If I had a dollar for every zombie game I’ve played, I wouldn’t be a millionaire, but I would still have a nice chunk of change. If I had a dollar for every zombie game I’ve played where I could huck an exploding ball of energy into a horde and then launch a police cruiser into the fray, I would have substantially less money. I would have one money. That one money is Toxic Commando.
On its face, Toxic Commando blends into the zombie horde-shooter genre with all the originality of the eighth Call of Duty Zombies map. You get a team of four, semi-open areas, healing items, allies who get downed and need to be saved, and enough firepower to take down the Ottoman Empire. You’ve got your normal horde zombies—the unwashed and unnumbered masses—but, like so many other games in this field, you’ve also got some bigger, badder dudes. Some grab you. Some charge you. Some explode. Some sponge damage like some kind of sponge. It all falls back into that beige mass of genre complacency, even if the game tries to paint over it with a Toxic Commando brush.
Once you boot into the world, though, there are plenty of things to mark on the map and nooks and crannies to explore. You can find spare parts, which are used to unlock powerful weapons or juice up defenses like electric fences, barbed wire, and bait traps. Spare parts are extremely limited, so you’ll spend most of each level hoarding them and repeatedly asking yourself if you really need to use one right now. You probably don’t. Better save all of them forever, just in case.
You can also find vehicles, which make traversing the zones much easier and much quicker. Each style of car comes with its own stats and abilities. A smaller sedan may not have a massive health pool, but it is much faster than its larger counterparts and can use nitro to zip away from danger. The heavier Humvees and trucks bring more durability, and some vehicles have winches that can rip open doors and vaults to uncover more unique items. More importantly, every vehicle is a several-thousand-pound solution to the immediate zombie problem.
Our heroes—whose names I honestly couldn’t be bothered to learn apart from the one I played, Ruby. Or was it Rudy? Anyway, our heroes are partially infected with zombie goop, giving them the spectacular ability to choose a class and, thus, use class abilities. The four class paths cover the expected bases: explosive energy attacks, healing, drones, and defensive shields. Each one comes with a perk tree dense enough to make your head spin if you really start digging into it.
There are also customization options for firearms, character skins, vehicle skins, and, of course, the ability to customize your horn. There are a ton of guns, but I couldn’t tell you there was a massive difference between weapons in the same class. Obviously, a shotgun plays differently than an assault rifle, but assault rifle A rarely feels meaningfully different from assault rifle B. The quantity is there. The personality is a little harder to find.
The plot of Toxic Commando is interesting enough for what it is, even if it feels more than a little familiar. A science experiment goes spectacularly wrong, unleashes the Sludge God, and leaves your discount mercenary squad to clean up the mess. Where the plot doesn’t take many big swings, the dialogue takes a bunch of them—and produces some truly massive misses. The writing is awful, and it never makes much effort to get better. It feels like I’m trapped in 2013. If that is your cup of tea, there is plenty of slop to drink from this particular pot.
Toxic Commando strays far enough from the zombie-shooter formula to be interesting, but not far enough to remain interesting the entire time. It is a perfectly fine game, and it plays much better with a full squad of four. I frequently found myself laughing at the sheer absurdity of its firefights, where we would be desperately fighting for our lives only for a four-door sedan to come sailing into frame and plow through half the horde.
If you can get Toxic Commando on sale—and bring three friends along—I’d say it is worth checking out. Just don’t go in expecting to discover any uncharted territory. There’s fun buried in all that sludge, but you have seen most of these zombies before.
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