John Carpenter's Toxic Commando Review

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There’s a particular type of game that does not ask for your patience. It announces itself immediately, putting a weapon in your hands, pointing you at something that wants you and your friends dead, and steps aside. John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando is that kind of game. To understand where it sits, it helps to understand the lane Saber Interactive chose to occupy. Cooperative first-person shooters have gone through a few distinct phases. For years, co-op was a side feature bolted onto campaigns built for solo play. Then Left 4 Dead proved a different model could carry an entire game. Every encounter, every resource placement, and every pacing decision assumed four players working together, and assumed that working together would sometimes fail. A lot of games have chased that architecture since. A few found it. Most did not.

Toxic Commando is also wearing a very specific name on the box. John Carpenter’s filmography sits in a particular register. It is lean, atmospheric, occasionally absurd, and always committed to its own internal logic. The banter lands, the one-liners cut through the tension, and the dread is real enough to hang in the air.

Toxic Commando brings that sensibility into game form. It feels like it could sit comfortably alongside The Thing, Escape from New York, They Live, Halloween, and Big Trouble in Little China. Carpenter’s presence is not just branding. He contributed to the game’s narrative and helped shape the tone it operates in. He also produced the main title track along with his son Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies, which sets the mood immediately.

Leon Dorsey, the CEO of a tech company called Obsidian, sets out to do something that sounds noble on paper. He greenlights an experimental drilling project in the near future meant to harness the power of the Earth’s core. It does not go that way. The project awakens an ancient threat known as the Sludge God, and the fallout turns the world into a toxic nightmare filled with undead horrors. Dorsey’s first attempt to contain what he unleashed fails, and the situation escalates fast.

Toxic Commando’s real focus is the squad. The game supports up to four players online with cross-play across PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, and its mission structure assumes teamwork rather than solo play. If Left 4 Dead is the blueprint for co-op as the main event, Toxic Commando is clearly operating in that lane. That is a meaningful design choice. It is not a solo game with co-op functionality. It is a co-op game that tolerates solo play (with AI companions). This distinction has consequences. Teamwork is the foundation, and the moment your group is separated or out of sync, the game makes sure you feel it.

Saber Interactive is not new to this space either. World War Z proved the studio understands swarm pressure, the horde model where sheer enemy volume becomes the point. Toxic Commando inherits that expertise directly. Enemy density stays high, fights are built to overwhelm lone players, and even coordinated groups can get buried when the pace spikes. It is common to finish a mission with a kill count deep into the hundreds, and sometimes higher, depending on how aggressive your squad plays and which difficulty you select.

Gunplay is a big reason those swarms stay fun instead of turning into noise. Shooting feels responsive, and the game makes small quality choices that keep you locked into the fight. The best example is that you can stay aimed down sights while reloading, which keeps your focus on the lane in front of you instead of forcing you to break posture every time you top off a magazine. When the screen is packed and you are trying to manage space, that one detail does more for the moment-to-moment flow than a dozen flashy effects ever could.

There are four difficulty settings, and you can squeak out wins on the lower two without another human player. The AI teammates are adequate, but not remarkable. They follow you, shoot whatever is closest, and teleport into vehicles if you drive off without them. They will use class abilities, revive downed players, and you can direct them to spend spare parts to repair turrets, fix vehicle engines, set traps, and open weapon crates. That is where the intelligence ends. They will use mounted turrets on vehicles, but I have never seen one use a fixed-position turret, and they will not pick up the special heavy weapons. Anything that requires real coordination is still on you. The bots do not think ahead, they do not improvise, and they do not cover the gaps a human teammate would.

The campaign is split into nine missions. The first is an introductory tutorial that you play solo, but it can be replayed online once you are in the full loop. From there, each mission pushes the narrative forward through Act 3 until you reach the conclusion. What sets Toxic Commando apart is the way Saber blends its swarm combat experience with a more open-ended level design that actually supports vehicles and long-distance traversal.

The mission regions are large and open, with hazards, zombies, mutated threats, and enough points of interest that you can spend a long time just clearing fog and checking every corner of the map. Exploration does not feel like filler, either. Points of interest and key locations shift between runs, including where you spawn and where certain objectives take place, which keeps repeat plays from feeling locked to one memorized route. Visually, the environments lean into a Pacific Northwest look early on, with tall green trees, cliffs, and mountainous sightlines. As you push deeper into the campaign, the world starts to warp around you. The Sludge God’s influence becomes more obvious, with thick swamps of sludge, darker skies, and an atmosphere that feels increasingly poisoned.

Main objectives stay varied enough to keep missions moving, and without spoiling specifics, you are often defending locations against swarms, escorting fragile equipment, and fighting to hold space long enough to survive the next push. Each mission also layers in a secondary objective that encourages you to explore instead of beelining the finish. These side tasks have you hunting down specific high-value mutated enemy types or destroying sludge growths hidden around the map. They are not always marked clearly, and that is another reason it pays to sweep the region instead of treating it like a straight line.

