Once the last of the zombies has been dispatched with a habitual blast of our shotgun, the noise of battle gives way to two lingering sounds: the splash of swamp water beneath our feet and the rumbling bass note of a jeep locked into low gear. We pick up our feet, aiming to catch up with the vehicle. But at the same moment, its wheels find purchase in the mud. The man in the driver's seat, Saber Interactive's chief creative officer, Tim Willits, is carried away towards the treeline.
"Tim," we ask, "where are you headed?" Checking the map, we see that he's making a beeline for approximately nowhere. The Hummer that houses our two other teammates, meanwhile, is en route to the next objective – a cultist camp in precisely the opposite direction.
"Oh, you're following me?" Willits replies. "Don't follow me – I'm clueless." We watch as he vanishes into the distance, and listen to the lapping of murky liquid against our boots. In spite of the phosphorescent red tentacles that tower over the swamps, everything is peaceful. And at least there are no witnesses as our own erstwhile ride, a police car, transformed from gleaming white to dark brown by the surrounding sludge and zombie blood, finally slips into the mire and is lost forever. With a little luck, by the time we catch up with our comrades they'll have forgotten to ask where we parked it.
Ride and die
This feature originally appeared in Edge magazine #418. For more in-depth features and interviews on classic games delivered to your door or digital device, subscribe to Edge or buy an issue!
Sludge is a central feature of John Carpenter's Toxic Commando. Set less than ten years in the future, the forthcoming co-op FPS from Saber Interactive is focused on a technology company called Obsidian (no relation to the California-based purveyor of the best RPGs) which drills into a remote forested region with the goal of harnessing the power of the Earth's core.
Reports of demonic shapes behind the eyes of its workers aren't heeded, and on October 29, 2033, the Sludge God reveals itself, promptly transforming the local human population into an army of mind-controlled undead.
"They were working on alternate technologies and energy sources, and they dug too deep," Willits tells us, carrying on the story. "They awoke something in the ground, and there was a huge coverup and concealment of the area. Obsidian CEO Leon Dorsey thinks that if he doesn't stop the Sludge God, it will break out of this containment zone and take over the world. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the best resources, and hires this motley crew to help him."
You arrive in the region along with three other mercenaries. Dorsey has promised you $250,000 for delivering a case of fuel to him, although there's some anxiety within the group about whether that's $250,000 for each person or in total, to be shared around. In the end, however, the squabble is academic since the mission goes south owing to the arrival of the aforementioned zombies.
"I could not have been more explicit in my instructions," Dorsey growls at the mercenaries as they regain consciousness following their initial encounter with the Sludge spawn. "Under no circumstances should you tamper with the egg. Instead, you killed its offspring."
With his tied-back grey hair and impatient stare, Dorsey bears a close resemblance to John Carpenter himself. The acclaimed horror director has long held a reputation for sharing unvarnished views. In a 2017 interview with the Guardian, he was asked how he feels about remakes of his films. "I love it, if they are going to pay me money," he replied. "I think everyone should pay me. Why not? I'm an old guy now and I need money. Send me money."
As for Carpenter's role in the shooter that bears his name, let's just say he isn't in attendance at Saber's daily standup meetings
More recently, YouTube has become well stocked with shortform videos capturing the legendary film-maker's showdowns with rude fans, along with his impish takedowns of modern horror movies ("What did I like about The Substance? Zero. What did I not like about it? Everything").
Sure enough, Willits says there's a "surprising amount" of Carpenter in Dorsey. "One of our writers had the opportunity to spend some time and talk with him. There's definitely a little bit of Carpenter in Leon. He's such a pleasant man, he really is."
As for Carpenter's role in the shooter that bears his name, let's just say he isn't in attendance at Saber's daily standup meetings, which is perhaps to be expected of a 77-year-old man who has long expounded the virtues of his retirement. Nevertheless, when the studio first began work on Toxic Commando, it drew inspiration from the science-fiction cinema of the '80s and '90s, and decided that bringing Carpenter on board in at least some kind of official capacity made sense.
"There are things in here when you play that you'll see have been inspired by his action films," Willits says. "He's more of a gamer than I think most people realize, and he's definitely embraced working with us on this game."
