REVIEW – John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando tells you exactly what kind of world it is selling right from the title: zombies, filth, washed-up losers, cars, guns, and a thick layer of synth-soaked apocalypse. This could have turned into a lovable trash-cult game, but the final result is much more uneven than that. Toxic Commando often nails the mood, yet as a co-op zombie grinder it just as often collapses under its own weight. It captures the Carpenter surface beautifully, only to forget far too often that atmosphere alone is not enough to carry a game.

The story begins where common sense has long since walked off the job: sometime in the near future, some corporate scheme unleashes an abomination called the Sludge God, which quickly turns the surrounding area into an undead hellscape. Cleaning up the mess does not fall to some spotless elite unit, of course, but to four classic outsiders who are loud, dangerous, and feel much more like a desperate last option than a carefully considered choice. The story clearly locks into Carpenter’s wavelength, but you never quite shake the feeling that it is more stylish set dressing than a truly strong foundation.

The game features four heroes and four classes, which do a good job of covering different playstyles. Strike is the classic offensive role, Medic keeps the team alive, Operator handles the technical side, and Defender fills the tank slot. The good news is that Toxic Commando is not balanced in a way that only works with perfect team coordination. If you do not want to fuss over precise role assignment every step of the way, the game will not beat you over the head for it. That suits it well, because the whole design feels like it sometimes just wants the player to smash straight through hellish hordes with brute force.

To support that, it also gives you a large and reasonably varied arsenal. The weapons behave differently enough that experimenting with them feels worthwhile, and the upgrade systems leave plenty of room to fine-tune your character. For players willing to sink real time into it, the game offers more than enough systems to tinker with. It is just a shame that it takes a much longer and clumsier road than it should to get there.

The atmosphere is there, the priorities much less so

One of Toxic Commando‘s biggest problems is that it tries to cram too many things into itself at once. Shooting, off-road driving, semi-open maps, zombie hordes, boss fights, defense sections, scavenging, classes, upgradeable skills, RPG elements – none of these is a bad idea on its own, but together they often overload the game instead of enriching it. The problem is not that it feels empty. Quite the opposite: the problem is that it never seems to know what it should have cut back on.

You feel that most clearly in the rhythm of the missions. The maps are large, the objectives run long, and they often lack the tight pacing that makes the best games in this genre truly work. Just think of Left 4 Dead: those missions are short, intense, and always keep the player moving. Even Saber’s own World War Z had a much better grasp of how important it is for a co-op zombie shooter not to stall out in the middle of a run. Toxic Commando, by contrast, sprawls too often, and by the time it finally seems ready to take off, some of its momentum has already bled away.

It does not help that the progression system is heavily grind-driven. It is not enough to simply level up: you also have to gather sludge seeds, spare parts, and other resources before you can finally unlock the piece of gear or upgrade you have been eyeing. Because of that, levelling up never really feels like a reward. It feels more like checking off one more task on a running to-do list. You get back to base hoping this is finally the run that unlocks your new toy, only to realize you are still a few hundred pieces short of whatever random material the game wants from you. That is not the kind of progression that makes you lean back with satisfaction.

When the Swarm Engine takes over, the game finally shows what it can do

Thankfully, Saber’s Swarm Engine can still remind you why it was easy to get excited about this thing in the first place. At its best, Toxic Commando is genuinely impressive in both spectacle and atmosphere. When monsters start crashing into you by the thousand, when a defense section actually puts real pressure on the team, or when you have to punch your way through a zombie horde with a car, the game finally grabs that mad apocalyptic action-movie energy you wanted from it right from the opening minutes. In those moments, it is genuinely easy to get swept up in it.

The problem is that those high points are too often separated by dull detours. Before Toxic Commando really gets moving, it has a habit of running the same tired loops again and again. A little fuel hunt here, charging some device there, then the familiar “defend this point for X amount of time” objective. Those templates have been worn so thin by now that they struggle to produce much excitement on their own. The game can surge to life in an instant, but it can lose its momentum just as quickly, and that leaves the overall experience far more uneven than it should be.

That contradiction more or less defines the entire game. You can feel how desperately it wants to stuff everything it possibly can into this package. For 40 euros, it undeniably offers a lot, and anyone who has a weakness for these mid-budget, slightly rough, but enthusiastic co-op action games will absolutely find things to like here. But to really meet it on its own terms, you have to be the kind of player who enjoys cars, semi-open maps, hordes, boss fights, upgradeable skills, and, more generally, a game that keeps trying to throw everything it has at you all at once.

It really works with friends, much less so on your own

Toxic Commando was clearly never built to let you grit your teeth and take on the apocalypse as some noble lone wolf. This is, at its core, an online co-op game, and just about every part of it screams that fact. If someone expects to comfortably power through it alone in a clean, easy-to-digest solo mode, they should probably be suspicious from the start. You can theoretically play with NPC companions, but even that still requires a live internet connection, so the “fine, I’ll just do it by myself” option does not really work the way it ought to. Worse still, lag, connection hitches, and general network headaches can still rear their head there too. In private sessions, that is especially irritating, because that is exactly where you would assume the game might finally leave you alone.

That was more or less what the review period made obvious as well. Whenever the crew was unavailable, or a proper online session simply was not happening, solo play was the fallback. And that was not very fun. On your own, it becomes obvious very quickly how heavily the whole thing depends on cooperation. What feels loud, chaotic, and genuinely entertaining in a group turns into a much more tiring routine when you are alone. The repetitive structure stands out more, it becomes clearer how much the co-op element is holding the entire experience together, and it is far harder to forgive the weaker parts that slide by easily in company. Because yes, once you have three good friends around, everything looks better. The more middling ideas work better, the clumsier sections are easier to laugh through, and the game as a whole simply feels much more alive. That is exactly what happens here: good company does not just improve the game a little, it improves it a lot.

That is why your final opinion of Toxic Commando depends so heavily on who you would recommend it to. If you are looking for your next great co-op zombie comfort game, the one you will live in for months, this may very well fall short. But if you have three friends who are always up for a swampy, neon-soaked, horde-crushing, half-B-movie, half-madcap shooter, then Toxic Commando can absolutely deliver a few damn good nights. Not because every part of it works flawlessly, but because when it finally catches the rhythm, it can be a very entertaining game.

Not outstanding, but entertaining in its own filthy way

John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando is exactly the sort of game that makes you nod with appreciation while grinding your teeth at the same time. The enthusiasm is obvious, and in places the whole thing is honestly quite likable. It captures the atmosphere surprisingly well, the Swarm Engine sometimes throws truly massive crowd scenes straight in your face, and if you can pull together the right team, you can absolutely stumble into a few evenings where everything clicks and you find yourself thinking: yes, this is why it was worth giving it a chance. The trouble is that those moments are always fighting against long, unfocused missions, a progression system that crawls along, and technical issues that keep dragging the whole thing back down.

And yet, for all its frustrations, there is still something about it that makes you reluctant to dismiss it outright. Saber Interactive remains one of those studios that can reliably squeeze something ambitious, flashy, and at times genuinely exciting out of a budget that is not exactly extravagant, even when the final result never fully comes together into a clean, polished whole. John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando is very unlikely to become the new king of the genre, and it certainly is not going to set the world on fire, but it would be a mistake to write it off completely. If you enjoy co-op zombie chaos, like Carpenter’s vibe, and have a few friends willing to dive into the swamp with you, there are much worse ways to spend your money.

-Gergely Herpai “BadSector”-

Developer: Saber Interactive
Publisher: Focus Entertainment
Release: March 12, 2026
Genre: cooperative FPS, zombie action game
Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S