John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando Review: Undead Mayhem Unleashed

Here’s Arka presenting Gameffine’s Toxic Commando review

As of 2026, there are a lot of co-op horde shooters in the market. The genre exploded in popularity when the Left 4 Dead games hit the market. Later down the line, a good many games tried to replicate the success seen by the Left 4 Dead games, with a dear favorite of us being the Vermintide games. With time, the lack of innovation made all game launches within the genre feel same-ish—something good with friends if you wanted to put your brain to rest and decided to shoot things up. Then came John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando, trying their hand at a table already full of players. John Carpenter’s reputation as a filmmaker indeed precedes him, and the developer Saber already had enough experience in the genre with games like World War Z and Space Marine 2, so naturally I decided to take the game out for a spin and see what it’s really made of.

Ashes of the Undead

Toxic Commando takes the story to a near future where experiments with the Earth’s core led to the awakening of an entity known as the Sludge God. The Sludge God is an entity with the power of turning healthy men and women into unliving zombies—resulting in a worldwide zombie apocalypse. The story is about a ragtag band of mercenaries who were employed to head into Ground Zero and extract the research done on the drilling process. Well, that’s pretty much it. Throughout the missions, players will be taking their own characters from the band of mercenaries and then head back into no man’s land to take out key targets or secure key intel to put an end to the Sludge God’s madness once and for all.

The missions, in key zombie shooter fashion, aren’t memorable in any way, shape, or form. The game’s fun with friends or with randoms—who will keep roaming through the map on their own, go AFK for the entire mission, and/or fire on you till you get knocked out. So you know, pretty average afternoon in a multiplayer lobby. If you’re someone who doesn’t have a party to accompany them, the game will add bots to the lobby in place of the other players. The bots aren’t any better in terms of assists or taking out groups of enemies, but they’re still miles better than the weirdos that frequent the multiplayer lobbies.

Refined Chaos, Recycled Ideas

Toxic Commando utilizes a mission-based system where players select the mission and then wait for matchmaking or immediately drop into the mission area. Missions have main objectives and occasional side objectives, which reward XP for leveling up. While it’s not mentioned, there is a special resource called sludgite that needs to be farmed from special infested nodes within the map. The sludgite helps in unlocking customization options and also comes in useful when upgrading weapons and abilities. Upgrades are key to surviving in higher difficulties and for progressing through the game, so stockpiling sludgite is a necessity (even though the game does not explicitly tell you this). Spare parts are another resource that is mostly mission-locked. Spare parts unlock gates, gadgets, upgrade crates, and so much more within the game. I felt that the game offered way more opportunities for spending spare parts than for earning them, as the spawn points for spare parts are few and are far apart from most mission objective locations. This compounds the difficulty, since you can only carry one spare part at a time. This does block regular access to certain key areas in certain missions, which felt like really bad game design to me.

Toxic Commando builds up a semi-open world within the missions, allowing the squad to approach mission objectives at their own pace. You can roam around on foot, or get a vehicle to ram through the horde! Be wary of the fuel meter, though—running out of fuel inside a sludge zone is definitely a recipe for disaster. The game does encourage exploration—but I’d say it took some time for the exploration to grow on me. I’m accustomed to most zombie shooters being fully linear by nature—playing one where I was forced to move from place to place to farm sludgite and spare parts to ensure I could get to and hold key parts of the map as part of the objectives wasn’t something I’d done before.

Exploring these large maps adds loads of opportunities and ways to execute the objectives and is necessary if you want to get the side objectives completed (which does reward sludgite). Seeing the infested scenery up close does mean you can never get too comfortable, as a variety of infested things are as always lurking around the corner (my favorite is probably an infested hulk of a creature called “goon,” as killing it makes me a “gooner”).

The game tries to combine elements from Dying Light and Back 4 Blood in one game, which makes for an awesome zombie shooter experience. Just like Dying Light, the main characters are infected—allowing them to unlock cool superpowers and not turn feral themselves because of a special collar that suppresses the mutagen, apparently. While that’s just main character syndrome, I’d say it works out quite well as a mechanic that helps retain interest in the game in the long run. These powers can be upgraded, similar to the guns and other weapons you use within the game. Earning these upgrades is necessary for doing well (AKA surviving) in higher difficulties or earning more sludgite (AKA more progression).

Neon, Noise, and Nightmare Fuel

The atmospheric design for a world infested with zombies is really good. It feels dark, with the occasional light from infrastructures on fire. The designs of enemies are also really good, reeking of the classic “Carpenter touch.” The humans who lost their minds are essentially “zombies,” but they look like a combination between zombies and the infested from The Last of Us. This is a really good design decision, as they are, in essence, infested by the Sludge God.

Toxic Commando doesn’t exactly push any barriers on the sound design, yet it does just enough to stay relevant as a zombie shooter. Most gamers like shooting stuff up with heavy rock music playing in the background (as long as they do not mask the atmospheric sounds). I especially like the loud warning sounds that play just before a horde hits up the squad, as it gives just the amount of adrenaline needed to adjust my seating position before I get mauled to death by the horde or knocked out by team fire.

Toxic Commando has done really decent work on the optimization. The game runs really well with DLSS, and even the frame generation implementation is good (since I’m on an NVIDIA card). I’m surprised at how stable the game runs even on high settings even when a large horde approaches (and I mean enormous). During peak moments when a lot of action was happening on the screen, or when there were a lot of effects to render, there were some noticeable dips. But it ran smoothly otherwise, for the most part.

Real Talk

Toxic Commando is a fun-to-play coop zombie shooter that allows up to four players to squad up and take down some zombies. The game plays it safe and doesn’t really add too much to “innovate” in an otherwise crowded genre, yet it plays surprisingly well for a game. If you have a squad of your own, give it a go and see how visceral zombie slaying feels.

FINAL SCORE: 70/100