Carpenter once remarked that he'd devoted his life to learning how to play Destiny 2, so it's not a great stretch to imagine that he might enjoy a co-op shooter in the mode of Toxic Commando.
"He's helped us with some story guidance," Willits says. "He's met with our writers. He's like: 'These are the things you need to focus on; these are the things that you need to explain more'. I would call it more like a mentorship."
Hands-on chaos
It has that Carpenter vibe when you hear it.
Tim Willits
On first impression, Toxic Commando's story and premise don't stand out from other tongue-in-cheek horror games such as Dead Island and Back 4 Blood; given Carpenter's extensive influence on the shooter genre over the past three decades, we wonder whether he has inspired so many spiritual successors that it's hard for his own, actual voice to cut through.
And yet the director's contributions can be heard quite clearly within Toxic Commando's soundtrack. Carpenter was famously an early adopter of the synthesiser, and has provided scores for several of his own movies, doing much to define the eerie, pulpy tone of some of the best horror movies like Halloween, Assault On Precinct 13 and Christine.
He's written a lot of Toxic Commando's music with his son and regular collaborator, musician Cody Carpenter. "The stems and some of the music bits in the soundtrack that he worked on for us, we've been able to incorporate into our songs," Willits says. "That's why it has that Carpenter vibe when you hear it."
More than anything in the dialogue or story setup, it's these woozy, pitch-bent synths that place Toxic Commando firmly in the Carpenter-verse. We're particularly fond of the way Saber has diegetically integrated the music into the course of a session. Keyboard riffs don't only play during the loading screens, but emanate from the car radio as your teammates idle in their trucks, waiting for you to gas up their rides.
But after the delivery mission goes so horribly, gorily wrong, why are the mercs even back in the field? Like any benevolent CEO, Dorsey is strong-arming his employees via their health benefits: if they quit the job, he'll disable the high-tech vests that are protecting them from the zombie virus now swimming in their bloodstream.
"No doctor in the world can help you," Dorsey says. "As long as the creature lives, the infection is incurable, untreatable. Even the vests only buy you…" The scientist inhales through his nose and throws a hand in the air for emphasis. "A week." The $250,000 payment is thus rendered moot, as the mercs forcibly become personally invested in Dorsey's victory against the Sludge God.
Class act
The sludge infection, however, has a happy side effect, since it gives each merc their own superpowers. This is how Saber contextualizes Toxic Commando's four classes: the Medic, the Defender, the vehicle-focused Operator and the damage-dealing Strike.
We opt for the latter, and although special abilities broadly take a back seat to the guns, when the monster horde gets especially hectic we have a barrage of magical missiles we can use to clear the screen swiftly.
We're grateful, too, for the Medic's healing circle; when everyone's health gets low, we can all crouch around the healer like we're getting warm by a campfire and regenerate some life. Over time, the Medic's bonus vigour ticks down, rather like the overcharged health bar of modern Wolfenstein's BJ Blazkowicz.
Like all such abilities in Toxic Commando, though, healing can be upgraded between missions, so Medics can eventually hand their comrades more permanent benefits.
You can find whole or partial analogues to many of these monsters in Left 4 Dead, which, more than a decade and a half on, remains the crucial touchpoint for all co-op monster shooters.
Each of the mercs has their own superpower-assisted role, then – but so do the zombies, the various special abilities of which become starkly apparent during a mission where we're defending a church. As the oncoming waves clamber over the railings, they're boosted by the hazmat-suited Skunks, who spread a gas that increases the strength of any nearby undead.
More immediately threatening are the Nukers, which look like sky lanterns filled with flames and are just dying to blow themselves up across the front of your vehicle – a nice, new, pearl-coloured police car, perhaps. And then you have the sneaky, slimy Stalkers, which lurk on the sides of the roads like walking spike strips, just waiting to wrap a tentacle around your wheel arch and bring you screeching to a halt.
We suspect there are other variants out there, with names we've yet to learn. At one point, while sitting in the back seat of a truck like a hapless child, we stare out of the window in horror as a well-shouldered monstrosity charges the vehicle. During another pitched battle, while reviving Saber creative director Jason O'Connell, the onscreen prompt to offer 'Help' suddenly turns to the considerably more alarming 'Ask for help'.
