I ran out of explosives on wave ten and watched our flank collapse in two seconds. You feel the heat of that mistake long after the match ends. I wrote this to keep you from making the same one.
Best skills to unlock in John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando
I’ve watched squads crumble because someone poured points into the wrong branch. Skill choices shape how your class behaves, so the order you pick matters more than the cosmetics on your loadout.
All four classes in Toxic Commando come with distinct roles, loadouts, and skill trees. You can’t pick every node, so you have to steal wins by prioritizing the moves that scale with later waves. Below I’ll tell you which skills I use, why they work, and how they change the way you play on Steam, PS5, or Xbox.
What are the best skills for The Strike in Toxic Commando?
The Strike clears crowds with explosives and explosives only. Treat each grenade like a vote—you want every one to count.
The priority is straightforward: increase carrying capacity, expand blast coverage, then add lingering effects that punish clustered enemies. If you play on higher difficulty, these nodes let a single well-timed toss swing a wave.
| Skill | Reason |
|---|---|
| Combatant | This skill allows you to carry one additional explosive. An additional explosive means more damage and provides you with an extra chance to clear the enemies. |
| Blast Radius | All upgrade nodes on this sequence improve the blast radius of every explosive you trigger. This enables you to improve the AoE potential of the explosives. |
| Supernova | While this upgrade takes a lot of time to unlock, it causes your fireballs to explode and spread fire within their radius. The ignited fire does damage over time to the undead caught in the blast. |
How should I build The Medic’s skill tree?
If your team survives, it’s usually because the Medic kept them in the fight. I’ve pulled people back from the brink thanks to a properly specced Medkit line.
Your upgrades should stack on sustain: faster ability refresh, stronger heals, and a safety net that prevents a single bite from ending a run. On solo runs this class becomes a small hospital on legs; in co-op it’s a force multiplier.
| Skill | Reason |
|---|---|
| Wizardry | This skill allows The Medic’s ability to recharge 100% faster when fully upgraded. The faster recover will help you to provide more heals over time, and help your team to survive for longer. |
| Medkit Efficiency | Once fully upgraded, the Medkit Efficiency allows your Medkits to heal 50% more health. These additional heals will be necessary against harder enemies and bigger waves. |
| Self Medicate | Things can go wrong at any time, and this skill allows your Healing Aura to revive you when you’re incapacitated. Having such a privilege allows you to survive longer and save your teammates when required. |
Which skills should I prioritize for The Operator?
The Operator’s drone is the difference between a slow choked match and a controlled cleanup. I’ve seen drones carry games when the gunplay alone wouldn’t.
Focus on uptime first, then add survivability and damage. A drone that stays on the field 50% longer becomes an extra player; a drone that wakes the moment you’re grabbed is the safety valve for solo players on Steam Workshop servers or public queues.
| Skill | Reason |
|---|---|
| Sustained Support | This upgrade allows The Operator’s drone to stay in the Battle Mode for 50% longer. This allows the drone to do more damage and kill more enemies. The 50% hike is massive for the latter waves. |
| Loyal Friend | If you’re playing solo, this skill will work especially well with Sustained Support. It will activate the Drone immediately if a zombie grabs The Operator. This allows you to escape tight situations when you don’t have a possible way to save yourself. |
| Drone Lethality | This skill significantly improves the drone’s damage output by 10%, which helps it to provide support fire when things get tough. Moreover, this skill upgrade works pretty well with both Loyal Friend and Sustained Support. |
Best skills for The Defender
The Defender should be a human shield the rest of the squad can rely on. In practice I treat the barrier as a controlled choke that kills anything foolish enough to try and breach it.
Prioritize barrier damage and durability. A barrier that damages enemies and grants teammates temporary armor changes how pushes work—your team can stand in the open with confidence, and the barrier becomes a force multiplier in late waves. Think of the barrier like a fortified bunker; it should both protect and punish.
| Skill | Reason |
|---|---|
| Repulsor | The Repulsor converts The Defender’s barrier into a death dome. With this upgrade, all enemies will take significant damage when they try to cross the barrier. Roamers will die immediately, and this skill massively improves the damage potential of The Defender. |
| Energy Armor | Once you get all upgrades on this line, your barrier will provide 25 Temporary Armor when your allies are inside the barrier. This Temporary Armor, when full upgraded, will stack to 100. The additional |
| Expansion | The Expansion skill increases the barrier’s protective radius by 20%. Both the Repulsor and Energy Armor skills rely on how effective the barrier is. Increasing its radius allows the barrier to target more enemies and provide more barrier to your teammates. |
Pick the class that matches how you like to play: crowd control, sustain, drone support, or tanking. If you want to test my recommendations, queue on Steam or a friend’s PS5 lobby and try the skill order I laid out—your later waves will thank you.
Which class are you going to bend into a murder machine first?