John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando Review: Rough Edges and a Lot of Heart

I’m really excited about this new action game! It’s a first-person shooter with zombies, but it feels like it’s trying to do something a little different with the genre. It’s a co-op game, which is awesome, and the developers, Saber Interactive – they made World War Z and Space Marine 2 – are clearly going for a really cinematic, almost John Carpenter-style vibe. I’m hoping it’ll bring something fresh to zombie shooters!

If you’re familiar with zombie shooting games, you’ll quickly pick up how this one works. It’s generally straightforward, which can be both a good and bad thing. The game features an engaging story with interesting characters and background details, and you’ll spend a lot of time fighting off large groups of zombies.

I spent around ten hours playing the game, primarily by myself, and I genuinely had fun – even replaying levels to improve or experiment. It has some fantastic elements, but it also feels a little unpolished in places, and I hope those issues get addressed in future updates.

What is Toxic Commando?

Toxic Commando will feel familiar to anyone who’s played games like Left 4 Dead or Back 4 Blood. It uses a similar gameplay style: you select a mission, choose a difficulty level, and gear up with your teammates before facing waves of enemies.

But there’s more! Toxic Commando introduces classes to give you even more ways to cause chaos. You can choose from four different classes, each with a unique role and helpful abilities in battle. What’s great is that each class levels up separately, and you can reset your skill points for free whenever you want.

The game features a great variety of weapons, including unique tools to help you defeat both regular and special enemies during missions. A major new addition compared to past games is the ability to drive nine different vehicles, each with its own special capabilities.

You’ll definitely need a vehicle to get around the large maps and reach your goal. Along the way, you can find optional objectives and useful locations to restock on health, ammo, and other resources. While planning your route is important, defeating the undead is the real priority!

Classes and Commandos

A really cool feature of this game is how it handles characters and classes. You get to choose both independently – you’re not locked into a specific class based on who you want to play. This gives players more freedom and control over how they experience the game, letting them pick their favorite character without affecting their gameplay style.

The characters each have distinct roles, similar to character classes in a game. There’s a good balance between lighthearted and serious personalities, and their conversations were engaging during quieter moments. The dialogue felt natural and was consistently interesting, keeping me invested in their interactions.

Each of the four classes has one main ability that you can heavily customize with upgrades, letting you tailor the class to your preferred playstyle. This adds a nice layer of strategy to the game and makes leveling up feel important for tackling difficult content. What’s really neat is that upgrades build on each other – each new level adds the benefits of the current and previous levels, making you noticeably more powerful.

During the game, it became clear that to unlock and level a second class, you’d essentially need to replay the entire story. This was frustrating because increasing the difficulty felt impossible without a huge challenge, especially if you were playing alone.

A Truly Wild Story

I’ve experienced many unusual games with unsettling themes and backstories, but Toxic Commando is remarkably strange. Instead of zombies, you fight humans infected by a bizarre, powerful entity known as the Sludge God. This creature is being held back within a large zone by the person who hired you, a man named Leon.

The strange circumstances create opportunities for both dark humor and absurdly funny conversations. It also provides a bit of lightness when dealing with unsettling details, like people willingly getting infected to honor a deity called the Sludge God. Leon often responds with a grim outlook, and your characters frequently discuss just how awful everything has become as they try to figure out what to do.

My main issue with the story is its lack of depth. While each of the nine missions starts with a brief intro and then a longer cutscene, these scenes don’t really develop the plot or characters beyond simply moving you forward or providing a quick resolution.

The game’s story feels complete after its nine missions, but it leaves you wanting more. With no extra modes or ways to delve deeper into the characters and world, the experience feels a bit short. While the ending is satisfying, there’s potential for future updates to add more variety to the missions and expand on the story.

Specifically A Co-op Game

It might seem strange to mention, but I wanted to address this since I mostly played the game by myself. Playing with actual people is a much better experience than using bots. While bots can help with basic tasks like setting up defenses, their usefulness stops there.

I really enjoyed the story in Toxic Commando, but honestly, playing with others is a big part of the fun, and early on there weren’t many people playing. It was tough finding matches or even getting friends to join, and that definitely took something away from the overall experience, even though the story itself was solid.

Each of the game’s nine missions starts with a brief introductory scene, then a longer cutscene that delves more into the story. However, these scenes mostly just serve to move the player forward or provide simple conclusions, without offering much depth.

The helper bots are useful for simple tasks, but they can’t drive or interact with key parts of the game. They become even less helpful on harder difficulty levels, and the game’s permadeath system – meaning once you’re dead, that’s it – adds to the challenge. This makes sense, though, because being able to die repeatedly without consequences would make the game too easy.

The game will likely be much more fun once it’s released and there are more players around. Even now, you can still get around 10 hours of gameplay from the story, as the missions are quite lengthy. They’ll probably be quicker to complete when you’re not having to do everything on your own, which is currently very time-consuming and frustrating.

