PULSE GAMINGEvery Halo Campaign Ranked Worst to Best
Halo 3 made $170 million in a day, and it isn't number one. We're ranking every Halo campaign by a single rule. How does it play if you start it tonight? That comes down to level design, story and how many different kinds of fights it throws at you. We weighed launch reviews, sales, the remasters and how each one plays on modern hardware, from the twin-stick spinoffs to Halo Infinite. Number one stays hidden until the very end. And one Bungie classic lands below two of its own spinoffs, which is the call you'll argue with most. Before any of that, though, we start with two games most players never finished. Fair warning: story spoilers ahead.
Last place goes to Halo Spartan Strike, a top-down twin-stick shooter from 343 Industries and Vanguard Games that landed on April 16, 2015. It was meant to arrive on December 12, until technical problems with The Master Chief Collection pushed it back. Spartan Strike frames its 30 missions as war-game simulations of history, replaying Halo 2's invasion of Earth on city streets. That's a smart setting on paper. In practice, the short arenas blur together, and you'll struggle to tell one mission from the next by the end of an evening. The controls are tighter than before, and the Halo weapons still feel right from above. But it brings fewer new ideas than Spartan Assault, which did this format first and told more story doing it. It's $2.99 on Steam, which is about what it asks of your memory. So what did the original get right that the sequel didn't? Number 11 belongs to Halo Spartan Assault, the twin-stick shooter that landed on Windows 8 and Windows Phone on July 18, 2013. Under the codename Bootcamp, 343's franchise development director Frank O'Connor pushed for an arcade shooter over a cramped phone FPS, and Vanguard Games tested more than 15 control schemes for touch. Set between Halo 3 and Halo 4, its 25 bite-sized missions give Sarah Palmer an origin story, and the sandbox survives the overhead camera surprisingly well. The trouble is that those short, score-chasing stages were cut for a bus ride, so you'll fight the same rush of Grunts and Elites over and over. It edges Spartan Strike only because it did the format first, with more story, so how did a controller strategy game from Ensemble Studios climb just one spot higher?
Number 10 swaps the assault rifle for a cursor, because Halo Wars is the real-time strategy game that Age of Empires studio Ensemble Studios shipped on March 3, 2009. The team spent 12 to 18 months just making the controls work on a controller, and Microsoft closed the studio right as the game reached shelves. What still holds up is the crew of the Spirit of Fire, and Blur Studio's cutscenes make Captain Cutter and Sergeant Forge feel like a real ensemble. Play it today, though, and nearly every mission is the same build-and-push loop, with unit caps so tight that your big final assault barely looks like a war. That's why it lands just below Halo Wars 2, so what did Creative Assembly build eight years later that this one couldn't? At number 9, Halo Wars 2 answers that question with one name, and the name is Atriox. Total War studio Creative Assembly built it with 343 Industries, and it landed on PC and Xbox One in February 2017. The Spirit of Fire arrives at the Ark, the Forerunner station that builds the Halo rings, and runs straight into the Banished. Atriox, the Brute who walked out on the Covenant, gets the strongest villain introduction the series had managed in years. The missions also vary far more than the first game's build-and-push loop, so it's the better strategy campaign of the two. It's still an RTS, though, and the story stops on a cliffhanger just as Atriox gets interesting. That ceiling is why it can't climb past the next entry, which has the slickest gunplay Halo has ever shipped. So how does a campaign with shooting that good get stuck at number 8?
Halo 5: Guardians answers with a split personality, a 343 Industries shooter that landed on Xbox One on October 27, 2015, with two fireteams sharing the campaign. Its 60 frames per second, thrusters and ground pound make these arenas the slickest Halo has ever played, and the art team even built animated cacti that react to gunfire. The trouble is the story, because the trailers sold a Spartan Locke versus Master Chief manhunt and the Chief leads only 3 of the 15 missions. Add boss fights that keep recycling the Warden Eternal and a campaign that's never left Xbox One for PC, and you get great guns carrying the wrong story. That's what keeps it below Halo Infinite, so what did one extra year of development buy the game that replaced it in 2021? One extra year bought Halo Infinite a grappling hook, and that hook is the main reason the 2021 campaign sits as high as number 7. After the July 2020 reveal drew heavy criticism, 343 Industries delayed it and opened up Zeta Halo, a ringworld you can explore in whatever order you like. The grappleshot turns every Banished fight into a toy box, so you can yank a fusion coil, board a Wraith or zip out of trouble before a Brute closes in. The trouble is the map itself, one forest biome of repeated outposts, and a story that keeps pointing at things that happened off-screen before the Chief wakes up. That's why it falls just short of a tighter campaign from 2012, so what did 343's first Halo get right with a fraction of the space?
