Game intel
John Carpenter's Toxic Commando
Take control of one of the commandos, team up with your friends and send the Sludge God and its horde of things-that-should-never-be back to the underworld. Ch…
I went in hoping for Left 4 Dead energy with a John Carpenter sheen. I got exactly that-plus a big, mud-spattered truck and a synth line that sounds like it’s been looping in an abandoned VHS rental store since 1988. After 3 hours on PC (Ryzen 7, RTX 3070, 1440p/144 Hz, FOV cranked to 100), Toxic Commando has me convinced it’s more than a nostalgia gimmick. It’s a messy, loud, genuinely fun co-op FPS with just enough of its own identity to stand apart from the obvious influences.
The hook arrives quick: a wry cinematic sets up a botched science experiment, an ancient ooze deity, and a team of mercs who are obviously not the first-choice heroes. It’s knowingly cheesy, and that’s the point. The first time the music cut in-a pulsing synth riff as a swarm crested a hill-I felt that warm Carpenter tingle. I’ve been burned by “X Famous Creator Presents” tags before, but the vibe here feels earned, not pasted on.
What hit me right away is how missions breathe. Instead of bottlenecked corridors and fixed crescendos, you drop into open zones with a list of objectives—secure a site, retrieve components, thin the horde around a relay—then fight your way to an exfil point. You can be methodical or reckless. My squad chose “reckless” within 10 minutes. We spotted a beat-up truck, four doors, mud up to the fenders, and piled in. One of us drove, the other three fired out the windows while sparks and sludge fanned off the front bumper. It felt ridiculous in the best way, a suddenly different tempo from the on-foot grind, and it created those “did that just work?” moments you tell your friends about.
Vehicles aren’t just set dressing—they’re a tool. They let you reposition fast, break through a choke, or just mow down a panic swarm when your ammo’s low. In our first session we botched a retrieval objective, got sandwiched between two masses of shambling nasties, and I yelled “truck, truck, truck!” like somebody’s sleep-deprived crew chief. We survived, barely, laughing the whole time. That’s this game’s cadence: bursts of stupidly intense action peppered with screwball escapes that probably shouldn’t work but do.
I’m picky about feel. If the pump on a shotgun is mushy or an SMG sounds like a hair dryer, my enthusiasm nosedives. Toxic Commando’s guns punch. The shotgun has a nasty close-range bark; DMR-style rifles let you pop heads at medium distance without feeling like you’re spraying foam darts; LMGs grind chunks off anything dumb enough to stand still. The recoil and audio feedback sit in that sweet spot between crunchy arcadey and grounded. It’s all intuitive—you grab a weapon and immediately understand its lane.
The wrinkle is your commando’s supernatural powers. Each character has a couple of cooldown abilities that complement their kit. Mine had a short-range shock to push enemies off me and a team-benefit skill that made target prioritization snappier. They’re not complicated, and that’s good. They’re panic buttons and power moments, not a MOBA bar to micromanage. As we learned the rhythm—ability, reposition, reload, ability—we stopped wasting them and started chaining them. A buddy softened a wave, I dumped a magazine into the elites, the driver swung the truck wide to scoop us up before the next surge. Chef’s kiss.
Progression is light but satisfying. Between missions you invest resources into your favorite guns—tighter spread here, bigger mag there—and nudge your commando’s powers. I like that upgrades reinforce playstyle rather than drown you in marginal 1% bonuses. After an hour, my shotgun felt like my shotgun, not just a different color in the inventory. If you’re allergic to RPG bloat, relax. This is seasoning, not a systems spreadsheet.
The easiest way to describe Toxic Commando is “a buddy-movie horde shooter,” and that’s where it separates itself. The tone is snarky without turning the cast into quip machines. Lines land because they’re seated in that end-of-the-world gallows humor Carpenter’s films do so well. There’s a wink in the violence, but the threat still feels ugly. The black, oil-slick mucks up the landscape like a spreading bruise, and it changes how you move. We learned the hard way that lingering in the muck is basically asking to get dogpiled.
The soundtrack sells it. Not just the obvious synth beds, but the way music swells to push you into a set piece and then dips so you can hear your boots in the dirt and your squad breathing. When we defended a satellite yard, lights flickering, the bassline pulsed in sync with our panic. I wouldn’t be surprised if the team literally sculpted encounter pacing around those cues. It’s atmospheric in a way that makes the dumbest moments feel cinematic.
I played one session with three friends on Discord and another queuing with randoms. With friends, the game sings. Roles emerge naturally: one person runs point, one babysits the objective, one drives, one floats as emergency support. We kept each other honest—calling out elites, swapping ammo, timing abilities so waves collapsed like dominoes. When we split up, we got punished. Hard. This is a game that rewards sticking together and communicating even if “communication” is mostly yelling “left, left, LEFT!” as a swelling carpet of teeth and elbows pours over a ridge.
With randoms, it’s still fun, but it gets prickly. People wander. Vehicles get stranded at hilariously bad angles. Objectives sit half-done while half the team chases shiny markers across the map. The game tries to help—clear pings, focused HUD cues—but when cooperation falters, the difficulty spikes and the chaos stops being joyful. If you intend to solo-queue long-term, prepare to ride that wave. I still had good runs with strangers, but the peak moments came from a mic’d squad that knew when to floor it and when to hunker down.
