John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando opens with a crew of surly soldier types bantering in an armored vehicle. The banter is as corny as it gets, and is mercifully interrupted by an exploding zombie, or sludge monster, or something. It’s unclear what these monsters are actually supposed to be, but that clarity is irrelevant when it comes to needing to blow these things up to survive. Luckily you and up to three other players are armed to the teeth enough to survive waves upon waves of this toxic horde. I got to play a preview build of this game, which has long been a bit of a mystery due to some prolonged silence following its initial announcement. But it’s here now, and we saw some gameplay during all the Gamescom brouhaha this year. Along with fellow Shacknews contributor Will Borger, I spent some time driving around, shooting zombies, and figuring out what exactly Toxic Commando is going for in terms of its tone and vibes. It’s a little weird, a little dated, a little arcadey. Despite some initial misgivings, we had a surprising amount of fun. Especially once cars got involved. For starters, we had to run through a prologue-slash-tutorial, which introduced the controls, the characters, some core concepts, and so on and so forth. Then Toxic Commando opens up, letting us take on missions that are more exploratory and less explicitly guided. This is where things got really interesting. That’s because there’s a bit of an open world element, in which you and your squad are able to explore a surprisingly large map to fight random groups of zombies, find collectibles, and get into emergent trouble before settling down on the main objective. The best part was getting into a vehicle, because that’s when Toxic Commando gets really silly. Each character can grab a seat, aim their gun where reasonable, and take in some comically detailed surroundings. My favorite was a dashboard bobblehead decoration that was an eagle flipping the bird. That, combined with a pumping, synth-heavy soundtrack, stereotypical characters, and splattery action suggested some 80s tribute work, although the kind that casts a wide net and ends up being a bit hard to pinpoint. Anyway, the driver has the most fun, because vehicles tend to have a winch available, which is one of the game’s big mechanical gimmicks. The winch can grab onto things like doors and fences to create openings, or latch onto the environment to, on paper, help you get past big pools of toxic sludge. But it’s, as we started to yell at each other into our mics, a “Dynamic Winch,” meaning it’s physics-based rather than scripted. So Will was able to latch onto rocks and drag an armored vehicle up the side of a cliff for example, helping us grab resources in the most extra way possible. Aside from the vehicles our characters also had special powers, which seemed to be fueled by sizable, game length-padding skill trees. I picked a “fireball,” which let me shoot effective blasts out of my hands when I had a full meter, almost like a set of magic grenades operating on a cooldown. Other classes and skillsets were available, suggesting an element of build-crafting on top of the regular gun violence and wench shenanigans. Our mission ended with a more by the book tower defense sort of situation, in which a massive horde of zombies attacked a door we had to fortify. There were various traps and barriers we could set up, which required spare parts we had to gather from elsewhere on the map. The number of zombies that appeared was absurd, nodding to technology previously used in Saber Interactive’s World War Z. Luckily all the scariest zombies glowed red in some way or another, making picking them up in the crowd nice and easy. That said, the demo was set to the easiest difficulty, so perhaps cranking it up tells a different story. After a successful defense, we were back in the hub going over rewards such as cosmetics we could purchase, indicating what we could possibly grind for when the full game launches. Toxic Commando is hard to get a bead on at first, from the John Carpenter branding to the cringey humor and gooey sludge monsters acting like zombies with a little more… substance. But after getting through the tutorial and playing a mission, we weren’t just having lizard brain fun shooting things, we were laughing and already starting to develop inside jokes, the kind of thing that happens following a memorable experience. If Toxic Commando has enough stuff going on to sustain a whole game of that, then I’ll be happy to see that brisk excitement grow into a bigger deal. But for now, I’ll always have that moment of leaning out the passenger side window while our massive death car scaled a cliff. John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando is set to arrive sometime in 2026 for the PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. A preview build for PC was provided by the publisher for this article.