With how much John Carpenter talks about his love of gaming, it’s always a surprise to me that we don’t see him pop up in the video game world. Given his love of Borderlands 2, it’s only natural that he got involved with a co-op shooter, lending his name to John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando from Saber Interactive.
Building off the work they did in World War Z, Toxic Commando is another game of blasting your way through horde after horde of zombies, but with a few clever twists that try to set it apart from the pack.
The story, which was written in collaboration with the horror master himself, sees you as a group of mercenaries caught up in a monstrous situation. In the near future, an experiment by a tech company attempting to harness the power of the Earth’s core unwittingly unleashes a Cthulhu-like being known as the Sludge God, immediately unleashing undead zombies and worse. Your team of mercs stumbles upon the Sludge God during a job, gets infected, and teams up with the man who set everything in motion in a desperate attempt to put things right.
Stories about a viral infection causing the zombie apocalypse are a dime a dozen, so I was relieved to see that it was a supernatural creature at the center of the outbreak. On top of that, this creature, being the Sludge God, gave it a good visual identity, with black goo everywhere to indicate the monster’s corrupting influence. The overall solid look is complemented by a strong soundtrack, aside from some weird screaming in some of the more intense songs, including tracks by Carpenter and his son. The game isn’t reinventing the zombie genre itself, but there’s just enough to the premise to set it apart, giving you a menacing antagonist, something the zombie genre often lacks.
The familiar zombie story comes with familiar zombie gameplay, but familiar doesn’t necessarily mean bad. Much like Left 4 Dead or Back 4 Blood, you do missions in squads of four, either with your friends or with computer-controlled companions filling out your team, completing various objectives as you scrounge for ammo and mow down zombies. Toxic Commando has these basics down well, with good first-person gun feel and just the right mix of enemies to keep things interesting.
It could probably use a few more creature types, but you’ve got a good variety of standard fodder enemies, ranged menaces, and hulking brutes to give the encounters some amount of variety. My favorite enemy type was the Nuker, which had a huge bulbous head that explodes when you shoot it, forcing you to carefully choose when to take them out so you don’t hurt yourself or your teammates.
Much like Left 4 Dead, the game is played out through a series of discrete missions, all of which have their own little animated introduction explaining the story and stakes. I’ve been a little fatigued by the mission structure of games like Helldivers 2 or Warhammer 40K: Darktide, where you constantly rotate through different sets of objectives mixed in with variable maps or map conditions, so I was pleased to see that Toxic Commando had a more handcrafted touch that didn’t feel like infinite churn. A beginning, middle, and end do a lot to help drive me through co-op experiences like this, and the fact that each of them has four different levels of difficulty gives you reason to replay them if you’re craving more action.
The biggest thing Toxic Commando brings to the Left 4 Dead formula is open-world missions. Each map is a fairly large area, probably a little bit larger than a Helldivers 2 map. As you travel around completing escalating objectives, you can find caches of supplies, whether that’s ammo for your weapons, health kits to keep you alive, or spare parts that can help you prepare for your final stand. All of these things are essential for your survival, so it’s up to you to do the risk-reward calculations about how much extra exploration you want to do before committing to the finale of the mission, which always ends with a massive last stand.
What makes this open-world structure sing is the addition of vehicles. Not only do they allow you to get across the maps faster, but they are a blast to use, feeling exciting but never overpowered. There are about half a dozen different vehicles throughout the game; some are randomly found throughout the level, while others are special trucks intrinsically tied to the mission goals. Even though some of them have weapons on them, it’s not a walk in the park once your squad hops in one. You’ll need to find fuel to keep it running and repair it with valuable spare parts.
It’s easy to get stuck in the mud and sludge while driving around, leaving you vulnerable to hordes, but it’s just another factor you need to think about when planning your route. Some of the vehicles are equipped with a winch on the front, which can help you pull yourself out of a jam. It’s also used to pry open certain types of crates that hide supplies, so making sure you’ve got transportation with the right equipment is necessary for success.
The nine missions all have different objectives, but most of them boil down to “drive here and get the thing/turn on the thing/kill the thing,” then go somewhere else for a different task. It’s not the most revolutionary gameplay loop, but it does a nice job of moving you around the map, sometimes locking objectives behind a winch requirement to force you to find the right vehicle before tackling it. Missions always end with a huge last stand where you have a moment to set up your defenses before activating something that brings massive hordes down on you as you hold a position for a set time.
