Left 4 Dead left such a mark that co-op shooters almost 20 years later are still trying to capture that success. Back 4 Blood, Warhammer: Vermintide, World War Z and many similar games have taken the best of L4D and offered their own interpretation of it, with mixed results. World War Z, developed by Saber Interactive, is probably the closest successor to the original Left 4 Dead, and their new shooter, John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando, tries to recapture that formula.
| Initial price | Reviewed version | Reviewer copy |
| 40€ | PC | Provided by publisher |
The master of horror, John Carpenter, the legendary director of films such as Halloween and The Thing, has inspired a number of games. Although he is a big fan of gaming, Carpenter did not get directly involved in game development. And it seems that a similar approach was taken with the game that bears his name. Eighties-inspired electronic music makes you feel like you’re watching one of Carpenter’s movies, but nothing more. There is no great direction that creates tension, no great social criticism, and no interesting characters and themes. It seems to me that Carpenter’s name was used here primarily as a marketing ploy rather than a true artistic signature. A real shame, considering how talented Carpenter is.
The story here is completely negligible, although the premise itself is interesting. Greedy corporations want to squeeze every cent out of the Earth and try to dig deep to turn the energy of the Earth’s core into a product. But this enrages the ancient Sludge God, a sludge god who assimilates the environment and humans to obey his every command. Our heroes, the toxic commandos, are trying to save the world, prevent an ancient evil and make some money along the way.
The story itself within the missions is kept to a minimum and you will mostly be doing some sort of tasks to contribute to the destruction of that Sludge God. Unfortunately, the chosen protagonists are rather uninteresting, both in appearance and personality. Rolling my eyes was a frequent reflex for me while playing, because any other response would cause a deep sense of shame.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably already know how these games work. You and your three friends, or AI comrades, fight your way through hordes of zombies and special enemies to complete various tasks. But Toxic Commando gives us a pretty big change, and that’s the level structure itself. You don’t follow a linear path, but you choose how to approach tasks on a huge map, which is why vehicles were introduced.
At its core, Toxic Commando is a fusion of Mudrunner and Left 4 Dead. And quite an interesting one at that. Outside of the vehicle, expect a satisfying bump, and when you’re on four wheels, the driving model is excellent. The movement of the vehicle itself is as it should be. I felt more natural behind the wheel than running around the map.
Much of the map is covered in deep mud that will slow you down. Finding yourself outside of the vehicle often means certain death as soon as a horde of zombies approaches. But if you’re in a vehicle, you’ll need a winch to get yourself out of the mud.
Vehicles can come equipped with flamethrowers, machine guns, electromagnetic pulses, and you can even ride in an ambulance that treats you. Of course, you need to look for ammunition and fuel for the vehicles themselves, and that leads to interesting situations where your car gets stuck in a swamp, and you have to look around for fuel. It might sound hard on paper, but I have to say that I enjoyed those moments. The constant switching between driving and moving on foot brings much-needed variety to a genre that can otherwise quickly become boring.
Along with regular zombies, there are also special enemies that are very reminiscent of Left 4 Dead. But all those special zombies are visually and functionally different and easy to identify and prioritize as a threat, unlike Back 4 Blood, which had too many of those enemies that all looked alike.
The tasks are not mostly diverse, but they all require the mutual cooperation of the players. Sometimes you need to drive and protect a heavy vehicle to a target, transfer batteries, protect a location or activate some kind of generators. Pretty standard, but that mix of vehicles and walking is enough to break up the monotony. The tasks are much simpler if you play alone, because the intelligence of your comrades is quite questionable, so the challenges themselves are mitigated. The AI can revive you when you fall and zombies shoot often, but realistically, the best AI in the genre is still in Left 4 Dead.
If you focus exclusively on the main tasks, you can solve the missions in about fifteen minutes, although they will be significantly more difficult. If you go slower, gather resources around the map and explore, it will take you longer, but you will get more experience points and better equipment to survive the infestation at the end of each mission. If you decide to go through the same mission again, some elements are randomly generated to encourage replayability. With nine missions and four different difficulty settings, there’s enough content to keep you busy for long.
The progression system is pretty simple, but still decent. There are four classes, and you can improve each of them with some pretty significant upgrades. I played as a Medic most of the time and unlocked the ability to periodically restore the health of the whole team, carry more first aid kits and ammo. The classes complement each other, so you’ll be pretty covered if you put together a good team.
What would a modern shooter be without weapon customization? Toxic Commando allows you to thoroughly modify the components of rifles, pistols, shotguns, etc. You can even paint individual parts. But the economy of the game doesn’t make much sense. One scope costs 11254 of so-called Sludgite material, and the other, functionally identical, costs 11134. Not only do the prices make no sense, but you can improve the raw damage of the weapon, which realistically encourages you to only use one weapon because you’ll weaken yourself by changing.
Weapons also have a Prestige system, similar to Call of Duty, where you can reset your progress to get a new weapon color. However, if you have invested precious Sludgite in the weapon, nothing will be returned to you. If you want to take advantage of the Prestige system, it’s best not to upgrade your weapons at all, which is quite boring. I advise you to just ignore the Prestige system and play normally because the rewards are not exciting either. You’ll get a couple of uninspired weapon camos and that’s about it.
Mostly the cosmetic changes look pretty desperate, both for weapons and especially for characters. I didn’t come across a single look that I wanted to buy, which is rare. It’s a real shame that we didn’t get some interesting prospects, and that may affect the financial success of the game. Why would anyone spend time on cosmetic items if they don’t look good? Fortunately, the game doesn’t have any variant of the Battle Pass system, so you can unlock everything by playing normally, without fear of something going out of the game.
Visually, the game is quite solid. The environment looks fantastic, and all the vegetation is completely interactive. Cars tear up bushes and crush grass, and it’s a real pleasure to shoot a zombie with a shotgun and watch it fly into the grass and cause dynamic vegetation movement. As you move through the mud, it dynamically deforms, and your characters become dirtier. A similar dirt system is used for cars. The more you drive and run over zombies, the bloodier and muddier the cars get, which is a great visual effect. The effects in general are great, especially the zombies being torn to shreds. The only thing that catches your eye are the facial animations in the directed scenes, but you will probably skip them.
Unfortunately, the performance is quite strange. At some moments, there are hundreds of zombies swarming around the screen and everything goes smoothly, and in quiet moments your framerate drops below twenty. Overall the game looks just fine, it’s just way more demanding than it should be. I feel like this is one of those games where the developers have replaced optimization with DLSS and similar FPS improvement methods.
Toxic Commando is just the kind of game you’ll play with a few friends, have a good time, but not much else. Driving around, stomping on zombies, tearing apart zombies with machine guns and frantically scavenging for fuel as the horde closes in on you all makes for crazy fun. The brain is on the pasture, and the finger is on the trigger. That type of game. The kind we have already seen and experienced x times.
It’s fun stomping on zombies and watching the ambulance turn red. Driving and shooting are good and the combination of them breaks the monotony that often occurs in titles like this. The mission tasks themselves aren’t too imaginative, but the pacing is spot on and it’s nice to be able to explore at your own pace, without time pressure.
It’s all fun primarily in co-op. If you plan to play Toxic Commando alone… and there are probably better ways to spend your time. Solo play expresses the problem of the jerk intelligence of the comrades and the strange economy, and then there are the performance problems if you play the PC version. So the rating ultimately depends on how you play the game. If you have a company – feel free to calculate as if it is a little higher than the stated one. If AI is your friend, Toxic Commando will annoy you more than entertain you.