For the past week, Saber Interactive and Focus Entertainment let us loose in the Demo of their first-person shooter. John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando, and I must say I’m having a blast!
While it was just a tease, we got a sense of how all the mechanics are going to work.
What is Toxic Commando?
The first mission we played was more of a tutorial, getting us to shoot our guns, drive the car, and experience the swarm engine in all its glory. I must say, seeing what that engine can do in Space Marine 2, Toxic Commando is the perfect place to use it. There can be hundreds of zombies on screen at any one moment, along with leagues plummeting off cliffs in the distance.
You play as a member of an elite mercenary squad who are toying with the name Toxic Commandos, to the hilarious distaste of most of the squad.
I’m always a little hesitant when someone lends their name to a franchise. My mind goes straight to Tom Clancy. Where his name became a brand and was just slapped on anything that was a gritty military shooter. So, what is John Carpenter bringing to the table? Well, he has lent his talents to writing the story. An 80s-inspired over-the-top Science Fiction Action Adventure full of terrible one-liners, and so much gore! John is also responsible for the score.
Let the Chaos Begin, well, some of it!
The demo for Toxic Commando gives us access to all 4 hero classes. All the weapons, attachments, and vehicles but only allows us to get to level 5.
The weapons and leveling system will be familiar to most. You get a primary and secondary weapon. Which can be chosen from a range of assault rifles, SMGs, and shotguns before you load into your mission. The more you use said weapon, the more attachments you will unlock. These are unlocked through spending the in-game currency, which you get from collecting orange crystals during missions.
There are 3 types of crystals. Orange, purple, and blue. Purple only appears on normal difficulty, or above, and blue during hard, or above.
The Purple and Blue crystals are only needed for cosmetic upgrades. So don’t worry if you’re a casual gamer and only want to play on easy; you will still be able to get buff!
There was a huge difficulty spike between normal and hard. Especially solo. I was unable to complete a hard mission during my time with the demo.
This will become easier the higher your hero level, but because we were locked at level 5, our abilities were limited.
Getting Swole
The demo for Toxic Commando only allows us to reach level 5, but it still gives us an idea of how powerful we are going to become.
There are 4-character models that you can select, and that will be your preference. When you load in, each player must be one of the models, so you might not be who you prefer. Which is fine, but a couple of them have super cheesy and annoying dialogue that they spurt out a lot.
There are 4 abilities to choose from as well. Don’t worry, though, your ability choice is locked in, so no matter who you load in, you are safe.
The 4 abilities are Strike, Medic, Operator, and Defender
Not only does each ability have an ultimate ability, like the Medic’s healing aura or the Defenders’ shield dome. They will complement other aspects of play. The Operator will be able to drive the vehicles faster, or the medic carrying more healing packs to help keep the team alive.
Easy or Normal, you can just mess around with them to your heart’s content, but when you pump it up to hard, you will need to work closely with your team to succeed.
Getting Around
When you load into each mission, you are dropped into a random location on the map.
Now, upon first glance, the maps are pretty big. Your first objective is to find a vehicle. They are marked on the map with a little car symbol. These are random too, it could be a Ute, Sedan, Ambulance, or the heavily armoured Jeep equipped with a mounted machine gun. Each one of these vehicles has its own ultimate ability, like the ambulance’s healing aura or the Jeep and its massive EMP blast.
The vehicles are equipped with a winch straight out of Mudrunner. Thankfully, the winching is a lot more user friendly that Mudrunner, but it can still be quite stressful getting stuck in the mud and gore while surrounded by zombies.
Once you have your wheels its time to make your way around the map collecting weapons and completing tasks that will lead you to the final encounter, defending a church from wave upon wave of the dead.
First Impressions
The demo was played on Steam, and while I don’t have a beastly gaming rig, I do have a decent one; I did run into a few performance issues. The audio kept becoming hollow and tinny, not a huge problem, but still not great. I also kept getting a massive out-of-memory notification. I was running OBS at the time, so I thought that could be it, though it had never been a problem before. After closing OBS, I kept getting notifications. So, I closed everything except the game, but I was still out of memory. I don’t think it hindered gameplay at all, but it was happening.
I thoroughly enjoyed my time with John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando, and the little tease was more than enough to get me to pick it up day one on the 12th of March (not that far away, exciting!)
Toxic Commando will be available on PC (via Steam), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.
What are your thoughts on the Toxic Commando Demo? Will you be playing on the 12th of March?
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