The answer sits at number 6, where Halo 4 traded scale for something the series had never really tried, a story about the Master Chief as a person. 343 Industries shipped it on Xbox 360 on November 6, 2012, and built the plot around Cortana's rampancy, the slow breakdown of the AI who never left his side. That's why the final mission, Midnight, still lands today, because the quiet goodbye after the Didact falls hits harder than any explosion around it. The trouble is the Prometheans, since the Knights teleport away and the Watchers keep reviving them, so too many fights turn into the same slow game of whack-a-mole. Those Promethean fights are the one reason it sits under a 2004 sequel, so how does a game that ends mid-battle still finish ahead of it? The controversial drop at number 5 is Halo 2, the Bungie sequel that hit the original Xbox on November 9, 2004, and earned $125 million on launch day. The fight through Metropolis, the ruins of Delta Halo and the decision to split the story with the Arbiter, a disgraced Covenant commander, still feel like classic Halo. Designer Jaime Griesemer later said the team "tripled everything," but a troubled development and time constraints forced cuts, and you can feel them in the final act. The campaign stops mid-battle on a cliffhanger, and the Gravemind finale feels unfinished, as if the last chapter is still sitting on a hard drive somewhere. Brilliant levels can't fully cover a missing ending, so what does a spinoff that started life as an expansion do better with one rainy city?
That rainy city is New Mombasa, and the spinoff is Halo 3: ODST, which Bungie shipped on Xbox 360 in September 2009. Producer Curtis Creamer first pitched it as a two-to-three-hour mini-campaign, and you can still feel that leanness today. Instead of a corridor, you get a dark, rain-soaked hub, and every clue the city's Superintendent AI points you toward triggers a flashback mission. Those flashbacks swing from tank columns to rooftop sniping, so the pace shifts every mission, all under a lonely jazz score. The counterpoint is the Rookie, a silent blank at the center of it all, and a campaign you can finish in an evening. That's why it sits below Halo: Reach, yet above Halo 2, because its structure is sharper than anything in the 2004 sequel. So what did Bungie save for its farewell a year later? Bungie's farewell is Halo: Reach, the prequel to Halo: Combat Evolved that landed on Xbox 360 on September 14, 2010, and it claims number 3 here. Creative director Marcus Lehto wanted a doomed planet to still feel like a win, so you play Noble Six through a defense of Reach that you already know is lost. Long Night of Solace launches you from the ground into orbit in a Sabre fighter, then onto a Covenant corvette, and it's still the series' best change of pace inside one mission. Then Lone Wolf strips away the objectives and leaves you alone against endless waves, which is why we'd call this the most varied set of missions Bungie ever built. Noble Team is the catch, a squad that feels thin next to the Halo 3 cast, yet its missions outrun Halo 3: ODST on variety, which leaves exactly one Bungie campaign standing in its way.
The runner-up is Halo 3, the Bungie finale that landed on Xbox 360 on September 25, 2007, and made $170 million on its first day. Bungie saw it as a chance to fix the ending Halo 2 lost, and The Covenant pays that debt with two Scarabs on one battlefield, leaving you to decide how to bring them down. The Ark does the same with open vehicle battles, Warthogs and Scorpions rolling across ground wide enough that every push feels like the series at full scale. The catch is the Cortana level, a slow Flood maze that drags, inside a campaign that's short for a finale, and that's why the first game's tighter level variety edges it. So what does a 2001 original still do that Halo 3, with all that scale, never quite matched? Number 1 is the game that started it all, Halo Combat Evolved, which Bungie shipped on the original Xbox on November 15, 2001, and it's still the campaign to beat. The Silent Cartographer still defines the series, dropping you on a beach from a Pelican and letting you pick your own route across an island full of Covenant patrols. Assault on the Control Room keeps cycling you between Scorpion tanks, stolen Banshees and tight fights on narrow bridges, so the pace never settles for long. Granted, the Library is the honest counterpoint, a run of repeated corridors and Flood waves that feels copied and pasted for far too long. But no later campaign balances open space and constant pressure this well, and with the remaster sitting in the Master Chief Collection for $39.99, all these years later it's still the blueprint.
Our pick: Halo: Combat Evolved wins because its best ideas still work with nothing propping them up. The Silent Cartographer hands you a beach, a Warthog and a choice of routes. Assault on the Control Room keeps changing what you fight and how you fight it. Even with the Library dragging, no campaign in the series mixes open space and pressure this well. So our top three is Combat Evolved, then Halo 3, then Reach. The hardest call was Halo 2 at number 5. Delta Halo and the Arbiter story deserve better, but that abrupt ending still costs it every time you replay it. If you'd put it higher, tell us which spinoff it should jump. Halo 3 made the money. The first game wrote the rules. That's the Pulse. Play something good this week.
The full ranking
- 12Halo: Spartan Strike
- 11Halo: Spartan Assault
- 10Halo Wars
- 9Halo Wars 2
- 8Halo 5: Guardians
- 7Halo Infinite
- 6Halo 4
- 5Halo 2
- 4Halo 3: ODST
- 3Halo: Reach
- 2Halo 3
- 1Halo: Combat Evolved
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Halo: Combat Evolved
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Halo 3
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Halo: Reach
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Halo Wars 2
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Halo Wars
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