Considering it was revealed to the world with a trailer that featured four zombie-blasting soldiers singing along to Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name”, I expected John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando to be much funnier than it is. Inspired in equal measure by the supernatural horror and buddy action movies of the 1980s, it is big and dumb and goofy… yet never as batshit bananas as you’d expect for a game that’s quite literally about fighting an entity called the Sludge God. But while it may not be that funny, it is fun. You may have already forgotten about that 2023 reveal trailer, but after playing three hours of its co-op missions, I don’t think Toxic Commando is going to fade into the background thanks to its surprisingly solid Left 4 Dead-alike antics.
While it is presented akin to a story campaign shooter with cutscenes, plot points, and a lore-dropping man-in-the-chair vaguely modelled after John Carpenter himself, Toxic Commando is clearly designed to be a regular destination for a team of four friends who can run through its missions on repeat. Each expedition takes place on a reasonably-sized open map, dotted with a handful of optional objectives and loot caches alongside the quest’s main goals. With no ticking timer or shrinking circle, you can take your time to collect everything, scour every point-of-interest, and generally mess around with your pals before pushing onwards to the mission’s finale. It’s surprisingly leisurely… at least until the horde applies the pressure.
Developed by Saber Interactive, Toxic Commando is built on the studio’s now-signature horde technology that renders hundreds of sprinting zombies simultaneously, allowing for enemies to clamber up walls like a reverse waterfall of rotting flesh. In many ways, Toxic Commando feels like a successor to the game where this tech originated, World War Z, and even features near-identical mechanics – during frequent hold-the-line defence objectives, you mow down incoming enemies with the same array of emplaced machineguns, mortars, and electrified grids. It’s just that this time it’s all rendered with a gloriously gross horror aesthetic. Who wants zombies to look like humans when they can look like lamp-eyed freaks from the death dimension?
Those freaks burst and break when they’re introduced to the hot lead dispensed by a very healthy arsenal. They’re all based on real-world guns (aside from the wildly powerful rail gun, which scatters foes like bowling pins) and divided up into your regular groups of shotguns, SMGs, sniper rifles, and other formats not beginning with “S”. Saving them from feeling utterly ordinary is how they fire with the exaggerated bravado of an ultra-violent b-movie – all sputtering muzzles, wide bullet spread, and explosive impacts. Legs are severed, ribcages torn open, and brains pinwheel out of busted skulls. It’s all as squelchy and sinewey as you’d hope from a game associated with the director of The Thing.
Your choice of loadout defines the combat experience much more than the four character classes, which feel like minor augmentations to standard FPS action rather than crucial battlefield roles. Each is defined by a single special ability – the Operator uses a drone that automatically bombards enemies for a few seconds, the Strike can unleash a barrage of energy blasts, the Medic has an area-of-effect heal, and the Defender can put up a damage-absorbing barrier. At least during my hours of play, these abilities came in handy during a pinch but did little to direct how I played. Perhaps filling out the skill tree will give each class stronger definition, but right now it seems like the regular shooting is the main event.
Mowing down a lot (a lot) of zombies is the crux of Toxic Commando’s objectives. Sometimes that’ll involve the genre-trademark special infected that largely work exactly as Left 4 Dead dictated (sticky ones that grab you, tanky ones that charge at you, gross ones that spit at you.) Elsewhere you’ll need to unload a belts-worth of ammunition into a tangled mess of tentacles, or use demolition charges to blow some kind of growth to smithereens. It’s mostly by-the-numbers co-op shooter fare, but across the few missions I’ve played there’s the odd one that shines brighter. One quest sees the map covered by a Fortnite-ish, life-sapping storm, and the only way to navigate between the shielded pockets of safety is to drive an ambulance that can trickle heal those sitting inside it. It’s a really coherent meshing of environment, situation, and equipment design.
Regardless of if the mission requires one or not, vehicles are as significant to Toxic Commando as its zombies and guns. The spaced-out objectives and open nature of the maps mean you’ll need some wheels to effectively cover ground, especially as that ground is so often practically carpeted by the undead. Cars like the armoured Maverick are good for both protection and doubling as a battering ram – you’ll just need to occasionally deal with the zombies who clamber aboard like particularly diseased monkeys at the safari.
All vehicles have a special ability, such as the ambulance’s healing aura or the Thunder pick-up’s flamethrower, but it’s the winch attached to all but the family sedans that really makes a difference. Essentially a grapple hook that can be fired into a variety of anchor points, it can be used to rip gates off their hinges, bust open treasure containers, and pull your vehicle up slippy inclines. See, the Sludge God, in his infinite sticky wisdom, has covered each map in great big stretches of gloop, and so without a MudRunner-lite approach you’ll be spinning tires and going nowhere.
There’s admittedly very little new or experimental in Toxic Commando, but what’s here is genuinely good fun. It’s a more open take on Left 4 Dead’s horde-filled adventures, fuelled by the same “arcane evil” feel that’s made Call of Duty’s zombie mode feel so aesthetically solid. There are some issues that threaten that fun, though. Every mission I played felt like it had had the wind kicked out of it by the final stretch thanks to dwindling resources. Health kits are in short supply, ammunition can get a little tricky, and spare parts – a currency that unlocks special weapons and defensive structures – can only be found in a limited number of loot caches. By the end of a mission it can feel like the odds are really against you, and while I appreciate the need to ratchet tension and create a challenge spike in the final objective, in a game where zombies arrive by the truckful, restocking ammo only to find you’ve been given a single magazine does feel a bit unbalanced. I was having a lot more fun during the earlier minutes, when bullets were plentiful and the blood spilled like wine, so I’m not sure if the flow and tone really mesh with the current resource levels.
The more concerning thing, though, is progression. All weapons have individual XP bars, and must be levelled up to particular milestones to unlock different modifications. When you unlock a mod, you then need to spend a currency to actually fit it to the weapon, and each one costs several thousand. I can’t help but look at the entire armoury and envision the hundreds and hundreds of hours I’d need to sink into Toxic Commando to achieve a decently functioning, varied loadout. It’s the sort of system that funnels you into picking a single favourite, rather than encouraging you to constantly switch between missions. This, combined with a trio of different currencies and palette-swap character skins, has me a little suspicious that the sludge of live-service has tainted something I’ve otherwise had a pretty good blast with. But these grindy woes can also be found in Saber’s Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, and they didn’t stop it from being one of my favourite games of 2024.
That’s not to say I’m expecting John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando to have anywhere near the same impact Space Marine had. But, provided the full game has a solid range of missions that genuinely prove replayable, I do think the strong shooting and entertaining enemies have a decent enough chance to secure it a home among friendship groups who’d happily re-watch gloopy ‘80s horror over and over until the VHS wears out. Whether they’ll ever unlock the attachments they want for their favourite weapons… well, we’ll have to wait to find out.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Executive Editor of Features.
