day playing, across dorm-room floors with OutKast in the background and in the basement of an unpleasant off-campus house while their roommates threw kegs upstairs.
They played strangers competitively, rushed through each new release and returned repeatedly to the first campaign. The Library became familiar territory, especially on Legendary, where repetition eventually settled into a kind of shared concentration.
Twenty-five years later, the friends live on opposite sides of the United States. Clay has two children, limited free time and a permanent shortage of sleep. Eric lives in Los Angeles, has moved through careers in law and social media management, and describes himself as burnt out and uncertain about what the next stage of life should look like.
When Eric suggests writing about the remaster, Clay initially resists. Finding enough time to replay a campaign he has already completed hundreds of times sounds absurd. Eventually, though, that resistance becomes the reason to do it. The project offers an excuse to reclaim several evenings that adult life has otherwise absorbed.
Two separate first encounters
Eric did not discover Halo alongside Clay. He first encountered the game in a university dorm, where co-op and local multiplayer introduced a group of ordinary console players to the rituals of the LAN party. Players moved between rooms, trading stories about their latest “Halo moments”.
Their separate introductions soon became irrelevant. They eventually played together and kept returning to the series, while many of the people from those first sessions disappeared from their lives. Clay remained: a friend whose adulthood took a different shape but whose history still overlapped with Eric’s in important ways.
The new campaign provides another bridge between their homes in Los Angeles and Cleveland. Headsets go on, schedules are negotiated and the pair begins the familiar process of fighting the Covenant while also fighting about how the other person plays.
The old game still has the sauce
Clay quickly objects to Eric’s approach. Eric runs directly into danger, dies frequently and says very little when he respawns. He also announces that he dislikes the original assault rifle, preferring the SMG instead—a choice Clay treats as a serious character flaw.
They spend almost as much time repairing Eric’s audio and explaining Discord as they do discussing tactics. Yet the moment the shooting starts, the design still feels remarkably alive. The combat combines physical movement, enemy behaviour and level layouts in a way that continues to produce unexpected outcomes.
A Grunt can charge with plasma grenades after a firefight. Flood forms can leap into a shotgun blast. A Banshee can present the perfect rocket target, only for the resulting explosion to send a stray piece of shrapnel back across the battlefield and kill the player who fired it.
Those incidents are the series’ famous “Halo moments”: partly arranged by encounter design, partly created by physics and partly delivered by bad luck. Few shooters generate them so consistently. The original trilogy, particularly Halo 3 and Reach, remains the closest comparison.
For a closer look at the competitive side of the series, the Ogre 2 video offers a useful contrast to the loose, improvised co-op style Clay and Eric bring to the campaign.
Legendary, Heroic and the value of playing badly
Eric argues that a player does not need perfect aim or an optimised strategy to enjoy Halo. The game rewards precision but leaves room for improvisation, even on its hardest setting. A fight can become memorable precisely because a carefully planned approach falls apart.
Clay is more interested in efficiency. With children, work and only a few spare hours, he wants each session to move forward. The argument between them reflects two competing ideas of play: one treats a game as a problem to solve, while the other values the detour, the mistake and the ridiculous death.
Halo supports both approaches. Its campaign is structured but generous, allowing players to combine weapons, vehicles, enemy weaknesses and the environment in different ways. A Warthog can flatten a Hunter, but the player still needs to manoeuvre, find a vulnerable angle and survive the surrounding enemies.
The game’s difficulty also serves a purpose. Longer encounters and larger arenas give more possibilities for something surprising to happen. Unlike an endless service-game grind, the campaign has a finish line. You can simply complete it, remember what happened and move on.
Friendly fire and the return of horseplay
Not every memorable session involves impressive play. Clay and Eric also enjoy wasting time. In earlier years they pistol-whipped each other, respawned and left invisible graves across the battlefield. The new campaign brings that instinct back.
The original game kept friendly fire enabled, while Campaign Evolved defaults to turning it off. That makes deliberate mischief less dangerous. Players can stick plasma grenades to a Warthog, experiment with physics or shoot at each other without bringing the whole campaign to a halt.
Many modern games are designed primarily as social spaces, encouraging banter while players wait, fall over or complete repetitive tasks. Halo achieves something different. Its combat is substantial enough to hold attention, yet open-ended enough for a serious firefight to turn into nonsense within seconds.
