John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando Review

There is a simple joy in casually shooting the shit with your mates. This same joy can be made readily available in video games, where you’re often shooting shit with your mates, preferably in a co-operative fashion. Sadly, the recent boom of battle royale games has meant that a particular sheen of sweat is required for most group outings, because your mates are facing off against other people’s mates – there is no room for a casual atmosphere here.

This atmosphere seemingly peaked back in the days of the Left4Dead series, where the journey absolutely felt just as fun as the destination. Wading through a horde of decomposing dickheads felt every bit as fun as locking horns with some hulking monstrosity, and few have been able to replicate it since.

That is until now, where John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando understands that same journey – but posits a genuinely brilliant question: What if we also had cars?

This fella is coming in hot for a hug

Toxic Commando (ToxiCom) is a four-player horde-based shooter experience that will see you and three others (AI or otherwise) traipse through a level blasting mutated zombie folk and the odd special monster mate, completing objectives and working towards a big finale for the mission. It’s a familiar premise that you’ve likely done before in at least a half a dozen various flavours. The two main twists that elevate and separate ToxiCom from the myriad of other similar experiences comes in the form of:

• It has a slavishly dedicated aesthetic of a goofy 80’s action/horror flick
• Vehicles form a central anchor to everything you do

I am a simple bloke, to me these are strokes of unmitigated genius. Horde shooters seemingly peaked in the days of L4D – to the degree that everything since has felt quite derivative and samey. A huge portion of this can be attributed to uninspired settings (woohoo, another zombie apocalypse) and formulas that either divert too much from expectations or aggressively adhere to imagined expectations to the point of boredom. You may feel I am doing a lot of talking about other games rather than ToxiCom at this point, but please, bear with me.

Most normal trip to Coles with the lads

To explain the aesthetic, you first need to understand John Carpenter. The dude is both a filmmaker and a composer, best known for bangers like Halloween, The Thing and Escape From New York, so he knows what makes that kind of ye olde 80s era goodness tick. For this game, he contributed to the story (and the banger music), helping create something that hums to the tune of equal parts badass, corny 80s action movie, and unmistakably old school gag horror. It’s a clear vibe that does a lot to elevate your standard goober shooter experience and has thankfully stuck the landing. Though I will admit that if you aren’t a fan of this kind of homage-like nonsense you will likely find yourself thinking the lunkhead player characters within the game were made in a lab to intentionally piss you off. 

Narrative-wise you are dealing with an out-there tale of hapless mercenaries doing a pretty bog standard Mcguffin delivery run before being beset by sludgie bog zombies and eventually an enormous tentacle beast. They detonate the Macguffin in the creature’s face to escape and are then greeted by the dude they were attempting to deliver it to: A doctor who is trying to rid the world of this ancient monster and desperately needed the Macguffin to do so. Cue the mercenaries becoming the TOXIC COMMANDOS™ and working with the good doctor to right their wrong and try to salvage the one star Uber delivery rating they are likely to get from blowing up other peoples Macguffins.

The Humvee even has a DVD player to keep the backseat kids quiet

The main structure of your missions will see you exploring sludgified alpine landscapes and forgotten facilities to get the necessary codes/bombs/doovers needed to assist Doctor Leon with his plan to annihilate the eldritch tentacle beast – most of which are beset by hordes of aforementioned bog zombies (‘Homo Mortis’, according to the doc) and occasionally bigger, scarier ‘special’ beasts that fill out the required rhythm of heightened tension when progressing the mission. The missions take place over a generously sized biome, which lends very well to the title’s second big talking point: vehicles.

In most missions, you will need to scrounge up some wheels – often done so by investigating the nearest landmark to your starting point. You’ll cross your fingers and hope upon hope that you might find a hardy service vehicle (perhaps even a military Humvee), but quite often you will need to make do with an affordable family sedan that would look right at home on Facebook Marketplace. You can then direct your newly christened chariot to the next objective and start feeling the rising urge to poke your nose into every optional side area to perhaps find speccy weapons, spare parts (more on those later) or even a cooler car. 

Part of this desire to find a cooler car is entirely centred around one of the most awesome features within ToxiCom: THE WINCH. Yessir, the humble steel cable can be found on a few vehicles in the game, and once acquired it opens new gameplay doors in a very literal sense. Some loot doors can only be opened with this hooked wonder, cracking nuts to feast on the goodies within. You can also fire a winch into an enemy to create a bloody mess where they once stood. Even the more humdrum and traditional use of the winch is a blast, as the alpine landscape of the sludgelands is home to all manner of waist deep mudtraps that are made infinitely better when you can attach the winch to something and tug yourself out. Hell, if you managed to keep the janky sedan from the start of your mission as a secondary mobile base, you can use that same winch to assist whatever poor idiot is trying to trek it through the mudmire. Advanced winching techniques involve using it to make violent sudden turns, as well as attacking it to archways to launch the vehicle into the air. Fair warning: Motion sickness is likely for those in first-person mode within the vehicle.

Does that factory say “Explosives”…?

This core of exploring, fighting and escaping forms an incredibly addictive loop with your mates – scrounging and slaying before piling into your beloved shitbox and inching closer to doing what you were actually tasked with doing, your in-game avatars talking trash and refusing to take anything serious. You are occasionally punctuated with a high tension moment, where a more sizable force or foe urges you to consider if you have lingered for too long on a sidepath and should perhaps get back on track. It is this ebb and flow that makes moments of high intensity appreciable, while the more mundane task of sniffing out goodies remains a clear attentive priority.

