PC REVIEW | John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando

I love all things 80s and early 90s. So much so that when I saw John Carpenter was attached to a new project featuring a grindhouse movie aesthetic, I was super excited for it to come out. I played the demo back in late February during the Steam Next Fest event and quickly added it to my wishlist. I liked the gunplay, I liked the over-the-top gore, and I loved how gorgeous and smooth it ran on my PC.

Fast forward to its release date of March 12th, and suffice to say, I was disappointed. Saber Interactive made one of my favourite co-op shooters back in 2019, based on the movie World War Z. It was fun, had a lot of content, and is still even being worked on to this day with the recently released Walking Dead DLC. But Toxic Commando unfortunately feels like a very low-budget AA game with John Carpenter’s name as the selling point. Thank you to James (another LiX writer) for joining me on this journey, but let me break it down for the rest of you below.

Things I liked!

• The Graphics | First off, let me straight up say Toxic Commando looks impressive. Everything from character models, textures, lighting, level design, and UI is excellent. The weapons themselves look realistic, with good animations when firing and reloading; zombies shamble and run towards you, and even crawl when their lower half has been detached. The game even runs well thanks to Saber Interactive’s in-house SWARM Engine. It powers through hundreds upon hundreds of enemies on screen at once while offering great fidelity. I would go so far to say that it is a very strong contender already for some of the best graphics in 2026.

• Music & Sound | Toxic Commando has a fantastic soundtrack, and one I believe was scored by John Carpenter himself. It has a punchy 80s horror soundtrack that feels like you are right at home watching a retro horror movie. Electric guitars, digital keyboards, and drums make up an electrifying soundtrack that fits alongside of you mowing down zombies. Sound effects are great with gunfire sounding realistic for each of the weapons, including a very satisfying electric pulse for the rail gun. Voice acting was also good, with all characters sounding believable, delivering solid lines throughout the game. Special mention goes to one of the Easter eggs in the game where Astrid screams the word “Leon” over and over again in a nod to Resident Evil 4’s Ashley Graham. That was a nice surprise!
  
  
• Cross Play & Multiplayer | Toxic Commando features full cross-play support for multiplayer. This means whoever you play with, console or PC, this game can be enjoyed regardless of your platform. Once the mandatory tutorial that acts as the first level has finished playing, you can invite anyone into your base where you can adjust your loadout and class. From here you can select a mission to do next or take part in the shooting range to see who can get the best score. At the end of each level, you will be returned to the home base where you can upgrade more depending on how much loot you secured.

Mixed & disliked!

• The Story & its many plot holes | Surprisingly, the story is bland. For a renowned storyteller such as John Carpenter, I was surprised when I found that at each section of the game, more and more questions were being asked, and not enough were being answered. The tutorial acts as the first level and does little in the way of explaining why the world is infested with sludge and has created these zombies. That’s fine. I figured this would get answered as the game progresses.
  
  It isn’t until much later that we are told that the premise of the game is that Obsidian, a multinational tech company, attempts to solve the global energy crisis by drilling directly into the Earth’s core. The experiment awakens a massive entity capable of turning humans into zombies. You are one of four characters who are sent in to retrieve a special type of fuel that can stop the sludge from spreading. The tutorial ends with the four characters having to sacrifice said fuel in order to stop the “Sludge God” from killing you, but as a result, leaves you infected with the sludge virus. You awaken to find these special vests have been put onto you to stop you from turning, but by the end, it is a simple line that says “Oh you must have become symbiotic with the virus and you are no longer at risk”. Really?

• Repetitive Gameplay Loop | Toxic Commando has a total of eight levels. One of those acts as the tutorial, and is shorter than the time it takes to make a cup of coffee. The initial gameplay loop works like this: Start level, walk or get in a car, head to objective, start machine, survive horde, level complete. There are some extra things to find if you explore, such as sludgite, which acts as currency for upgrading, but you get it as a level reward anyway, and you can also find spare parts to do things like repair your car, and open weapon chests, or fix support weapons like mounted turrets.
  