Bots are pretty limited in what they can do. They can’t gather supplies like ammunition or fuel, and they don’t offer healing beyond a Medic’s temporary boost. Mostly, they just provide spare parts, which are great when holding a position, but otherwise create extra work for you. Don’t count on them to reload the heavy machine gun or refuel vehicles – you’ll have to do those tasks yourself.

Riding in Style

A really cool part of the game is that each vehicle has unique strengths. This makes choosing the right cars for a mission more important. For example, when I played with some other players recently, we used both the Ambulance to heal teammates and the HMV-Maverick for its powerful machine gun.

What really sets these characters apart isn’t just their skills or weapons, but a unique game element I haven’t seen before. Most of the maps feature dirt roads filled with water, creating muddy areas. These muddy patches slow vehicles down, and can even completely stop them.

This feature introduced a new way to approach reaching your goals, which I hadn’t thought about before. I found it really added to the excitement and challenge. Luckily, most vehicles on the trickier, muddier maps have ways to overcome this, like a boost or winch, so it never felt truly limiting or frustrating.

Driving in many games isn’t very enjoyable, but this game does it really well. Each vehicle feels unique, and while the driving mechanics aren’t revolutionary, they’re genuinely fun – which is great, since you’ll be driving for a large portion of the game.

Visually Disturbing in the Best Way

The game’s visual style perfectly captures the unsettling and terrifying atmosphere of cosmic horror. While the color scheme relies heavily on dark and muted tones, it doesn’t detract from the overall stunning look of everything, including the creatures and the slimy, tentacle-like growths that spread across the environment.

The game doesn’t focus heavily on beautiful scenery, but you’ll frequently find yourself watching out for groups of monsters heading towards your current goal. While the unique monsters are quite strange, the game clearly explains their abilities and how they behave.

The Goon, for example, is the team’s powerful attacker and is designed to be a forceful, head-on threat, while the Snare is a mass of tentacles used for grabbing and pulling enemies. Once you see these creatures, their roles become obvious. Their designs aren’t just functional – they’re also unsettling and scary.

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The game truly shines with its spectacular mission setups. Whether you’re defending church gates or witnessing hordes of monsters surge across vast landscapes, each encounter is visually impressive. The monsters themselves are distinct and detailed, and the resulting chaos of explosions and falling enemies creates a strangely captivating experience.

Progression for Fun and Challenge

The game’s progression system has its ups and downs – some aspects are excellent, while others feel underdeveloped. It shares similarities with other zombie shooters, but feels a bit unpolished. You’ll improve your character through three main avenues: unlocking new weapons, increasing your class level, and collecting cosmetic items.

You can customize your weapons with cosmetic items, but let’s talk about upgrades first. As you play, you’ll collect resources that can be used to improve your guns with things like sights and attachments. These upgrades aren’t essential, but they can help you fully level up a weapon, reset it, and unlock a special skin.

The game features familiar progression and customization options. You’ll earn experience points (XP) to improve your character’s abilities, and gather resources to unlock cosmetic items for both your character and vehicles. The most unique and desirable cosmetic items are earned by playing on higher difficulty levels.

Cosmetics are a really enjoyable part of the game, with tons of options to collect. If you love customizing your gear, you’ll find plenty to do, as almost everything can be personalized. I especially liked being able to modify and recolor individual weapon parts – it added a great extra layer of freedom to the customization system.

The game’s progression feels uneven. Some aspects are excellent, but others aren’t as well-developed.

My main issue with character progression was that it didn’t quite make sense. You’ll likely focus on a single class throughout the campaign, reaching around level 15 by the end. That’s when you unlock all the skills and can really start customizing your character’s abilities.

Switching to a different class requires replaying parts of the main story or completing challenging side missions, unless you have help from more experienced players. This prevents newcomers from tackling content that’s too difficult, but it can also keep you at a certain difficulty level for longer than you’d like.

As a fan, I’ve found that leveling up can be a bit tricky since there’s no endless horde mode – you’re mostly limited to replaying the campaign missions. Honestly, it does help you really learn the levels, which is cool, but it can get repetitive, especially if you’re playing by yourself. And if you’re with friends, it can be annoying having to stick to the same difficulty or even lower it if you’re not really getting anywhere. It feels like you’re stuck in a rut sometimes!

Closing Comments

Toxic Commando, at its best, is a surprisingly fun experience. Even when it’s not perfect, it’s still a good zombie shooter with impressive action sequences. The game has a few issues right now – the artificial intelligence of enemy characters and playing alone can be frustrating – but these problems are likely to be fixed. If you can look past these rough edges, you’ll find a really enjoyable game that might even surprise you.

2026-03-11 20:12