An enormous zombie, whose frayed form resembles a Hasselback potato, lifts us clean off the ground and holds us aloft like a screaming, thrashing ice-cream cone. You can find whole or partial analogues to many of these monsters in Left 4 Dead, which, more than a decade and a half on, remains the crucial touchpoint for all co-op monster shooters. But Toxic Commando feels like much more than a variation or a pastiche.
Saber's work on both Space Marine 2 and World War Z feeds into the swarm-based combat, but the studio has another, perhaps less-acknowledged string to its bow: detailed vehicle simulation.
More than a decade ago, a graphics programmer working at Saber on Halo's anniversary remake began a side project called Spintires. Pavel Zagrebelnyy had grown up in St Petersburg, the world's northernmost metropolis, and fallen in love with the old Soviet trucks and excavators operating in its swampy countryside. "I like the balancing of traditional challenges," he told PC Gamer in 2021. "The integration of physics and the feel of the wilderness."
Zagrebelnyy no longer works at Saber Interactive, but his very particular brand of offroad simulation has continued via SnowRunner, Expeditions and this year's RoadCraft, all of which focus on a slow-paced, sumo-like struggle between machinery and the wild. Only Toxic Commando, however, has sought to tie the two key strands of the studio's DNA together in a satisfying double helix, incorporating vehicles into the co-op shooting paradigm.
"We had the exact same SnowRunner physics at first, but it was a little too slow," Willits explains. "So we made it slightly more accessible." It's certainly far easier to build up speed in Toxic Commando's vehicles, and not once do we find ourselves rolling down a hillside on our roof – a fixture fail state in Saber's previous simulations. Even so, the undulation and buoyancy that make SnowRunner's heavy machinery engrossing to drive is present and correct in Toxic Commando's trucks, ambulances and turbo-charged panda cars.
Route finder
Toxic Commando has sought to tie the two key strands of the studio's DNA together in a satisfying double helix, incorporating vehicles into the co-op shooting paradigm.
The level design also leans on the openly traversible, vertiginous landscapes Saber learned how to build in the Spintires series and its spinoffs. When we sit down to try Toxic Commando, as far as we can tell our missions take place in a steep, sodden valley. Finding a route from one objective to the next often means plunging our ride down the side of a natural half-pipe, then fighting to retain the momentum as we cross a quagmire.
Not for nothing is sludge your designated enemy in this game. If you're thrashing your car at top speed, you can smash through zombies with ease, but muddy expanses regularly threaten to pull you to a halt, leaving you to defend a static point while under threat from another special undead, which Saber calls the Heavy. Worse, sludge acts as a supernatural summoning point. The longer you're trapped in it, the more zombies emerge from the muck around you.
When this inevitably happens, your best friend is the winch. As in SnowRunner and RoadCraft, you can unfurl it from the front of your vehicle at any time, and wrap it around solid parts of the terrain to pull yourself out of trouble. Saber has decorated Toxic Commando's environments with glowing, sac-like winch points, providing a readable visual prompt, but the cable can also be applied much more broadly – launching a winch hook at a teammate's truck to try to tug one vehicle with the other, and thereby save fuel, for instance. Even Willits and O'Connell seem uncertain of the device's limitations.
"Throughout the world there are stuck doors and bunkers and places that you can winch open," Willits says. In this way, your vehicles can be used to break down barricades and open up caches of loot. But you'll need to feed the trucks in turn, collecting spare parts for post-battle repairs and petrol cans to top up the tank.
Although in theory there's nothing to stop you leaving your cars behind (and you're encouraged to swap them for others as you come across them in the wild), each vehicle offers different benefits, and it's possible that you'll become attached to particular models. Cop cruisers, for example, come with extra ammunition for your guns, while the ambulance provides health boosts. If you find something with a mounted turret, it'll prove itself a godsend during the zombie sieges.
But the vehicles serve another purpose. Since they all have room for multiple mercs, they're a subtle incentive to stay together and lean hard into co-op. "Once you leave the group, the world definitely beats you up," Willits says. "When one of us wanders off and tries to do our own thing, we're punished for it." At the same time, he admits he wants to see players try to tackle the game on foot, just to see how it will transform the core experience. "There are a million things that you could do," he says. "I love the fact that there are so many gameplay systems working together that have been crafted and architected through years of development."
