John Carpenter's Toxic Commando

Written by Jason Dailey on 3/11/2026 for PS5  

This November will be the 18th anniversary of the release of Left 4 Dead, an instant classic that many games have tried to emulate to varying degrees of success. John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando is the next four-player co-op zombie FPS looking to capture those Left 4 Dead vibes. While Toxic Commando doesn’t reach instant classic status, it does arrive with a couple of new tools in the toolbox that make it an enjoyable mashup of titles such as World War Z, MudRunner, and of course, Left 4 Dead.

Your first question is probably “What does John Carpenter have to do with this?” Well, if you don’t know, Mr. Carpenter is an avid gamer at the ripe age of 78 in addition to being a master of big screen horror and a music composer. In fact, he composed the theme music for Toxic Commando, and the game takes inspiration from his ‘80s films like The Thing, Fog, and Big Trouble in Little China, attempting to capture the humor and action of '80s horror flicks. It gets the action part right, but the characters and attempts at humor are more cringeworthy than funny.

Toxic Commando’s story picks up after a tech company called Obsidian and its CEO, Leon Dorsey, tried to harness the power of the Earth’s core and triggered a full-on zombie cataclysm, releasing an entity known as the Sludge God in the process. Leon summons the Toxic Commandos to a quarantine zone for their assistance in defeating the Sludge God and they seem more than happy to oblige. The story is inconsequential, really, and it’s not like there are character arcs to keep up with, but in truth, that’s about what I expected. I came into Toxic Commando looking to blow stuff up, and in that regard, I was wildly successful.

From there, you choose from one of these four characters to play as, and a class, which determines your abilities and skill tree. You can change classes between missions, though I recommend picking one and sticking with it to enjoy a nice sense of progression. Each class has a special ability and more than 30 perks to unlock as you progress. The Defender can place a protective shield that keeps projectiles from hitting you and any teammates within. The Healer generates a healing aura returning HP to anyone nearby. The Operator has a companion drone that provides additional firepower. And the Strike class special lets you hurl supernatural fireballs at enemies. Pretty standard stuff for a co-op zombie shooter, you could say.

What is not so standard is developer Saber Interactive’s Swarm Engine, which allows for what appears to be hundreds of zombies on screen at times. This is the same impressive tech utilized in its other titles, World War Z and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. Despite playing both of those games, seeing the Swarm Engine in action for a third time in Toxic Commando is no less spectacular, especially during the final fights of each mission. And in general, Toxic Commando looks and performs great. On PS5 Pro, I stuck to the Quality graphics mode where the Swarm Engine’s level of detail and gritty realism really shines at a stable frame rate.

With all those zombies comes lots of killing, and a decent amount of dying too. This isn’t a co-op game where you can stray too far from your comrades, as doing so invites a swift death. If you don’t get picked up while “Down But Not Out,” your teammates can carve you out of a sludge pod somewhere on the map to revive you. Your best chance of success is sticking together and coordinating your abilities for when the time is right. If you find Toxic Commando to be too hard or too easy, there are four difficulties to choose from, with progression tuned differently for each one. Essentially, the higher the difficulty the more XP and resources you earn.

If for whatever reason you don’t have three other friends to play with, the open spots in your squad are filled with AI bots. I was able to clear missions by myself with a squad of bots on normal difficulty, but they’re wildly inconsistent. They always seem to find a way to revive you when you’re down, which is amazing, but on the other hand, I cannot tell you how often I caught them standing still just taking a zombie thrashing. So, they’re somewhat intelligent at best, probably well enough to complete the game, but even if you can manage to rope in just one friend, you’d be a lot better off.

Toxic Commando’s narrative takes place over three acts and 10 missions, each of which takes around an hour to complete, if you’re doing it right. The structure of each mission is generally the same: get to point A, activate or collect something, get to point B, defend against a zombie horde, rinse and repeat. It’s your standard zombie shooter fare until the third act, which contains the two best missions with the most thrilling zombie fights. Even the zombies themselves are what you typically see from the genre: basic swarming zombie, ranged annoying zombie, grabbing slamming zombie, exploding zombie, and so on.

It’s possible to simply “golden path” each mission, but I was finding little to no success doing so. What I found is that you need to focus on gathering as many spare parts as possible, which are used to unlock special weapon crates and repair defensive mechanisms at each mission’s final area. Trust me, you’re really going to need those spare parts to survive the last stand with a mix of electric fences, machine gun turrets, mortars, and more.

Finding and collecting spare parts is a fun side quest since it gives you an excuse to explore each map in a vehicle. Adding vehicles and open maps to the Left 4 Dead formula are two of Toxic Commando's biggest checkmarks. Piling in the Humvee and steamrolling zombies or blasting them with the mounted heavy machine gun between objectives is a fun time. Each vehicle has a special ability as well. So, for instance, the Humvee has an EMP that will help get you out of a pinch, or the cop car will attract zombies to it using the siren before exploding. Vehicles act as your mobile base, needing to be repaired, refueled, and restocked when you can catch a break in the action. In another neat twist, Saber brought over some of the mud and water physics from the MudRunner franchise. This means you can get bogged down and must winch yourself out or up a hill, which adds another wrinkle of chaos when you’re stuck on a hill and being swarmed by a horde of zombies.

In terms of gunplay, there is a nice variety of weapons to choose from, including assault rifles, SMGs, sniper rifles, shotguns, pistols, grenades, and melee options. You carry a primary, a secondary, a melee weapon, and a throwable with you. Weapons are categorized by a rarity system, with higher-tier ones able to be scavenged from the map, though they have limited ammo.

I was thrilled to see support for the DualSense controller’s adaptive triggers on PS5, which creates some hefty and satisfying gunplay. What surprised me the most is the rather robust amount of weapon customization. Each gun can be modified with different barrels, grips, stocks, sights, magazines, and more. But what you really should focus on (and what I didn’t realize until halfway through the game) is upgrading a weapon’s tier. With enough sludge, you can bump a weapon up a tier which increases its damage and makes killing zombies a hell of a lot easier.

At the end of the day, Toxic Commando is the latest game chasing that Left 4 Dead magic. It doesn’t quite find it, but it brings enough new ideas to the table that it’s worth checking out if you have friends to play co-op with. While it is playable solo, doing so feels lifeless, mostly because of lackluster AI, but also because there is no one to coordinate with. The cookie cutter mission structure and zombie variants are nothing you haven’t seen before, but the Swarm Engine’s massive zombie hordes are impressive, and the inclusion of vehicles with MudRunner-style terrain physics are interesting twists on an otherwise dated zombie-killing formula.