Usually you will come across two marked vehicles on a map, and they are a smart first stop before you start exploring. The vehicles are randomized across the six standard options, so do not expect to find the same one each time you play. Even then, they are not a free advantage. You still need to protect them and scavenge enough resources to keep them fueled and stocked with ammunition if you want the best chance of surviving what the game throws at you.

Each vehicle brings its own utility. That can be as simple as a four-door sedan outfitted with a nitro acceleration system, or as dramatic as the police car, which can use its siren to pull zombie attention before detonating. Some are built for traversal. The Maverick comes equipped with a winch, which makes it much easier to pull yourself out of thick mud and other terrain traps. Then there is the pickup truck with its infinite respawning gas canisters, but no mounted weapon.

With a full party of four, it often makes sense to split across two vehicles so you can support each other instead of moving as one easy target. The ambulance is a great example of why the choice matters. It restores health, which is perfect if nobody is running a medic, but I could not rely on it alone, especially compared to some of the more defensive options.

All of the vehicles can be customized cosmetically, whether you are changing light colors, adding graffiti tags, equipping novelty horns, or swapping in new skins. Toxic Commando also runs on a simple currency economy, with three main currencies earned through play and exploration.

Sludgite is the common one, and you will collect it in huge quantities. You can pick it up directly from the ground, usually in areas covered with sludge that tend to kick up trouble when you get too close. You also earn Sludgite at the end of missions based on performance, including kills and profile progression. Anything collected during a mission is shared across the group, so there is no need to worry about one player sprinting ahead to vacuum up loot. If you go down and the run falls apart, especially on higher difficulties, you only earn a small slice of what you collected. It is not ideal, but it is better than nothing.

This currency is primarily used for weapon attachments and tier upgrades as you level up your weapons. The other two currencies, Residium and Mortite, are much rarer. Mortite does not even enter the picture until you bump the difficulty to Hard or above. Both are mainly spent on cosmetics, whether that is a new outfit for a character, weapon skins, or the broader vehicle customizations.

Classes are where Toxic Commando’s build identity actually lives, and it is worth clearing up one thing early. You can select a preferred character when you queue up, but there is no guarantee you will get them. If someone else is already using that character when you join, the game assigns you someone else. More importantly, character choice is mostly cosmetic. Your class is selected separately and evolves as you level up, and that is what defines how you contribute to the squad.

A big part of my enjoyment came from experimenting with all four classes, so I do not want to spoil every unlock. Instead, I will keep it to the basics. As you earn skill points, your abilities evolve in ways that let you lean into your preferred play style. Strike is the pure offense option, built around harnessing the infection to launch fireballs that can wipe out clustered groups when the horde starts stacking. Medic is the safety net, with a healing aura that can stabilize a fight quickly, but it is far more effective with real teammates than with bots that refuse to step into healing range when it matters. Operator adds utility through a drone that follows you, targets nearby threats, and can ignite enemies, while also bringing helpful support tools like vehicle repair. Defender is the backbone of a coordinated team, deploying a barrier shield that protects allies from projectiles and punishes anything that pushes through it. The best part is that you can respec skill points back at the base before jumping into a mission, so you are never locked into early choices if you want to experiment or pivot once the higher difficulties start demanding more from your build. With a good squad, the classes feel like roles. With bots, the game becomes less about synergy and more about damage control.

Weapons in Toxic Commando level up through simple use, and that progression is more than a cosmetic number. As you build XP on a weapon, you can upgrade it to the next tier, moving from green to blue to purple, with each tier improving the underlying stat profile. Attachments are where the tuning really happens, affecting stats like accuracy, range, damage, handling, and fire rate, and they are not always pure upgrades. The catch is cost. Attachment purchases can get expensive fast, often running over 10,000 Sludgite for a single piece, so do not expect to be buying multiple attachments every successful run. Realistically, you are usually looking at one meaningful purchase at a time.

Once a weapon hits the top tier, you can prestige it, and that is where the system turns into a long-term grind. Prestiging resets the weapon back to level 1, which means you are starting over and giving up the comfort of a fully built gun for a while. You lose access to the attachment unlocks you had earned on that track, but in return you get exclusive skins and a stat profile you cannot access otherwise. In practice, it is not something I would recommend doing right before pushing a mission you still need to clear. Prestiging is better treated as a replay decision, a way to keep the loop fresh after you have finished the campaign and are running missions again for upgrades, cosmetics, and better builds.

Cosmetics also go deeper than a single weapon skin. Once unlocked, you can equip charms that dangle off your guns, and skins can be applied either to the weapon as a whole or to individual parts. It is a small touch, but it goes a long way in a co-op game where half the fun is showing up with a loadout that looks like it belongs to you.

