PREVIEW Toxic Commando

The ‘Total Conversion’ isn’t a widely-referenced practice in video games these days.

As a concept, it hails back to the early days of Wolfenstein and Doom modders in the 1990s, who would take the WAD files that contained all of the game’s assets and replace everything from sprites to sound effects to map layouts. The changes could be as small as substituting demons for Barney the purple dinosaur, or something as large as the famed Aliens Total Conversion, which added all of the weapons, enemies, and sound effects of the film to create the best Aliens game at that point. It was so impressive that Fox threatened legal action to shut down its distribution, reasoning that no one would buy an Aliens game from them if they could get a better product for free — provided they already owned a copy of DOOM.

I bring up the concept of the ‘Total Conversion’ because that’s the best lens through which to view John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando. I recently played a preview that featured four of its levels, and while the experience was exactly as thrilling and disgusting as one would hope a co-op zombie horde shooter would be, I couldn’t help but feel like I’d played it before. Of course, that’s because I largely had — Toxic Commando is fundamentally a Total Conversion of World War Z, with just enough design tweaks to keep things interesting.

First, the similarities – structurally, it’s uncannily similar. There’s a four-person team dropped into a zone and told to reach an objective, which – at least in the four missions I played, always climaxed in a huge zombie rush where resources collected during the mission were spent to put up defenses in the hopes of slowing the hordes a little.

The arsenal is exactly the same – and I don’t mean similar types of weapons, I mean literally the same weapon models given the same names. Progression is also identical, with separate weapon and class experience points allowing players to unlock new attachments and abilities. There’s plenty of room for customization as well – just like in WWZ, the character a player picks is an entirely cosmetic choice, any one of the commandos can used with any specialization or weapon.

The biggest thing differentiating Toxic Commando from the game it was built upon is the level design. Where WWZ had mostly narrow, linear levels that were meant to be crept through carefully, Toxic Commando‘s levels – at least the three I was able to sample after the prologue – are huge, open landscapes that the player is encouraged to charge through recklessly. In a nod towards replayability, each mission starts with the players dropped randomly at one of the possible insertion points on the map, and while the ultimate objective in each stage will be located in the same place, the various points of interest are shuffled each time the level is loaded, ensuring that scavenging will always be a novel experience.

There’s a surprisingly large focus on vehicular mayhem here. I encountered a wide variety of rides, each offering a different ability, such as ambulances that heal the team automatically while driving, a truck with a flamethrower mounted on the bed, and even a police car that attracts zombies before exploding, wiping out dozens of them in a moment. Running down zombies in a truck is always thrilling, but the developers manage to keep the vehicles from being OP by borrowing some code from another one of their titles – Mudrunner. The maps are absolutely packed with swampy terrain that can slow and even trap vehicles, forcing players to use winches to pull them free.

As for the story, the fact that it has one at all is an improvement over WWZ, but I haven’t seen enough of it to weigh in just yet. Basically, the plot is kicked off when a clean energy drilling project accidentally opens a cavern where Tendril from the Inhumanoids was trapped, and it proceeds to absolutely wreck the area, turning everyone into zombies and spreading toxic sludge across the landscape. Now, normally I would hesitate to use a reference that obscure, but it’s so obviously accurate that it would basically be malpractice to not do so. (Google it if you didn’t grow up in the ’80s.) The players are hired by the owner of the energy corporation to deliver the fuel that will allow him to kill the beast, but then things quickly go awry, and soon they’re trapped in the monster’s exclusion zone, infected with a zombie virus, with no choice but to fight for their lives.

I had a better time with Toxic Commando than I was expecting. It’s certainly a more accessible game than WWZ ever was, although some of that is a matter of taste – if forced to choose between carefully sneaking past zombies or rolling them over with a APC while a friend blasts them with a mounted machinegun, obviously I’m going to choose the latter. More importantly, the mission variety and randomized elements make it feel like it will have stronger legs than WWZ did. While I know that WWZ has a devoted fanbase, I found Toxic Commando far easier to pick up and play, and I wouldn’t be surprised if even WWZ’s diehard players eventually made the switch.

That said, as promising as this playtest was, I don’t know if I’ll ever understand the title – there are four of them, so should it not be Toxic Commandos?

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