Even the campaign’s insistence that there is only one Master Chief becomes fuel for jokes when co-op visibly places two armoured heroes in the same room. The contradiction does not need solving. It simply creates another opportunity for the friends to mess around.
The Chief does not age
The series’ central character has remained physically unchanged since crash-landing on the ring. Clay and Eric have not. Twenty-five years have brought marriages, children, career changes, burnout and the uncomfortable awareness that a quarter-century represents a significant portion of an adult life.
That contrast gives the campaign’s science fiction an unexpectedly personal edge. Master Chief can be crushed by a Wraith, hit by a Hunter or thrown from a bridge, then return to the fight after a respawn. The players behind the helmet do not get that reset.
Eric reflects on a line from the television adaptation in which the Chief describes entering battle while knowing that someone may be lost, but believing it will not be him. Beneath the military dialogue is a useful distinction: the fictional hero continues, while real people accumulate time and change.
For Eric, Halo becomes a way to measure that distance. The game is not the measuring tape; Clay is. An enduring friend provides a fixed point against which a person can understand where they have been and how far they have moved.
Why the campaign still works
During a break between sessions, Clay keeps thinking about the campaign’s spaces: recursive corridors, silver pillars, flooded facilities and battlefields that transform when new enemies arrive. The structure remains strong because each level introduces a combination of terrain, weapons and opponents before revisiting it with a fresh threat.
Vehicles do not feel detached from the rest of the game. The Warthog, Banshee and other machines use the same physical language as the weapons and enemies encountered on foot. The result is a campaign that expands without losing its underlying rhythm.
The comparison with later online-focused shooters is revealing. Clay spent hundreds of hours in Destiny, Destiny 2 and Marathon, often grinding alone among more committed players. Over time, those games became cycles of content, dissatisfaction and competition rather than simple opportunities to play with a friend.
Halo: Campaign Evolved offers a cleaner promise. You can finish it. You can play for the pleasure of the encounter rather than for experience points, loot or a better ranking. In one late-night session, Clay and Eric continue shooting enemies even after they have a clear route to the next objective, simply because the combat remains enjoyable.
A fitting return, with one compromise
The bonus missions are less essential than the core campaign, but one arena captures the series’ confidence. The player receives an array of weapons and power-ups before facing overlapping waves of enemies. It is effectively a Horde mode, presented as a reminder that Halo helped establish this language of combat in the first place.
On Legendary, the fight becomes a lesson in accumulated knowledge. A plasma cannon clears a group of Elites, a battle rifle handles Brutes, a rocket launcher deals with Hunters and an overshield makes the next advance possible. Every previous death has taught the players something about positioning, timing and risk.
That final stretch brings the pair back into the same rhythm: calling out wounded Elites, moving through corridors, covering one another and making decisions quickly. The chaos becomes almost musical. For a moment, the distance between their present lives and their old dorm rooms disappears.
They complete the campaign with the Warthog run toward the collapsing ring, then reach the Pelican as the environment tears itself apart. The credits arrive after a late-night session. Even a poor post-credits scene cannot undo the satisfaction of finishing together.
Wasting time properly
Clay realises that he has started approaching games like work. He checks estimated completion times, removes unnecessary steps and tries to win efficiently. Leisure becomes another schedule to manage rather than an activity that can absorb an evening without producing anything measurable.
Playing with Eric interrupts that habit. The point is not to maximise progress. It is to spend time together, argue over weapons, solve audio problems, revisit familiar rooms and allow a session to become longer than planned.
In the end, Clay quietly lowers the difficulty from Legendary to Heroic because Eric is struggling badly. Eric is running into the wrong fights, using the SMG and sticking Clay with grenades. Clay’s earlier claims about the purity of Legendary play turn out to be part nostalgia, part exaggeration and part fiction.
They finish the game on Heroic. Afterwards, Eric switches friendly fire back on without telling Clay, punches him from behind and opens fire with the SMG. Clay responds with a grenade. Both screens go dark.
This is horseplay. It is also the point. Halo remains a superb shooter because its design creates room for skill, improvisation, failure and silliness. For Clay and Eric, its deeper value is that it gives two old friends a reason to waste time together—and to recognise that doing so is not wasted at all.
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