  Neither of these additional things make it worthwhile though, given how ridiculously easy this game is even on harder difficulties. The level maps are tiny, and given how slow most of the vehicles are because they are always getting stuck in the sludge, I found the best way to traverse was to just walk everywhere.
  
  
• Grinding for cosmetics | There are some additional currencies to collect, but these are only awarded on the higher difficulties such as normal and above. This additional currency is used to purchase weapon skins, car skins, and character customisations, which, to be fair, don’t offer anything of value. If you want to make your gun look like a modern day Call of Duty Battle Pass, then fine, but the actual reality is it serves no purpose past this.
  
  The other cosmetics which do have some meaning are weapon attachments, but these can be purchased using sludgite from any difficulty level. In my single playthrough of all levels, I managed to fully upgrade my Ark Machine Gun. It added damage, stability, and accuracy buffs to the gun, making the dispatching of zombies a little easier. However, since the difficulty levels seem largely unbalanced in Toxic Commando, I personally never saw much need to do this if you didn’t want to. The only additional thing you can do, but also acts as a minor annoyance, is once the gun is prestiged, you lose all of the attachments you bought, which serves as nothing more than padding the game out again by making you work for the attachments if you want them back.
  
  
• Same weapons over & over | Toxic Commando does offer multiple weapons, but all of these are available from the get go. Only the weapon attachments need unlocking, so experimenting with weapons gets boring quite quickly. Apart from the gun range at the home base, I never change my main weapon or side arm, as I never saw the need. Weapons act as more of a fashion statement in this game rather than actually being a tactical reason to have it. Given how the weapon attachments work, and how expensive they are, once you start focusing on a weapon, you will be hard pressed to ditch it in favour of something else.
  
  
• Final boss or lack thereof | At one point, James and I got super excited because the final level started to look like it might be fun. Infinite ammo onboard the “God Killer” truck saw us mowing down hundreds of zombies, but unfortunately, this too was just another lie it told us. We reached the bottom of the pit, and began to fight the final boss, chewing away at its health in a surprisingly fast way, only to have the “Sludge God” come out and kill it before we could. Great! Now the real boss fight can start, right? No. A cutscene plays, and the Sludge God is killed for good.
  
  The credits roll, and we are back at the home base, pressured into replaying the game for the aforementioned cosmetics. No thanks. At this point, I’m four hours in, and I’ve finished the game in its entirety. It offers no additional game modes, and all I am left with is the guilt that James spent $40 to join me on this lacklustre game.
  
  
• Length | Toxic Commando can be finished in approximately four hours, and personally I find that a little too short for an AA studio game. If the game were fun, offered multiple game modes, or had additional unlocked content after it were done, I could probably justify the spend. But last year, there were over 19,000 games released on Steam alone. Developers need to realise that they are competing in a much larger way than they ever have done before, and there is always another option on where to spend your money. Especially if they are multiplayer games.
  
  
• Unbalanced difficulty | As mentioned earlier, there are additional currencies to gain on higher difficulties. Being curious, we tested other difficulties, and these didn’t seem to alter much in the way of making it harder. Zombies were still dispatched in two to three shots, with some of the additional enemies taking slightly more. I understand that some enemies can become bullet sponges in some games, and that is how they scale their difficulty, but Toxic Commando seems to just throw more enemies at you, which didn’t seem to be much of a problem. Since there were already a decent number of zombies on screen at any given time, I would have opted for the tougher enemies to make this more of a challenge. The whole situation leaves the difficulty scaling feeling unbalanced.
  

CONCLUSION

Score: 40/100

Toxic Commando is a great example of how to market your game. Attach a well-known, beloved name to your project, have an impactful demo, and show no in-game screenshots on your store page. However, Toxic Commando is also a great example on how to not release your game. Seven actual levels of rinse and repeat game mechanics, with no-post game content or alternative game modes, makes this one of 2026’s worst releases so far. A short, bland, and forgettable story that even somehow manages to take the satisfaction of killing the final boss away from you.

Aaron

Gaming is in my blood.  Be it handheld games, Xbox, PC, Switch or Playstation, I am all over it.
I make my own games as part of my profession and love playing co op games with friends in my spare time. Avid dog lover and camper van enthusiast.