Partially from the mind of 80s action-horror wizard John Carpenter, Toxic Commando is a four-player co-op FPS that pits quip-spouting mercenary dickheads against a goopy eldritch beast known as the ‘Sludge God’ – an immense block of living phlegm that emerged from deep within the Earth after science nerds dug too hungrily downwards. This, of course, gave rise to goop zombies, big goop monsters, tentacles, and a gameplay loop that involves thwarting aforementioned goop baddies to further the goals of the good Doctor Leon in trying to fix this sticky fuck up.
The big twist on the gameplay is a heavy reliance on vehicles for getting around and interacting with the world – meaning you and your mates need to look after your ride or risk being stuck on foot. It’s an experience that doesn’t lend well to an offhand explanation – it’s too easy to boil down the description to “Oh, it’s Left4Dead but with cars” – but I have to emphasise that this does zero justice to Toxic Commando as a whole. Oh, and John Carpenter’s involvement is one of aesthetic and flavour, composing music and injecting 80s era fun into whatever crevice can manage it. This is the dude who directed The Thing, so meaty monstrosities are prevalent throughout.
Allow Adam and I to speak to John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando, and why a short squirt into its muddy mayhem may well reveal that it has the juice. The sauce. Hell, it may even have the spice.
Ash
Zombie Shooter.
Yeah, yeah, I know that’s a term that deactivates brain cells – I can see your eyes glazing over in real time – but stay with me on this one. My brave, lukewarm opinion is that the Zombie Shooter genre is not an overplayed card, but rather one that is swamped with mediocrity. For every decent brain-gobbling bastard blaster there are dozens of half-cocked, creatively bankrupt dumpster fires to try and navigate. Even the ones with a modicum of effort put in seemingly end up lacking a pulse, so I will make a promise now to avoid mentioning Back4Blood.
Our preview experience seemed to be a pretty complete build of the game, kicking off at the very beginning of the narrative where our team of mercenary meat-heads balls’d up a critical delivery to the good Doctor Leon resulting in all of us being infected with narrative-driven sludge disease and meaning we now need to team up with the Doc to kick ass across a series of dynamic missions in the hope of saving the world. When I say dynamic, I mean that it seems like parts of them change on replay, considering that a mission that we spectacularly failed at was quite different when we restarted it.
In a mission, your ragtag group of mercenaries will be traipsing across a sludge-infested world teeming with goop zombies. Like most Co-op Zombie Shooters™, you’d do well to stick together – but environmental hazards and the lure of goodies off the beaten path sing a siren song to split the party and dig around. While Left4Dead could often feel quite tight, ToxiCom has a lot of room to manoeuvre if you see fit. The big switch-up is that these large spaces really do call for transport, so a vehicle almost becomes the fifth team member. Serving as a weapon platform, a healing centre or even just a comfy way to get somewhere quickly, your car is quick to become a central point within a mission. The sticky landscape of the Sludge God is also unbearably muddy, so you will get the odd opportunity to MudRunner your way out of a deep bog by using the winch (when you aren’t using it to rip doors off loot rooms).
The relative safety of the WellPlayed wagon
Losing the car early on in a mission highlights how much distance you need to travel on foot. Even with a range of great guns on hand (with many more to loot throughout) and class-based abilities, the real winning class in my eyes is still automobile, if only for how the game starts to ratchet up the horde of baddies over the course of a mission. As you hoof it from objective to objective, enjoying the gunplay, you can’t help but feel your bullets starting to dwindle, and you start staring hungrily at the optional parts of the map that promise guns and ammo. These areas are often home to the bigger goons within the game, so you need to weigh up the commitment of looting these areas, while still lamenting the loss of your ride.
I’ve barely scratched the surface of Toxic Commando, but it’s a formula that is hitting all the right notes for me. When the moment-to-moment gameplay is more than simply oh no, zombies, you can start to stretch out and find comfort in resource management, scrounging and having a crucial central resource like your beloved party wagon. The biggest relief was the simple truth that the game felt engaging and comfortable to play – even rewarding with regards to how careful engagement of goo-dudes could help avoid feeling overwhelmed. And the moments where you did buy the farm, you could readily accept that you didn’t approach the situation in the best way possible. The simple fact that failing a mission left me wanting to try again speaks volumes – compared to 2021’s Back4Blood, which left me desperately wanting to do something else. Yeah, I know I said I would avoid mentioning B4B – but it’s the best recent example I got. Sorry.
Adam taking a mud nap
Adam
So, Ash mentioned that the two of us and a pair of our mutual mates spent a significant amount of time bumbling around in seriously suped-up sedans and muck-ignoring Jeeps, but what foes did we face when we weren’t busy burning rubber? To Toxic Commando’s credit, its flavour of zombie-adjacent shambler stands out for two reasons: variety and sound design.
A hallmark of Left 4 Dead’s zombies (I promise that will be the last mention) is how instantly recognisable they are, and how each threat necessitates a particular approach. The sludge monsters in Toxic Commando follow a similar road, though they aren’t constrained to bipedal baddies. Tentacles that burst from the earth to whip the shit out of you are just as common a sight as a massive brute with tiny little weak points on its back. Nukers who peel through the pack to detonate in your face are joined by Stalkers who hang at the back to fire projectiles from afar. Skunks are walking plagues, buffing their fleshy friends in a nearby radius, while the standard Roamers make up the bulk of the horde. Each mob was comprised of a different set of monsters, making each encounter a little puzzle of who to take out first to give your team the best chance of survival. Granted, we solved those puzzles with callouts like “focus on the lanky bastard,” but that didn’t dull the experience at all.
You might expect variety in your zombie shooter enemies, but what I wasn’t expecting was to be haunted by their cries. Each goop ghoul has a unique audio callout, just like…that game I said I’d stop referencing, letting you know by sound alone what you’re up against. The difference here, however, is that these guys clearly retain some semblance of humanity, as they can splutter out a few legible words from time to time. The best example from our preview time was with running Nukers who would, on occasion, signal the bass drop for Skrillex by shouting “oh my god” before turning into a ball of fire and flesh. It’s not just the implication that these poor souls might be aware of their current situation that I find upsetting; it’s the dread that comes with hearing these callouts, not from the foe in my crosshair, but from the nasher at my back.
If guns aren’t your go-to, by all means deploy some blunt force to your problems
To wrap up what has been a rather silly preview, I want to touch on Toxic Commando’s inherent silliness quickly. Considering the man whose name is on the box directed They Live, it should come as no surprise that Toxic Commado employs weapons-grade cheesy dialogue. I’m not talking about Marvel snark; this is pure 80s shlock that no living being would say with sincerity. I know for a fact that when reviews drop next year, the game’s writing will be called into question as a negative, but my personal taste for so-bad-it’s-good chatter was met time and again while playing with this band of dipshits. So much so that a particular line during a cutscene has been seared into my consciousness thanks to its stupidity and the voice actor’s commitment to the bit. Spicy.
John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando releases on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on March 12, 2026.
Previewed on PC using code provided by the publisher
