John Carpenter's poisonous commando kills 80s horror spin on left 4
Blog Andrew Joseph 26 Aug , 2025 0
Considering it was revealed to the world through a trailer that included four zombie bombers singing in Bon Jovi's “You Give Love a Bad Name” John Carpenter's Toxic Commando More interesting than now. It's equally inspired by the 1980s supernatural horror and companion action movies, it's clumsy and stupid…but never the Batman Banana as you'd expect, it's really about fighting an entity called Sludge God. But although that's not the case InterestingThis is pleasure. You may have forgotten the 2023 reveal trailer, but after three hours of co-op missions, I don't think the toxic commando will fade away due to its surprising stability due to its surprising stability left 4 Dead– Similar antics.
While its introduction resembles a story shooter with cutscenes, plot points and a knowledge stage with John Carpenter himself as a parody chair, the toxic commando is clearly designed as a regular destination for teams of four friends who can repeat the mission. Each expedition was conducted on a reasonably sized open map with a handful of optional targets and looted beside the main targets of the mission. Without a ticking timer or shrinking circle, you can spend time collecting everything, searching for every dot, and usually messing around with your friends before pushing it to the end of the task. Surprisingly, at least before the tribe puts pressure on it.
Developed by Saber Interactive, the Toxic Commando is built on the studio’s current signature tribe technology that can provide hundreds of sprint zombies at the same time, allowing enemies to climb up walls, such as reverse waterfalls of rotting meat. In many ways, the Toxic Commando feels like the successor to the game where the technology originated, World War ZEven with nearly the same mechanics – you can lower incoming enemies with the same machine gun, mortar and electrical format grid during frequent keeping online defense targets. But this time, all of this is presented in glorious horror aesthetics. Who wants zombies to look like humans, like light monsters with the death dimension?
When these freaks are introduced into a very healthy arsenal, these freaks burst and rupture. They are all based on real-world guns (except for powerful track guns, scattered with enemies like bowling nails), and are divided into conventional shotguns, SMGs, sniper rifles and other formats that do not start with “S”. What saves them from totally ordinary is how they use the exaggerated brave touting of super violent B movies – all sputtering muzzles, wide bullet spreads and explosive effects. The legs were cut off, the chest was torn apart, and the brain was lifted out of the broken skull. Everything is the same as you want in a game that is related to things directorship.
The load you choose defines the experience of combat that is much larger than the four character categories, which feels like a smaller enhancement to standard FPS action rather than key battlefield characters. Everyone is defined by a special ability – the operator uses a drone that automatically bombs the enemy for a few seconds, a strike can release a large amount of energy explosion, a doctor has an effect therapy, and a defender can be placed in obstacles that cause damage. For my hours at least, these abilities came in handy in pinch, but hardly guided my game. Perhaps filling in the skill tree will give each class a stronger definition, but now it seems that regular shooting is the main event.
A lot of mowed grass (a lot ofZombies are the crux of the toxic commando targets. Sometimes this will involve special infections of genre deals, which are largely as the remaining 4 dead do (grab your stickiness, the clumsy people who charge you, the creepy spit out at you. This is mainly the fare for the digital co-shooter game, but in a few missions I played, there is a weird glow. One mission sees the map covered by fortresses, storms of life, and the only way to navigate between safety bags is to drive an ambulance that can trick the stream into stealing people sitting there. This is a truly coherent grid of environment, situations and equipment design.
Whether the mission requires one or not, vehicles are just as important to toxic commando zombies and guns. The spaced goals and the open nature of the map mean you need some wheels to effectively cover the ground, especially since that ground is usually a carpet that is actually carpet by the undead. Cars like armored calfs are perfect for protection and double-as-beating rams – you just need to occasionally climb onto the zombies on board like the particularly sick monkeys in Safari.
All vehicles have special abilities, such as the healing halo of ambulances or the Thunder’s flamethrower, but are actually winches comparable to family sedans. Essentially, the grapple hook can be fired into various anchor points, which can be used to tear off the hinges, open chest treasure containers, and pull the vehicle onto slippery slopes. Look, the God of Sludge has covered every map in his infinite sticky wisdom, covering a huge gloop, so without the method of mudrunner-lite you will rotate the tires and have nowhere to go.
Admittedly, there is little new or experimental about the toxic commando, but it is really interesting here. It's a more open view of the vibrant adventure of the left 4's death, driven by the feeling of “arcane evil” that makes Call of Duty's zombie mode feel so solid aesthetically. However, there are some issues that threaten this. Every task I performed felt that due to the decrease in resources, I kicked out of the wind in the last period. There is a shortage of supply of health kits, ammunition can be a bit tricky, and spare parts (a currency that unlocks special weapons and defensive structures) can only be found in a limited number of loot caches. By the end of a mission, it might feel like your odds are really bad, and while I'm glad I need to draw tensions in my final goal and create a challenge peak, restocking ammunition just finds you're given a magazine does feel a little unbalanced in a game where zombies arrive at trucks. I had more fun when my bullets were abundant and my blood was overflowing like wine in the early minutes, so I wasn't sure if the flow and tone matched the current resource level.
But, what is even more worrying is progress. All weapons have separate XP bars and must be upgraded to specific milestones to unlock different modifications. When you unlock the mod, you need to spend money to make it actually fit the weapon, and each currency costs thousands of dollars. I can't help but look at the entire arsenal and imagine that I need to sink hundreds of hours into the toxic commando to achieve a functional diversity load. This system will attract you to choose a single favorite system rather than encourage you to switch constantly between tasks. This combined with three different currencies and palette trading role skins makes me a little suspicious that the sludge from the on-site service contaminated me otherwise had a good explosion of this. But these grinding dilemmas can also be found in Saber Warhammer 40,000: Space Navy 2and they didn't stop it from becoming one of my favorite games of 2024.
That's not to say I want John Carpenter's toxic commando to be around the same impact that the Marines have. But as long as the entire game has solid missions that do replay, I do think that strong shooting and entertainment enemies have plenty of opportunities to make sure it is a house in a friendship group that they re-watched the 80s horrors over and over until the VHS wears out. Whether or not they will unlock the attachments of the weapon they want…well, we have to wait to find out.
Matt Purslow is the executive editor of the IGN function.