John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando PC Review 8/10 "John Carpenter’s name may be on the box, but Saber Interactive brings the bite" 🧟‍♀️

Toxic Commando Review – The Best Left 4 Dead‑Style Zombie Blast in Years

An hour into John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando, I was curious about what exactly Carpenter had contributed to this game. After all, this PvE zombie shooter has no aesthetic or thematic similarities to his work, and despite his impeccable horror pedigree, Carpenter has never made a zombie movie. If anything, it’s stylistically much more reminiscent of James Gunn than Carpenter.

So I did some research. And…“I was not brought on as a creative force, except they wanted to use my name, so they paid me to use my name.” As it turns out, aside from providing a few pieces of music (which I suspect were lurking on his hard drive long before this project), Carpenter’s involvement, in his own words, was “Well, I played it!”

Fair enough! Might as well be David James’ Toxic Commando then, because I also played it… And I think it’s just great!

Let’s get the inevitable comparison out of the way early on. Toxic Commando is highly reminiscent of Left 4 Dead. It’s a four-player multiplayer game in which you move as a team through maps, fulfilling objectives while battling hordes of zombies. Occasionally, you’ll get a special zombie type thrown into the horde like Stalkers, Nukers, and Slobs, which I’m betting you can map onto the iconic Left 4 Dead enemies without me having to spell it out for you.

But in this case, imitation really is the best form of flattery. After all (note, millennials may want to be sitting down for this bit of information), Left 4 Dead 2 was released seventeen years ago. Sure, there’s been more recent revivals like Back 4 Blood, Vermintide 2, and World War Z: Aftermath, but none of them scratched the same itch.

Toxic Commando does. And so what if transplanting the basic design template of Left 4 Dead into a modern game with some extra bells and whistles afforded by technological progress is a teeny bit creatively bankrupt? That doesn’t mean it isn’t a whole lot of fun!

The peak of the Toxic Commando experience always comes at the climax of each mission, when you and your teammates arrive at a location bristling with turrets to repair, traps to activate, a welcome infinite ammo box, and a button to press that may as well be marked “summon lots of zombies”.

Hit it, and lots of zombies duly arrive. At this point, Saber Interactive’s proprietary Swarm Engine kicks into full gear, with what feels like thousands of enemies running straight at you. This was impressive in World War Z but feels perfected here, with each zombie feeling like an individual even as it’s part of a gigantic crowd tumbling over obstacles, surging over buildings, and piling up over walls. Grabbing a turret gun, opening up on the horde, and carving a bloody trail through them isn’t exactly high-brow entertainment, but damn, it’s cool.

The rest of the game is no slouch either. Smaller encounters in tighter quarters are also fun, and some neat, subtle nudges force players to cooperate. For example, a subtly restricted FOV forces you to rely on your teammates for protection as they blast away any zombies heading in your direction that you haven’t spotted. 

There are only a couple of quibbles. One of the few ways Toxic Commando distinguishes itself from Left 4 Dead is that each stage takes place on large, semi-open maps. Online multiplayer being what it is, if you’re playing with randos, you’re inevitably going to end up squadded up with someone who sprints in the opposite direction from the group, dies, and then forces the entire party to trudge over to revive them.

There’s also the fact that some people are just plain dense. There’s a mission that warns you “Winch Required”, in which you must take a car with a winch to a trailer to force open the door. There is a car with a winch parked at the spawn point. On three separate occasions, my teams were utterly baffled by that, despite my putting down markers on the car we needed to fetch. Oh well.

On a more minor point, the plot is whatever, the writing is unremarkable, and the four player characters are varying flavours of “snarky rogue”. It’s serviceable stuff, but while Left 4 Dead’s inter-character banter went a long way towards making the game characterful, Toxic Commando’s dialogue is both inconsequential and generally inaudible, though from what I did hear, you’re not missing out on anything.

Perhaps there’s also an argument that this game is a bit too short - you could feasibly be completed in a single lengthy sitting if you had three buddies together on voice chat. But there are steadily increasing difficulties to tackle (and the mission structure changes based on difficulty) and character classes to develop.

SUMMARY

I don’t want to nitpick too hard, as I enjoyed practically every minute I spent with Toxic Commando. The nuts n’ bolts running and shooting is great; it’s graphically dazzling when the action kicks into high gear; it’s smartly designed to get players to cooperate; and it continually presents you with new things to do (albeit generally involving shooting lots of zombies).

I primarily played on a gaming PC, but it also runs surprisingly well on a Steam Deck. Sure, you’ll be on low with FSR, but it’s never unplayable and generally sticks to 30fps.

This is the best Left 4 Dead-style game since Left 4 Dead 2. If you want to blast thousands of zombies with your buddies, look no further than Toxic Commando.

8/10

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