John Carpenter's Toxic Commando hands you a gun, points you at an endless tide of undead, and asks you to hold the line with up to three other players. This is cooperative horde shooting built around one sustained impulse: keep firing, keep moving, keep your squad alive while the infected swarm from every angle. Revive fallen teammates, share ammunition, cover each other's flanks. The chaos is the point, and the game leans into it with the kind of gleeful excess you'd expect from a project bearing Carpenter's name.
Four players can team up online, with cross-platform multiplayer bridging the gap between platforms. The co-op is built into the fabric of the experience rather than bolted on. When the swarm hits, survival depends on coordination: covering fire, shared resources, and well-timed revives separate a functioning squad from four people dying separately in the same room. The scale of the hordes is powered by Saber Interactive's Swarm engine, the same technology behind World War Z and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, meaning the screen fills with bodies in a way that feels relentless rather than staged.
The arsenal runs deep. Firearms, grenades, katanas, and class-specific abilities give each player a distinct role in the carnage. You pick a class that matches how you want to fight, then lean into that specialisation as the waves escalate. Vehicles scattered across semi-open maps add another layer, each one offering something different. Some pack heavy firepower, others carry utility tools like a winch, and the best ones let you plough through hordes at speed with the kind of satisfaction that only comes from turning undead into road paste. Finding the right vehicle for your team's composition becomes its own tactical decision, a brief moment of strategy between stretches of pure aggression.
The premise is broad and loud. A being called the Sludge God has unleashed its horde upon the world, and a squad of commandos is humanity's answer. The setup exists to justify the shooting, and it does that job without pretending to be anything more. Carpenter's involvement lends the project a horror pedigree that few games can claim. The filmmaker behind Halloween and The Thing has spent decades defining what dread looks like on screen, and while Toxic Commando trades his signature tension for volume and velocity, his sensibility runs through the game's willingness to embrace the grotesque.
Saber Interactive brings its own track record to the table. The studio has built a reputation around large-scale action games where enemy count is a feature, not a limitation, and their engine work on previous titles gives Toxic Commando a technical foundation that supports the promise of unending swarms.
The maps stretch across wasteland environments designed to be driven through as much as walked. Semi-open layouts encourage exploration between firefights, with vehicles serving as both transport and weapon. The mood sits somewhere between horror and dark comedy, the kind of tone where you're laughing at the absurdity of the situation even as the screen fills with things that should not exist. It's less about dread and more about the cathartic release of meeting overwhelming odds with overwhelming firepower.
Toxic Commando is available on PC, with a Blood Edition that includes a cosmetic pass and two post-launch content drops covering skins for characters, weapons, and vehicles.