Sludge is not just set dressing, either. It is an active system you are constantly routing around. Puddles slow you down, contamination climbs as you wade through it, and the game makes sure you feel the cost of taking the shortest path instead of the smartest one. Too much exposure starts to chip away at your health, and your vision clouds over with a red haze that makes it harder to read the space in front of you. It is one of the better tools Toxic Commando has for turning open maps into decision spaces. Do you push straight through a sludge-soaked shortcut to save time, knowing you are going to arrive compromised and slower to react, or do you take the longer route, stay cleaner, and keep your mobility for when the swarm hits. In a co-op game built around momentum, that choice matters more than it sounds.

That same theme carries into the defense and scrap economy, and it is also where solo play starts to fall apart. There are missions where you are asked to set up defenses and hold a location against sustained pressure, and those moments are some of the most fun Toxic Commando has to offer with real teammates. With bots, it turns into damage control. You spend more time directing the AI and babysitting their decisions than you do focusing on the zombies trying to chew through your jugular. In one run, I was tasked with setting up defenses at a church, and every placement required spare parts. I had already spent scrap earlier in the mission opening weapon caches, and because the AI will not venture off to hunt for additional scrap or grab special weapons, I hit the defense phase underprepared and stayed underprepared. The horde came anyway. Hundreds on screen, bodies stacking, and a timer ticking down while the defenses melted.

It gets even worse when the special mutated enemies show up. Those larger threats hit harder, soak up damage, and punish hesitation in a way basic zombies simply do not. In co-op, that is where roles and coordination matter most. Solo, it is another layer of pressure on top of an already compromised setup. That is the difference between “co-op supported” and “co-op designed.” The game is not unfair. It is simply honest about what it expects from the team.

The UI and quality of life design are mostly strong, but there are a few friction points worth calling out. The biggest one is that the entire game is always online, even if you are running solo, which means there is no true pause. When you are in a mission, the world keeps moving. If you step away, the swarms do not politely wait for you to come back.

Where Toxic Commando does shine is in how it communicates results and progression. Missions end with multiple summary screens that break down everything you just accomplished. Weapon XP, profile XP, class XP, kill counts broken out by enemy type, and any weapon attachments you unlocked along the way. The only catch is that unlocked attachments still need to be purchased, so the end screen is a progress report, not an instant upgrade.

Loot rules are also mostly cooperative-friendly, but not everything is shared equally. A lot of pickups are handled in a way that avoids drama, and ammo is easy for everyone to stay topped off, but medkit crates and combat gadget crates are different. Those have a limited pool of grabs that the team shares, which means you do need to be mindful about who is taking what, especially on higher difficulties when resources start mattering more.

If you are not using voice chat, the game does include a standard radial communication wheel that covers the basics, and it helps keep random squads moving in the same direction. It also has a solid ping system that lets you point out almost anything in the world. A location on the map, hidden ammo, a vehicle, a threat you want the team to focus, or a dangerous enemy that just entered the fight. Those tools go a long way in a co-op game where not everyone is going to be on mic.

That said, voice chat is a godsend here, whether you use the in-game option or your platform’s party system. The maps are open, the objectives encourage detours, and the pressure spikes fast. Being able to call out a vehicle, a secondary target, or a resource need in real time makes a bigger difference than any UI prompt ever could.

The base helps smooth that loop out. It is not just a menu hub. It is a functional space where you can test weapons and throwable gadgets before committing to them, and it even includes a target practice minigame that makes loadout experimentation feel quick instead of tedious.

On PS5 Pro, performance is mostly solid. The game defaults to its quality mode, which runs at 30fps, and that is a no for me. Performance mode is the way to play and delivers a much smoother, more responsive experience. Load times were heavier than I expected early on, but most of the hitching and stuttering I ran into at the start of my review period had already been patched out prior to release. Online, I had no real complaints. Whether I was playing with the SelectButton crew or jumping into Quick Match with randoms, I did not run into noticeable lag, disconnects, or the kind of teleporting enemies that can ruin a co-op shooter.

All of this adds up to a game that knows exactly who it is for. Toxic Commando is at its best with friends, when you are splitting across vehicles, calling out secondary objectives, and recovering from the moments where everything goes sideways. The open maps and shifting points of interest make replaying missions feel worthwhile, the class system gives squads real identity, and the progression loop has enough depth to keep you chasing upgrades long after the campaign credits roll. If you are planning to play solo with bots, you can get through the lower difficulties, but you are going to see the seams quickly. This is a co-op shooter that comes alive when you have real teammates making real decisions.

Simply Put

John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando is the best game in years to carry the Left 4 Dead torch forward, not because it copies the formula, but because it understands why that formula worked and builds on it with open regions, vehicles, and swarm pressure that feel purpose-built for co-op. The bot experience is serviceable on easier settings but cannot replace human coordination when the game demands real teamwork, and while the cosmetic economy can get a bit pricey, it never gets in the way of the core progression. At $40, it punches above its weight, and with the right squad it is exactly the kind of co-op shooter that sinks its hooks in and does not let go.

Note: John Carpenter's Toxic Commando was reviewed on PlayStation 5. A digital copy of the game was provided by the publisher/developer.