The gas cans whose contents keep your trucks on the road can also fuel car-mounted weapons such as the flamethrower, or be tossed into the back of your truck if you haven't yet decided what to do with them. Should the need arise, you can even hurl them into a horde of enemies and ignite them with a bullet. It's this kind of flexibility that can be missed by developers looking to recall the strengths of Left 4 Dead, but Saber appears to have kept it in mind since the beginning.
It's this kind of flexibility that can be missed by developers looking to recall the strengths of Left 4 Dead
"You saw the chaos," Willits says. "You saw the randomness and the gameplay that just emerged. We're doing silly stuff with multiple cars and towing each other and throwing gas tanks."
It's robust technology, he adds, which enables player improvisation of this kind. "You can't script that out. That's just natural play, but you need to create an environment and a framework that allows for that. And that's what I think players really love when they play games. We've expanded not only the swarm tech, but the AI director."
The term 'AI director' was coined by Valve, referring to the system in Left 4 Dead which manages the frequency and form of enemy attacks, anticipating – and manufacturing – crescendos and lulls in the action. Many developers of co-op games have attempted to recreate Valve's defining, invisible auteur, but Willits believes Saber's version is especially sophisticated.
"It curates the Heavies and the swarms," he says. "It knows the state of the game. It knows what we're doing, it knows what we have, and it shifts and moves the combat to hopefully give us the best experience that we can have. I do think the AI director was picking on me."
In World War Z, Willits says, the zombie swarms were more predictable: "You always knew they were coming down this alleyway or over this section of buildings." The undead hordes of Toxic Commando are more erratic. "Just the randomness of having such a large area to play in has made the swarm tech and the AI director much more robust," Willits says.
Doomed
We're doing silly stuff with multiple cars and towing each other and throwing gas tanks
Tim Willits
Is it a stretch to suggest the combat in Toxic Commando recalls the dizzying gunfights of 2016's Doom and its even more dizzying sequel, Doom Eternal? Maybe not, given the clutch of Id Software veterans installed alongside Willits in Saber's senior team.
"Jason O'Connell basically handcrafted most of Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal," Willits says. During our session, he is regularly taunted for his combat performance by Chad Eanes, Toxic Commando's assistant creative director, who also worked on Doom 2016 and Eternal as a level designer and producer. As a trio, Willits, O'Connell and Eanes have accrued almost half a century's worth of Id Software expertise.
"The group of us really do bring a lot of experience in firstperson shooters," Willits says. "Everything from how long you've got to hold a button down to what the dead zone is when aiming; how the weapons feel in your hand and the kickback, and how much damage one bullet creates compared to a rocket launcher. So it is decades of experience in design and planning and building worlds that I think helps us give guidance to all of our teams."
There are also echoes in Toxic Commando of the archetypal Doom plotline, which generally concerns humanity's desperation for energy at all costs. But where the game is most pleasantly reminiscent of Id Software's output is in its fondness for premise over story. This is a shooter that would rather players were bogged down in sludge than lore.
"To be honest, we had much more exposition in this game, and we've definitely trimmed it down," Willits says. "I think that we got to a nice, good spot. Our characters have personality, but they're not annoying. You can see that we have a game flow and a narrative to the experience, but it's not all up in your face. We want people to jump in with their friends, have exactly the same experience that we had today, and have a great time."
During the initial cutscene exchange with Carpenter's doppelgänger, just as the dialogue threatens to get lost in plot twists and scientific detail, mercenary Astrid places her fingers on her lips and silences the group with a sharp whistle. "This is a shitburger," she summarises. "Monsters are real. Maybe we're dying. Hell, he could be the goddamn devil. But if he's telling the truth, what choice do we have?"
"So," Dorsey retorts. "One of you knows how to think." We have a sense that Saber has its head screwed on right, too. This is a company that has consistently found success in one of the most crowded of genres, the co-op shooter, amid a growing crisis in game discovery. By folding in the niche charms of offroad simulation, it's now giving itself the best chance to stand out and strike gold again. Beneath Toxic Commando's mud, goop and ooze, there just might be something special.
Toxic Commando is just one of the upcoming PS5 games headed our way in 2026
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