John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando is terrifyingly fun

If you too have been struck by a strange Mandela effect: no, there is no John Carpenter film titled Toxic Commando. Your mind is fusing Troma's 1984 cult classic, The Toxic Avenger, with the grand guignol career of the New York director. So what is John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando? Well, you weren't too far off anyway. John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando is therefore the result of Saber's internal brainstorming and the idea of merging two mechanics already present in their game catalog: online combat against immense hordes of zombies from World War Z with the wheels of armored vehicles racing through mud like in Mudrunner. The icing on the cake of this project is the involvement of John Carpenter, called upon to supervise the narrative component and offer feedback on the game structure, which is inspired by (and often explicitly pays homage to) numerous of his films, from Escape from New York to They Live, not forgetting Prince of Darkness and Big Trouble in Little China. More generally, John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando aims to be an all-round homage to a certain type of 80s genre cinema (among the inspirations cited by the developers is even Lamberto Bava's Demons), to the point that Carpenter's involvement extended to the soundtrack.

John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando

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The Plot of John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando

If the game's stated intention is to reproduce the sensations and emotions of 80s action/horror films, the plot conceived for John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando seems very well suited to the purpose. It all begins when an ambitious experiment aims to extract clean energy from the planet's core. Obviously, something goes wrong and instead of an unlimited energy source, the excavation brings an ancient deity, the Sludge God, to the surface. If you remember Ghostbusters, ancient deities tend to be quite grumpy upon awakening, and our ancient god is no exception, covering the Earth with noxious and toxic sludge, upon contact with which humans regress into bloodthirsty zombies.

The brilliant move, however, is yet to come. A normal person at this point, after (perhaps inadvertently, let's give them the benefit of the doubt) having opened the gates of the apocalypse, would find it normal to flee into the woods and never be seen again. Our genius, however, cunningly recruits a team of four commandos to solve the big trouble in zombietown for him. Obviously, no one with an ounce of common sense would accept such a mission, but it so happens that the four paramilitaries were infected as soon as they set foot in the area and are alive thanks to a machine from our somewhat perverse genius that prevents the contagion from reaching their brains. And that's exactly where we come in.

The Zombie Carnage of John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando

As can be inferred from what has just been described, John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando is a four-player cooperative shooter. Its structure rests on a series of missions, obviously replayable at will, in which the team will have to complete a series of increasingly crazy tasks for our apocalypse genius so that the disaster they are witnessing can be somehow fixed, with some technological gadgetry, lots of explosives, and a bit of hope and less touchy deities about holes in the garden. Each mission begins with a briefing phase, in which the game quickly summarizes our task. Usually, it involves going to points A and B, and then to C where we have activated something to defend or exterminate. Although this formula is obviously declined through a series of variations on the theme, the true unpredictability of each mission is given by the possibilities offered by the surrounding play areas.

Much like in other fields, even in the fight against zombies, going straight to points A, B, and C to finish the mission as quickly as possible and go to sleep is a method that can work, but it takes away much of the fun. The map of each mission is quite large and full of elevation changes: scattered here and there are vehicles, supply zones, and other areas of interest, where, for example, you can collect points to spend on activating turrets and other machinery at the final battle location. More than any other element, however, the map abounds with zombies: dozens, hundreds in the hottest spots, who come running, shambling, piling on top of each other with a fun ragdoll effect, wielding various objects, while among their ranks even more menacing and unsettling horrors generated by biologically infected sludge make their way. And since the clashes against these rivers of undead are always very exhilarating, you will often find yourself wandering, perhaps in search of fuel or ammunition to launch another assault on the zombie stronghold.

In the team, the roles are classic: there's the healer, the tank, the engineer, and the assault, here glorified by the wonderful definition of Flamer. The roles on the field are sufficiently defined to reward teamwork, but not so rigid as to prevent heroic surges or somewhat crazy improvisations. As perhaps emerged from the description in the preceding lines, John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando doesn't reinvent the wheel, from any point of view, but it keeps its goal firmly in mind, which is to reproduce the atmosphere of certain 80s films, and it focuses on that. And it works. The gunfights with zombies on foot are massacres spectacularized by the flood of bodies and blood splattering everywhere on screen, while on 4 wheels the game transforms into a carmageddon in the mud, with grappling hooks, turrets, and various other accessories as a backdrop. Oh, there are even supernatural powers.

Obviously, the game is at its best when you have three other human companions available besides yourself. In general, it's in matches with more human players that the most fun and somewhat random moments occur, but we also tackled a good portion of the missions supported by bots alone, and they didn't perform badly at all. If you don't trust them much, you can give simple orders to coordinate them, but in normal situations, they manage their role autonomously and even drive, leaving us the coveted spot on the turret. Of course, in some aspects, it's a bit rough (the animation of switching from the vehicle's camera to first-person, to cite the most obvious example), but having a clear understanding of its objective and the scope of its means allows John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando to surprisingly prove to be an excellent online pastime, which certainly has everything in terms of growth and upgrades to satisfy more modern tastes, but also allows for a slightly more casual approach, or a round every now and then. Of course, the period in this specific segment is quite complicated, but John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando has what it takes to find some space, strong in an element difficult to engineer on paper, regardless of budget: fun.