These horde sequences are exciting spectacles, throwing a staggering number of creatures your way. Seeing them all climb over one another to reach you shows that Saber took what they learned making World War Z and refined it to make memorable moments. While they are truly a sight to behold, there are some missions where it feels like you can barely make a dent in the crowd as they continue to pour in. It mostly feels balanced. I don’t think I ever failed any of these sequences on normal difficulty, but I do think they might be a little overdone at times.
Despite each of the missions having different little stories and objectives, they do end up running together. As I mentioned, even if the objectives all have different narrative flavor, they do kinda run together, and the environments all feel pretty interchangeable. The exceptions to this were the missions where you had a specific vehicle that was emitting a field that kept you safe from a harmful effect in the area. To stay alive, you needed to keep moving the vehicle with your group to make your way across the map. It was a clever way to vary up the gameplay, doubling down on the best part of the game, the vehicles, to great effect.
With John Carpenter being involved, I was hoping the thing that would set this game apart was personality, but overall, there’s not really much to write home about in that department. The characters each have their own action hero-esque designs, but they never really elevate themselves above “generic snarky” as far as character traits go. If you showed me a script with the names removed, there’s no way I could tell you who said what, because they all seemed extremely similar. They never get to the point where their banter is annoying, but I was hoping for a bit more Snake Plissken or Jack Burton attitude.
Because of their infection at the beginning of the game, each of the characters has a power that they can use on cooldown throughout the missions. Interestingly, you can pick your character separately from your class, so you’re not tied down if you like the look of one but want the skills of another. Classes aren’t anything revolutionary, but having an ability feels good enough. The Medic puts up a regenerating zone to keep people alive, the Defender deploys a shield bubble for protection, the Strike can shoot a powerful fireball to deal massive damage, and the Operator has a drone that can be sent out to autonomously attack monsters.
Each of the classes gains XP upon mission completion, allowing you to allocate skill points and enhance your main ability. It’s all kind of Co-op Shooter 101, never really giving you any extremely interesting options where you can find clever synergies, mostly just increasing certain stats as you go. While I was glad the character classes were there, I never really latched on to one as a favorite, frequently swapping each mission to make sure I got a taste of all of them.
Guns are also levelled up individually by using them, which felt a little tacked on to me. As you increase in levels, you can purchase add-ons to your gun using various currencies that you can earn on missions. Guns are all pretty standard variants of shotguns, assault rifles, SMGs, and pistols, and little stat boosts never really felt too meaningful. Levelling up guns felt like a bit of a tacked-on way to encourage players to swap weapons frequently, but the reward never felt worth it once I settled on a gun that felt like it worked well enough for me.
The Sludgite currency used for add-ons can also be used to purchase various cosmetics between missions, but nothing in the game really stood out as particularly meaningful on that front. If that’s something that acts as a hook for you, it’s here, just don’t expect it to be anything particularly eye-catching or unique.
Weapon crates can be found throughout the levels, unlocked with spare parts, and those add a bit more variety to the combat. Grenade launchers, massive machine guns, and an ultra-powerful railgun all felt like great additions to the arsenal, but the limited amount you get to use them felt kinda like a bummer. I think I wanted the options to start at outlandish, then move on to even more outlandish, but what we got was a fairly bog standard variety. Overall, the gun choices get the job done, but again fail to give the game much in the way of personality.
John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando doesn’t reinvent the wheel with the genre, but the addition of the vehicles does just enough to make it worth trying if your friend group has been searching for a new co-op zombie shooter. There’s a great joy in finally finding a truck in the sludge, hopping on the back to operate the flamethrower, and speeding through hordes as your buddies hang out the window, blasting zombie after zombie.
The nine missions took me about seven hours to get through, but if you’re having a good time with it, there are four different difficulties to add challenge and increased rewards to subsequent playthroughs. Everything it does, it does well enough, but a lack of ambition keeps it from being one of the greats.
Review codes provided by publisher. John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando launches March 12 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC via the Epic Games Store and Steam.
