Left 4 Dead has held the horde shooter crown for 17 years, but John Carpenter's Toxic Commando is the best challenger yet

Left 4 Dead has maintained a stranglehold on the horde shooter for the best part of two decades, but one studio has spent the last several years making repeated plays for Valve's undead crown. Saber Interactive – the team behind World War Z and Space Marine 2 – is pulling out all the stops to make John Carpenter's Toxic Commando the next great zombie shooter. And while I don't want to speak too soon, it might actually have done it.

I'm given very little time to adjust to Toxic Commando. Before I could even be handed the controller for my Gamescom demo, I found myself battered to the floor by some shambling denizen of the undead. Thankfully, that gives me an immediate introduction to two excellent features. The first is a healing drone that allows my teammates to revive me while barely pausing their zombie-killing rampage. The second is Toxic Commando's pistol, which I can use to thin out the hordes enough that someone can come to my aid, but will also prove key to my adventures later on.

Revived from my initial stumble, it's time to get oriented with my surroundings. My first real impression of Toxic Commando is that it's huge – my mission takes place in a valley far wider and more open than anything I'd traditionally expect to see among the usually tight corridors and narrow sightlines of a zombie shooter. It feels closer to a Team Deathmatch map from a traditional FPS than anything out of Left 4 Dead, and I was initially skeptical – until COO Tim Willits allayed my fears.

The environments are "much larger" than anything from Space Marine 2 or World War Z, he admits, but "because of the dynamic nature of these larger environments, the swarms can come from different directions." Those swarms can vary greatly in size, and feature various different specials, all driven by the AI director that Saber has been busy perfecting across its previous releases. The result are zombies that do meaningfully fill this larger environment – it's rare that you feel like you're trekking through empty space, or that you're surprised by a cheap jump scare.

Bloodrunner

A consequence of bigger environments are vehicles that you can use to traverse it. My demo hinges around an enormous armored jeep, our driver mowing down zombies as I pick them off out of the passenger window and the gunner's turret chatters ceaselessly away above me. It's an aspect of Toxic Commando that borrows from an unexpected aspect of Saber history.

"For the gameplay, we wanted to introduce not only everything that we've done in World War Z and Space Marine," Willits explains, "but also in our Runner series." While it's been busy making massive licensed shooters, Saber has also had less mainstream success in a series of complex driving sims that hinge around players navigating natural disasters or huge banks of mud and snow. It's a heritage that's on full display in Toxic Commando, the jeep having to pull itself up steep slopes that have become mired in mud that sits four feet deep – at one point I watch one of my allies almost disappear below the surface as they try to wade through it.

It's an interesting way to flesh out those bigger maps. When my squad comes across the jeep, we're warned it's got minimal fuel supplies left, but we also know that it's got a winch that we could use to rescue another vehicle stranded elsewhere on the map. It might be worth it, but it could also leave us stranded, offering a layer of tactical decision-making that's rarely such an important part of these games.

Toxic Commando's take is "more arcadey" than anything from the Runner games, but it might not exist without them – Willits told me that the inception of Toxic Commando came from a Snowrunner stream watched by Saber's CEO, Matt Karsh, in which the player commented on how scary the nighttime environments felt. "Everyone knows there's literally nothing in Snowrunner that can get you," Willits pointed out, "but Karsh was like 'that's a good idea.'"

Poppin' Zeds

As the demo progresses, I've mowed down so many zombies that even after multiple pickups, my assault rifle is completely out of ammo. With no other choice, I turn to my pistol, and start to feel like I've been missing out on something this whole time. Earlier, I was too distracted to really get a feel for just how good this gun is, but now, I'm ripping through zombies with a single shot, each one bursting into a cloud of viscera as the pistol kicks satisfyingly in my hand.

Toxic Commandos owes its excellent gunplay to developers who Willits brought over from Quake Champions. Willits himself is a veteran of the Doom and Quake series, and it's clear he knows his way around a good weapon. Soon, one of my allies and I are leading the charge – me with my pistol, them with a shotgun – and with each cacophonous pull of the trigger, another zombie disappears in a spray of gore. It's an incredibly satisfying advance that leads us down the hill towards the spot where we'll make our last stand.

As we approach our final destination, it becomes clear that the slower fire rate of these two excellent guns isn't going to cut it. There are more zombies on my screen than I think I've ever seen before, pouring like water down the slopes towards a central fortress. As we take up a defensive position in preparation for the next wave, I swap my pistol for something even more explosive: a mortar emplacement that I use to thin out the approaching horde as my allies pick off the survivors. This is the highlight of my Toxic Commandos experience, a last stand that feels genuinely desperate in the face of so many enemies. It's something I don't think I've really felt in a zombie game since summers spent with Left 4 Dead 2's Helm's Deep mod, a whole array of outlandish weapons sounding off around me as the horde just keeps coming.

I ask Willits why the industry has struggled to replicate Valve's success in the intervening decade. "It was a long time since the industry had a really successful co-op zombie shooter after Left 4 Dead," he admits. "And it's an easy formula to be honest." For Saber, he says, getting this close is a result of the strong foundation it built with its previous horde shooters, but also the expertise it's been able to borrow from its runner games, and Willits' own FPS experience.

Toxic Commando is a game of many parts, but it's certainly more than the sum of them. Whether that's enough to truly challenge Left 4 Dead, I'm not yet prepared to say, but many, many games have attempted that challenge over the past 17 years, and Toxic Commando might just be the one that comes closest to overcoming it.

Are we looking at a new contender on our list of the best zombie games?

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