The best shooter 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 shooter costs you.
Filtering to shooter means you want the guns to be the answer. It is the right filter when what you liked was the feedback — the sound, the recoil, the way enemies react.
What you get: Moment-to-moment feel, and the shortest distance between picking a game up and enjoying it.
What made Halo Combat Evolved worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the shooter part of that answer, and only the shooter 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.
Variety. Shooters commit hard to one loop, and the ones that try to be something else usually do the something else badly.
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.
How the guns sound and how enemies react to being hit. A shooter with mediocre levels and superb weapon feedback is more fun than the reverse, every time.
Each pick says. Several of the best shooters ever made are single-player campaigns, and a few of the co-op ones are genuinely worse with bots.
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 shooter — 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 shooter guide for where to start in the genre generally.