Your missions will then offer a range of to-do’s depending on what you are currently trying to achieve, where the ToxiCom developers have done their best to ensure that mission objectives try to break the usual mold of “Dig in and hold out for a while” crescendo-type events. Across the game’s eight missions, you might be escorting a critical vehicle to a location, standing in specific spots to boost a WiFi signal or lugging a special battery that projects a Do-Not-Die field for your mates. They are creative without turning the experience on its head and make for a great change of pace from the usual hold-outs. With more missions promised, the curse of repetition across the existing handful of options may be abated, but it still looms.

To speak to hold-outs however, they are a blast. It isn’t a horde game without having some kind of magnificent last-stand moment while a generator charges up or a makeshift bomb ticks down. The spare parts you scrounge up throughout your travels can be exchanged for big ticket defence items like electrified floor panels, mortars and bait traps. Then you dig your arse in and weather the storm as a tsunami of bog goobers pour towards you from every angle, supported by their bigger scarier bog-boogers. If you are successful, the dust will clear and show a masterpiece of carnage, whereas failing will leave your heart pounding in your chest and a deep desire to fix your mistakes and show those gloopy bastards who is boss. It’s a great time.

The winch is perhaps the greatest addition to modern gaming in years

The main genesis of these failures comes in the form of mismanaged resources in the face of those bigger enemies. The game touts an impressive array of special baddies, ranging from the human-sized Skunk and his toxic cloud of poison, to the Goon, a bristled baddy who loves to charge at you, all the way up to the hulking Slob, a more traditional tank-like enemy that wants nothing more than to pound you and your friends into paste. Underestimating or being under-prepared for the myriad of special gunkers can wreak havoc on a team. Simple things like sticking together and a generous amount of reserve ammunition ready can do a lot to keep y’all safe, but all it takes is one mistake to start a panic scramble. Maybe you saw some delicious Residium off the beaten path and figured it would only take a moment to grab it, but BOOM – a snare has now grabbed you and your friends are 140 metres away. Luckily, there are ways to both respawn and self revive within the game, so these mistakes can serve as a learning experience.

A player also needs to take note of their current player class to best provide value to your gameplay. Turns out the sludge monster infecting you at the start of the game has leveraged an amount of beneficial gunk-power to your talented mercenary self, meaning you now have a humble super powers alongside your gun-toting talents. These archetypes are fairly standard in their applications – a healer class can restore HP, the striker can briefly fire enormous energy blasts, you get the idea – but the real depth comes from the varied builds that can be enjoyed once you start to level that class. Skill point-based trees allow you to tailor what you are doing, benefitting both your active ability and your gunplay stats to start specialising your commando in whatever way suits you best. My experience started to lean towards shifting my fireballs to instead be a passive sky gun, so I could throw it up to nuke baddies while I continued to shoot unimpeded, handy for holding an area with air support. A friendly medic could shift his healing aura to being targeted on a particular space, rather than radiating from his person. There is an amount of depth that means you and your buddies can play the same class in an entirely different way from each other, keeping your sludge exploring fresh and fun on replays.

When you aren’t manifesting fireballs or directing kill-drones, guns are your bread and butter. Any enemy can be felled with enough firepower, and the game supports your munitions with an intensely deep amount of customisation options and level up opportunities. Attachments and ranking up guns allow you to squeeze every bit of firepower out of a varied range of iconic gun types, be they rifles, shotguns or assault rifles. You can fiddle with these stats between missions and then pick whatever gun you want before starting one – but guns can still be found in game should your tastes change mid-mission. There is also a spectacular amount of personalised visual customisation to be had if you so wish, with in-game mission money allowing you to buy colour swatches that can be applied to your gun piecemeal. A golden desert eagle, with a neon pink scope and a wood-coloured grip? Why not, the game is doing nothing to stop you from carrying a rainbow-coloured Kalashnikov – go for it.

Weekend bingo goes off pretty hard at the local church

The main concern that stayed with me is the very real issue that plagues all co-operative shooting experiences: what happens when you aren’t playing with friends? Realistically all it takes is one shithead taking off in the car and wrecking it to deeply compromise the Toxic Commando experience. The game doesn’t exactly guardrail against this kind of thing, and the alternative of playing exclusively with Bots isn’t a great comfort, given that the bots are dumber than dogshit. It is entirely why “gaming experience may change during online online” has the deeper meaning that it does, considering BallStomper88 may be entering your lobby at any moment to winch the Humvee into a deep ravine. My advice? Convince at least one of your mates to come along for the ride. They will likely have a blast.

The other criticism has to be leveraged against the lack of visual customisation for the Mercenaries themselves. The game has launched with a doofy Day One special edition that contains unique outfits for each of our misfits, but after painting a sniper rifle with a purple-to-orange gradient as a standard feature it feels bafflingly odd that no consideration was given for letting us put some visual identity to our avatars. Why can’t I paint Ruby’s jacket in colours that agree with me? Why can I slap a kitty-cat decal on my pickup truck, but not on Walter’s back? It feels like a depth of opportunity was passed up to sell some very boring skins in the normal traditional way.

Final Thoughts

Blending high-octane action with 80s pulp flair, John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando delivers a chaotic co-op experience that feels like a love letter to the director’s iconic aesthetic. It’s basically a Stranger Things-themed Left4Dead meets Mudrunner, which sounds ridiculous on paper but somehow has manifested into the freshest breath of air in the horde shooter space in years. While the core mission loop could lean into repetition after a few runs, the clever mix of class-based strategy, vehicle combat, and required player coordination should keep the momentum from stalling.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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