Blending 80’s horror energy with co-operative shooting and vehicular chaos, John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando is poised to find extra mileage in a roadworn genre. Built by Saber Interactive and infused with Carpenter’s signature touch, the game brings zombie swarms, limitless customisations, and open mission structures, all wrapped in pulpy humour and ladles of slime. Here, we’ll rundown fifteen key things to know before you buy, covering gameplay mechanics, content plans, and an early concern.
A Zombie Horde Shooter in the Spirit of Left 4 Dead
John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando is, at its core, a cooperative zombie horde shooter in the lineage of genre touchstones Left 4 Dead and Back 4 Blood. Built around relentless swarms and frantic firefights, success hinges on teamwork and coordinated crowd control rather than lone wolf heroics. While, on paper, Toxic Commando seems a rehash of established formulas, its focus on scale and replayability – alongside a few aces in the hole – give it a unique spin.
Swarm Tech Powers Hundreds of On-Screen Enemies
Developer Saber Interactive are leveraging the same Swarm Engine technology they deployed to great effect in 2024’s Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, enabling large-scale battles flooded with hundreds of enemies. Notably, the technology has historically balanced the spectacle of swarming hordes with stable performance, suggesting Toxic Commando should maintain smooth gameplay even when undead chaos rules the screen.
Built for Four-Player Co-Op With AI Support for Soloists
The game is built for four-player online co-operative play via matchmaking or private lobbies, with AI teammates ensuring solo players can still experience the campaign by stepping in when squads aren’t full. If you’re planning on tackling the hordes alone, be warned; the game’s latest overview trailer advises you’ll be swiftly overwhelmed. Full crossplay is confirmed at launch, making it easy to rally a team regardless of preferred platforms.
John Carpenter Lends Creative and Musical Input
You might be wondering what hand the legendary filmmaker has in the game, save for lending his name. Well, he’s contributing creative input, offering guidance, feedback, and story direction, while also shaping the soundtrack with his signature synth-driven atmosphere. In other words: his DNA is imprinted throughout. Escape from New York is an obvious touchstone – both visually and sonically – but The Thing’s twisted horror and Big Trouble in Little China’s pulpy humour also give Toxic Commando its distinct tonal identity.
Four Playable Classes
As you’d expect of a co-operative shooter, your squad will be composed of distinct archetypes. In Toxic Commando, there are four classes: Strike, the damage-focused aggressor, the unstoppable brickwall Defender; the Medic, whose job is to keep everyone alive, and the Operator, a tech-adept support class. Each skillset and ability is designed to synergise, although all four can plunge into the toxic wastelands as a Strike; there’s nothing stopping you.
Each Class Offers Unique Progression Paths
Each of the four classes will feature their own upgrade path via dedicated skill trees, providing further opportunity for differentiation. What’s more, there are over thirty possible customisations to explore per archetype, with weapon specialisations rounding out the options. These systems go way beyond cosmetic identity, ensuring unique, potentially surprising synergies can emerge simply by expanding your chosen class’s abilities.
Weapon Upgrades are Extensive
Beyond earning Skill Points to level up your chosen character, Toxic Commando also ships with an extensive suite of weapon upgrades. Upgradable specs include the weapon’s accuracy, its range, handling, damage dealt, fire rate, penetration, magazine capacity, reload speed, and mobility. And that’s not all. Attachments can be augmented too; sights, barrels, magazines, grips, and so on, for each gun. There’s more: paint jobs and cosmetic charms mean you can match the look of a gun to your vision. All in all, with sixteen weapon types – from standard machine guns to secondary pistols, melee weapons, and mission-specific heavy ballistics – there must be hundreds, if not thousands, of weapon permutations on offer. The only caveat: weapon upgrades come at a cost of in-game currency – more on this later.
Vehicles are as Critical to Success as Guns
If you’ve seen anything so far of John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando, you’ll know already that traversal and combat isn’t limited to hoofing the swamps on-foot. Vehicles will play a significant role in every mission, and they’re arguably one of this horde shooter’s defining features. Get behind the wheel of sedans, pick-up trucks, or ambulances, turret-mounted humvees, heavily armoured HGVs, and more. Each ride has its perks – and can be customised with detritus littered across the map – although, surely, capability to negotiate the roughest terrain has to be up there as the most crucial prerequisite.
Hostile Terrain is its Own Challenge
If Space Marine 2 influence Toxic Commando’s combat, then Saber’s other ventures – unyielding off-road sims SnowRunner and MudRunner – lend their design sensibilities to vehicle traversal. You’ll have noticed the sludge – the game’s dripping with gloopy stuff – and if you’re motoring a run-of-the-mill vehicle you’ll need to steer carefully else you’ll get stuck. That said, careful driving isn’t in the zombie apocalypse playbook, so more often than not your team will need to work together to fish your stricken vehicle out of the slurry before the hordes descend.
Missions are Packed with Extra Objectives and Distractions
The game’s semi-open maps don’t operate with simple point-to-point objectives. No, throughout you’ll encounter countless side tasks, emergent distractions, and layered mission structures to encourage exploration and keep you from sprinting to the finish line. Giant tentacles must be blasted into mulch, environmental equipment needs repairing, hidden stashes are primed for looting; the objectives your team decides to take on are variable and dynamic, balancing risk with reward. Sure, you could gun it for the main objective, but will your squad have the resources to survive once you get there?
Nine Launch Maps With Free Post-Launch Content Planned
At release, Toxic Commando will feature nine maps; each massive, and each with unique missions and challenges. Although a full roadmap hasn’t been detailed, publisher Focus Entertainment has confirmed free post-launch additions including new missions, enemy types, weapons, and vehicles, suggesting, perhaps, that foundations are laid to continually evolve the game’s co-operative eco-system from day one.
Grind Concerns
Certain hands-on previews and playtests have suggested a potential heavy grind in early builds, particularly around weapon progression where upgrades, attachments, cosmetics, and even the gun itself, need to be financed by in-game currency. While this remains speculative until balance is finalised, with three versions of Sludgite – the game’s crystalline resource, scattered throughout with value tiered by difficulty – plus parts and scrap to collect, the road to tailoring your character and weapons looks as bumpy as each map’s slime-ridden tracks.
Release Date, Platforms, and Price — and a Steam Demo
John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando is released unto the world on March 12th, and will be playable on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. And, speaking of Steam, there’ll be an early chance to get your hands dirty thanks to a free dem.. As for price, the game’s Standard Edition retails for £34.99 / $39.99, with the enhanced “Blood Edition” available for £43.99 / $49.99.
Two Editions and Pre-Order Bonuses
Toxic Commando Standard Edition includes the base game, while the deluxe “Blood Edition” includes access to two future paid DLCs and a golden weapon skin and charm pack. Pre-ordering either edition nets you Leon’s Secret Stash, with exclusive weapon and character skins hidden inside.
PC Requirements
For the John Carpenter’s John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando demo on PC (and likely a decent baseline for the full release), the game targets 1080p at two clear tiers. On the low end, it’s aiming for around 30 FPS on Low settings with a Ryzen 5 1500X/Core i5-8400, 16 GB RAM, and an RX 580/GTX 1070-class GPU with 8 GB VRAM. For a smoother experience, the recommended tier shoots for roughly 60 FPS at 1080p on Ultra, pairing a Ryzen 5 5600X/Core i5-11600K with a stronger RX 6800 XT or RTX 3060 Ti, while still sticking to 16 GB RAM and 8 GB VRAM. In both cases, you’ll want about 58 GB of space and an SSD is required.