The best action games like Halo Combat Evolved are Halo Infinite, Halo 2 and Destiny 2. Below are 12, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to action costs you.
Filtering to action means you want the fighting to carry the game rather than the story or the map. It is the right filter when what you actually miss is how something felt in your hands.
What you get: Combat you get better at. Action games put their design budget into the moment-to-moment, so the thing you are doing in minute two is the thing you are still doing in hour twenty, only better.
What made Halo Combat Evolved worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the action part of that answer, and only the action part.
The best the series has played since Halo 3, and free to play in multiplayer.
Dual wielding, and the multiplayer that defined online console shooters.
The same studio's gunfeel, in a live game.
The best campaign in a modern shooter and the best movement in any.
The PlayStation answer, with a far stranger arsenal.
The console shooter Halo replaced, and still worth playing.
Push-forward combat and a resource economy that never lets you idle.
If the co-op chaos was the part you played most.
Open encounters, many approaches, and genuinely good enemy AI.
The other Xbox shooter pillar, heavier and cover-led.
Heavy third-person shooting with the same sense of scale.
A single-player shooter campaign that still commits to being one.
Pacing and world. Action games rarely have the quiet stretches or the writing that the adventure and RPG picks bring, and a few of them are shorter than they look.
The full list is on games like Halo Combat Evolved — 12 picks, no genre filter.
Halo Infinite. The best the series has played since Halo 3, and free to play in multiplayer.
No. Halo Combat Evolved released on the Microsoft Xbox, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
A small set of verbs and a game that keeps finding new questions to ask of them. The weak ones add buttons instead; the strong ones make you better at the ones you already have.
No, and difficulty is a poor proxy for depth. Some of the hardest action games have very few decisions in them, and some of the deepest have a difficulty setting that lets you meet them halfway.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Halo Combat Evolved list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is action — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the action guide for where to start in the genre generally.