Every horde shooter lives or dies by how it mixes its threats. Toxic Commando throws a basic mass of shamblers at you and then spices the stew with a handful of tougher variants that force focus fire, repositioning, or a quick ability pop. I appreciated that elites feel woven into the flow rather than appearing as hard stops. By hour two I could feel the “AI director” equivalent turning the screws—push too fast and you outrun your resources, go too slowly and the map starts crawling with trouble. It’s a nice push-pull, and the open zones keep it from feeling scripted even when you know a crescendo is coming.
Vehicles are a blast, but the handling sits a hair looser than I’d like. Think “muddy arcade” rather than “precise.” I adapted after a few laps—gentler steering, feather the throttle—but those first minutes had me clipping fences like a sleepy valet. The third-person camera can get tight in cramped alleys, and if a teammate body-blocks the exit point of the vehicle, you can fumble the dismount and instantly eat dirt. It’s not a deal-breaker, just some jank baked into the fun.
Objective clarity is good most of the time, but during one “secure three sites” mission the subtler markers got swallowed by the gloom and goo, and we circle-strafed like idiots until someone finally spotted the interactable tucked in shadow. The UI prioritizes cinematic contrast over utility in a few places. I tweaked brightness and it helped, but I’d love a high-contrast HUD option for grey-on-grey fights.
Repetition always lurks in this genre, and after three hours I felt a faint echo of “we’ve done this loop before.” The systems—open maps, vehicles, cooldown powers—do a lot to mix things up, but long-term variety will hinge on how many mission types, objective twists, and elite combos the full game has in its pocket. The bones are solid; the question is diet and exercise over time.
Toxic Commando calls its progression “light,” and that’s fair. You pick one of four commandos (each with their own voice, silhouette, and power kit), grab a couple favorite guns, and nudge them forward with earned resources. I gravitated toward a shotgun/DMR loadout: the DMR for plucking heads, the shotgun for “oh no” moments. Upgrades meaningfully changed how I approached fights—a tighter choke on the shotgun meant I didn’t fear mid-range as much, so I could hold a flank instead of playing bumper cars with the frontline.
The power upgrades felt like unlocking confidence rather than raw numbers. Early on I burned abilities reactively, bailing myself out of bad positioning. By the end of my third hour, I was using them to set the pace—open with control, collapse the nearest elite, hop in the truck to rotate before the map thickeners caught up. It’s satisfying, and it meshes with the game’s focus on vibe and moment-to-moment decisions over spreadsheets.
On my 3070 at 1440p with an unlocked frame cap, I bounced between 90-140 fps, dipping toward the lower end when massive swarms spawned or when we lit up half the screen with particle soup. Input felt snappy, even driving. I knocked motion blur off (always) and nudged the FOV to 100, and the game held together nicely. Load times sat firmly in the “slurp your coffee and you’re in” zone on an NVMe drive. I ran into a couple micro-stutters when a new enemy type appeared on-screen for the first time in a session—nothing catastrophic, but noticeable.
Audio is a highlight. The mix keeps the synth beds from crushing callouts, and weapons have grit without turning into white noise. If you’ve ever tried to track a teammate’s “I’m grabbed!” in a chaos sandwich, you’ll appreciate that clarity. I’d love a few more granular toggles—voice ducking, HUD scale, that sort of thing—but what’s here is already serviceable.
Left 4 Dead 2 imprinted on me hard. It’s still my quick-hit co-op gold standard. Toxic Commando doesn’t try to beat it at its own game. Instead, it widens the lane: open-objective maps instead of linear gauntlets, trucks as a crowd-control wildcard, and a tone that leans into Carpenter’s black-comedy bravado. I found myself missing the razor-edged encounter scripts L4D perfected, then immediately appreciating the freedom to approach a target from a totally different angle because we had a vehicle and a plan. It’s not “better,” it’s a cousin with a lead foot and a leather jacket, and that’s okay.
If you love:
…then Toxic Commando is squarely in your lane. Solo players can queue with randos and have a good time, but the ceiling is way higher with a mic’d squad. If you need airtight realism or hardcore meta depth to stay engaged, this might feel a touch breezy. If you bounced off Back 4 Blood’s card systems but still crave horde chaos, this scratches the itch without homework.
By the end of my third hour, I had that “one more mission” itch—the good kind. The open zones make room for dumb heroics. The guns feel assertive. The vehicles inject slapstick and strategy in equal measure. The Carpenter vibe isn’t a skin; it’s the spine. When it stumbles, it’s usually because the camera and UI don’t always keep up with the muck and madness, or because open-ended objectives can nudge less coordinated teams into chaos spirals. But even those spirals often end in the sort of laughter you only get from narrowly escaping a mess you absolutely caused.
It’s not rewriting the horde-shooter rulebook, and it doesn’t need to. Toxic Commando knows exactly what it wants to be: a gory, synth-soaked buddy movie you play with a mouse and keyboard. I’m in.
Score: 8/10
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