Halo fans have been pretty starving for something new as of late. Halo Infinite and Halo: MCC continue to provide content drops for multiplayer modes but we've seen nothing single-player since Infinite's campaign launch in late 2021.

Phil Spencer teased Halo news for next during last weekends Xbox Summer Showcase news but we have nothing more than that.

Well, fortunately we have the wonderful Halo community who continue to make mods and fan games for the beloved sci-fi shooter series. The latest is Spartan Survivors. When you see "˜Survivors', you're probably thinking, "wait, is that like Vampire Survivors"? And you'd be totally right!

Spartan Survivors brings the gameplay of Vampire Survivors-likes to the world of the Master Chief. A range of UNSC and Covenant weaponry, ever-unlocking upgrades, a horde of "˜the Cov' to blow in to a million pieces, it's all here.

Players can play as The Chief himself, or as The Arbiter or an ODST. There's 10 levels to play through, all based on levels from the mainline Halo games - The Library, The Silent Cartographer and The Pillar of Autumn.

The best thing about Spartan Survivors, it will cost you absolutely nothing to play. You can download the game for free now on itch.io and it will be coming to Steam and Xbox later this year. The game was downloaded almost 1,500 times in it's 72 hours with over 20m grunts, elites and the rotten flood being obliterated in that time. Here's an infographic highlighting early player success:

I have thoroughly enjoyed my time with Spartan Survivors and was lucky enough to catch-up with its creator, Juan Guillot Gonzalez.

Interview

Spartan (from Halo) and Survivors are two names that will sound familiar to many modern gamers. But we've yet to hear the two together. Tell us a bit about the game.

Honestly, Spartan Survivors has been more of a learning project and a gift I wanted to make to the Halo Community. I feel like it could be summarized in one sentence: what if you mixed Halo's gameplay and the bullet heaven genre?

This was pretty much the basis, aka understanding what it means to mix both and making sure it retains a certain identity. For me, it meant being involved at all instant while playing and always having players on the move while aiming. I don't think you can play Spartan Survivors while idling and achieve victory haha (but happy to be proved wrong!).

I recently downloaded Spartan Survivors from itch.io and had a blast. There is clear inspiration from other "˜survivor' titles, tell us what inspired you to create the game.

Glad you had fun! I wanted to learn how to create a game from scratch, what it involves, from game design to creating visual assets to audio and game delivery, everything. In 2023, following an interview of Max Hoberman from Certain Affinity I made for my podcast, I got to meet one of our listeners, Gaëtan. As we talked together, I suggested we collaborate on creating a small game and the rest is history.

I wanted something simple to learn what it meant to do game design, and I thought the bullet heaven genre would be quite straight forward. Spoiler alert: it wasn't and it involves a lot of design nuances I didn't expect at first, but it was hella fun to do!

Tell us about your relationship with the Halo series. And which is your favourite of the mainline Halo games?

I grew up playing Halo, my father gifted me Halo CE and Half-Life when I was very young and I had a blast! It got me curious about « Design » in general, like how do you create such things as video games, and thankfully the internet was there to answer my questions. I learned a lot from GDC (Game Developer Conference) since Game Dev were openly talking about their design process, how they collaborate to create games and it inspired me over the years and shaped my career as a Product Designer later on.

I would say my favorite Halo games are Halo CE and Halo 3 ODST. Can't really decide which one because I love them both for very different reasons but they both resonated with me and created long lasting memories with some friends.

There are many Halo enemies, weapons and power ups in the game already. What else from the franchise would you like to bring to Spartan Survivors in the future?

Our next update will bring new in-game drops & power up as well as bosses to mix up the gameplay a little bit and give more challenges to players, achievements for Steam, but after this next update (and once the game is available on other platforms), we'll be done with Spartan Survivors, we consider the game to be content complete regarding what we wanted to achieve with it.

We had a blast creating this game and are so happy to see players having fun with it and telling us about it, that's our greatest reward honestly.

You've launched for free on itch.io and plan to launch on Xbox and Steam. The gaming community expects Halo will launch on PlayStation in the future. If so, would you look to take Spartan Survivors to PlayStation?

With Spartan Survivors, we created our own tech (which we will open source soon) without using an existing engine such as Unity or Unreal for example. The good thing with creating a game for PC or Xbox is that you can use your own hardware, while for PlayStation, if not mistaken, we would need to be provided a dev kit.

If it could be done without that, sure, but otherwise it is quite expensive to get one and that's not something we have in mind.

Lastly, the games completely free. What's in this for you as a developer?

The joy of creating! You know, not every hobby needs to be monetized, sometimes, the rewards from creating this kind of experience is purely the fact of collaborating with someone you appreciate, learning stuff along the way and seeing people having fun with what you created.

Juan’s partner for the Spartan Survivors project, Gaëtan is an indie developer working on other projects. You can follow their titles including the upcoming Sea of Dream Survivors on their Twitter/X account.

Spartan Survivors is available now for free on itch.io. The game will also be available on Steam and Xbox later this year. You can follow Spartan Survivors on Twitter/X and BlueSky for more updates on the game.

Have you had chance to check out Spartan Survivors? If so, drop your most OP builds in the comments below and stick with GSC for all your Halo news.