The new John Carpenter game will absolutely stuff your screen with zombies

Contrary to some claims, the scariest thing about zombies is not that there’s a lot of them. It’s that they’re dead, and dead things are scary. (I am sometimes startled by pigeon corpses.) But I’ll agree that the second scariest thing about zombies is that there’s a lot of them, and that’s where John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando, an upcoming co-op shooter with a story “inspired by” the famed horror director, really excels.

I knew I was going to like the Toxic Commando preview build I recently played when the tutorial had me plow through a sea of flailing zombies in an armored car. My geriatric RTX 2070 Super even managed to render all the blood that shot out of them without catching on fire.

I did have to murder my render resolution to achieve a framerate I could live with, but I wasn’t there to appreciate the sharpness of zombie freckles. I just wanted to shoot some zombs, and Toxic Commando delivered: I shot zombies with a mounted machine gun, I shot zombies with a shotgun while leaning out the window of a car, and I shot zombies with a railgun that punched through lines of them.

The first proper level after the tutorial put me and three other PCGers into a large, rocky outdoor map which we explored freely, occasionally wandering away from each other despite all the zombie fiction that tells us not to do that.

After saving each other from grabby tentacle monsters a few times and hunting down the best guns we could in our armored car, we converged at a church where we spent our collected resources to activate defenses like mounted guns and barbed wire, and dug in for a wave defense finale.

The normal difficulty was tuned just right: We survived the fight by the skin of our teeth, and when it was over, you could hardly see the ground in front of the church under all the dead undead. I appreciated how the horde bounded down the rocky cliffs around us and then soared over a tall fence like gazelles—not really scary, but funny.

Toxic Commando’s “inspired by John Carpenter” story is far more comedy than horror (more Big Trouble in Little China than The Thing, to put it in Carpenter movie terms), starring a ragtag group of quipping antiheroes that’s been called into action by a mad scientist. Infected with a supernatural disease, they must defeat the eldritch “Sludge God” and its risen abominations to survive. That includes the undead, but also original monsters.

I feel safe in guessing that there are more sophisticated supernatural co-op shooters out there: 2021 Left 4 Dead spiritual successor Back 4 Blood, for instance, and the excellent Remnant series. But we’re not talking about games that aim to be all-consuming live service empires, so there’s always room for more, and Toxic Commando seems like it’ll be a strong candidate for co-op groups looking for a few weekends of goofy fun.

It’s set to release sometime in early 2026, and you can find it on Steam here.

Tyler grew up in Silicon Valley during the ’80s and ’90s, playing games like Zork and Arkanoid on early PCs. He was later captivated by Myst, SimCity, Civilization, Command & Conquer, all the shooters they call “boomer shooters” now, and PS1 classic Bushido Blade (that’s right: he had Bleem!). Tyler joined PC Gamer in 2011, and today he’s focused on the site’s news coverage. His hobbies include amateur boxing and adding to his 1,200-plus hours in Rocket League.