I recently blazed through the first half of Halo: Campaign Evolved in a couple of days, fully prepared to relive a traumatic part of my childhood. Despite some modest gameplay upgrades and a complete visual overhaul, it largely still feels like the same game as 2001’s Halo: Combat Evolved. Lines of dialogue that have echoed in my head for decades sent shivers of nostalgia down my spine, and the opening missions remain propulsive enough to make stopping genuinely difficult.

One minute, Master Chief is rescuing stranded Marines across the surface of a mysterious ringworld. The next, he’s sneaking aboard a Covenant cruiser with a sniper rifle, storming an island fortress to find a map room, or driving a tank through a snowy canyon. Dropships crash. Aliens scream. Cortana chirps instructions and quips directly into Chief’s ear. Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori’s score transforms every firefight into an epic. Even now, I can’t help but thrash my head when “Rock Anthem for Saving the World” kicks into high gear as you storm the beach in the game’s fourth level.

Then the sixth level, “343 Guilty Spark,” shuts almost all of that noise off as the epic sci-fi shooter descends into full-on horror.

Having grown up playing GoldenEye 007 , I gravitated toward Halo like a moth to light. I detested horror games, especially Resident Evil and Dino Crisis , which used clunky controls to make shooting monsters even more stressful. Halo , on the other hand, wants to make you feel powerful.

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