Halo: Campaign Evolved

Halo: Campaign Evolved Story Summary

The story of Halo: Campaign Evolved begins aboard the Pillar of Autumn as it flees the destruction of Reach, humanity's most fortified military colony. Captain Keyes orders the ship into slipspace, where it emerges near the mysterious ringworld known as Halo. Covenant forces immediately attack, believing Halo to be a divine relic. Master Chief Petty Officer John-117 is awakened from cryo sleep and entrusted with Cortana, the AI who carries vital UNSC intelligence. Chief and Cortana escape the doomed ship and crash-land on Halo's surface, where they begin to rally scattered Marine survivors and push back against Covenant patrols.

When Cortana discovers the danger of the Covenant seizing control, she insists that Chief press forward and leave her behind in a control room to give her time to learn Halo's systems. As Master Chief fights the Covenant, he comes across something else, something much deadlier, the Flood. The Flood is a parasitic species that was imprisoned by the Forerunners on Halo. It doesn't matter what it is, if it's organic, the Flood will take it over, so they must be stopped, but at what cost?

In the chaos, Chief meets 343 Guilty Spark, the Forerunner monitor assigned to oversee Installation 04. Guilty Spark appears as a floating construct with vast knowledge of Halo's systems. He convinces Chief to retrieve the Index, the activation key required to fire Halo. Believing this will stop the Flood, Chief complies, unaware of the catastrophic consequences. As he's about to activate the Index, Cortana arrives and reveals the truth, that activating Halo won't stop the Flood, it will starve them to death by killing all life in the galaxy. Since Chief is a life in the galaxy, he's against that plan, so he does what he can to stop it, including destroying Halo itself.

Halo: Campaign Evolved Missions

The Pillar of Autumn
Halo
Truth and Reconciliation
The Silent Cartographer
Assault on the Control Room
343 Guilty Spark
The Library
Two Betrayals
Keyes
The Maw

Halo: Campaign Evolved Operation METEORITE

Operation METEORITE takes place one year before the events of Installation 04 and follows Master Chief and Sergeant Johnson on a covert mission against the Covenant. The UNSC discovers that a Covenant agricultural and research vessel is orbiting the glassed colony Promise, and Chief is deployed to infiltrate it. As they move deeper inside the vessel, they uncover disturbing evidence of Covenant experiments tied to human colonies, revealing their growing interest in manipulating and studying humanity's worlds.

Things intensify as Chief and Johnson push further into the ship, encountering new Covenant enemy variants and facing escalating resistance. Their objective is to secure navigation intelligence that could expose Covenant fleet movements. During the infiltration, they discover that the vessel is overseen by the San'Shyuum Minister of Harmony, a high-ranking Prophet who directs the research. Chief and Johnson manage to retrieve fragments of navigation data, piecing together information that hints at Covenant routes and strategic plans. The mission culminates in a desperate push toward the vessel's core, where they secure the full intelligence package and trigger a reactor overload to ensure the Covenant cannot recover their secrets.

Chief and Johnson narrowly escape as the vessel collapses, but they do manage to deliver the stolen data to the UNSC. This intelligence later proves crucial in understanding Covenant fleet movements leading up to the discovery of Halo. Operation METEORITE is not meant to alter the main Halo storyline but using alien weaponry and UNSC weapons absent from the first game makes it feel like more of an epilogue. The only thing that feels that it takes place before the game is the lack of Cortana, but it's meant to serve as a bridge between Reach's fall and the events of Combat Evolved.

Halo: Campaign Evolved Operation METEORITE Bonus Missions

Boarding Action
The Most Dangerous Game
Heavy Burden