Samson

It's sometimes hard not to have expectations for games you're keen to try. Even though the alarm bells are ringing and everything suggests this game has the odds stacked against it, you still hold out hope. You cross your fingers, avoid walking under ladders, and all that, in the hope that the game might just blow you away after all. That's how I felt about Samson, which I'd seen several exciting previews of, sending my expectations skyrocketing. Not only that, but everything suggested that developer Liquid Swords, consisting of a number of veterans from Avalanche, had understood not to bite off more than they could chew, and had created a game narrow enough to make it across the finish line.

When I first saw Samson, subtitled "A Tyndalston Story", I thought it resembled the semi-linear missions of the GTA series, just without firearms, and that is actually a fairly accurate description. In many ways, the team here has clearly drawn heavy inspiration from Grand Theft Auto, where missions involve driving around an open city and completing various tasks. The only difference is that all combat uses only fists. Otherwise, the structure is very familiar if you've played open-world games before. It's not the first GTA spin-off set up this way; think of Sleeping Dogs, for example.

You play as Samson McCray, who returns to his hometown with a massive debt to various criminal gangs in St. Louis. His sister has been taken hostage to ensure he pays the $100,000 he owes. Consequently, Samson must throw himself into criminal activities in Tyndalston to earn the money. The story, however, is rather thin and mostly an excuse to send the player out on missions. Samson isn't a particularly exciting character, and his friends are exactly the stereotypical figures you'd expect in this type of game. It all feels like something you've seen before, and I found it hard to really engage with either Samson, his sister, or the people he surrounds himself with. There's a slightly over-the-top quality to the story, as if it tries to adopt a bit of self-awareness, but it just doesn't work when the characters aren't any more dynamic than they are.

To earn money, Samson can throw himself into various activities. He can take part in races, deliver drugs, and beat up other criminals who get in his way. The only thing the game really does differently is remove firearms, and as we mentioned before, the focus on close combat isn't even entirely original. The rest feels borrowed directly from GTA, and perhaps even Mafia. It's frankly disappointing. The game uses a system of so-called Action Points, where each mission costs points, and you can typically manage three missions a day. At the same time, you have to keep paying off your debt, otherwise you'll be hunted down. Good idea, isn't it? Well, yes, it might sound fine on paper, but in practice it's extremely punishing. If you fail a mission, you lose almost all your money. You can later unlock abilities that reduce the loss, but you still lose around 90%. It's incredibly frustrating. It's fine to feel the pressure of debt in a more system-driven and mechanical way, but it's just poorly implemented.

You can really feel how the game constantly pushes you to play perfectly and it just doesn't work very well. It feels more like an exercise in avoiding frustration than having fun. If only the missions were entertaining, but unfortunately they aren't. Broadly speaking, they fall into two categories.

The first type are car missions, where you drive around, take part in races, or stop other criminals by smashing their cars. You have your own car, which breaks down quite quickly, and when that happens, you have to pay to repair it or find a new one. The problem is that you can't steal cars from traffic, so if your car breaks down, you might end up running several kilometres to find a new one. It's not particularly well designed. It all quickly becomes stressful, especially because the game also penalises you financially. When you have to worry about your car, your money, and the difficulty of the missions, it starts to feel like work rather than entertainment.

And I know there are those who want a challenge more than anything else, but try to imagine Celeste, where your hard-earned strawberries drain away over time, and every time you fail. Samson isn't challenging, it's just maliciously designed and not in a clever way. You gain experience points along the way, but even when I reached the game's final section, I was knocked down by enemies who were just giving me a dirty look, and at that point, I was right at the bottom of the aforementioned skill tree. It didn't feel any different and I didn't feel any stronger than when I started the game and that's not a good thing. You don't feel any sense of progression and that made the game quite boring.

The other type of mission takes place on foot, where you have to find packages and beat up enemies. This is where the game really falls apart. The controls are imprecise and feel "floaty" and there are so many technical glitches that it made me rage-quit several times. You often get stuck in the environment, and when that happens, your character can start flying around in strange ways. It can take several minutes to free yourself and you don't feel like restarting because the game hasn't necessarily saved.

The combat system isn't good either. You can get stun-locked by enemies who just keep hitting you without you being able to do anything, and suddenly you're lying dead on the ground and have lost your money... again. Enemies can also spawn behind you without warning, so you get hit with no chance to react. It feels unfair and frustrating. I must admit that I threw my keyboard onto the sofa several times in sheer frustration. That's not a good sign. This can be fixed, of course, but I'm forced to describe my experience as it was, not as it might potentially be for you.

If I'm to say something positive, the town of Tyndalston is actually quite nice. It has a gritty, raw atmosphere and the constantly wet roads give it a distinctive feel, even though it never actually rains. It's a bit odd, but also a bit charming in a quirky way. Unfortunately, this is quickly overshadowed by repetitive sounds and conversations that loop endlessly, and which eventually just become irritating. This game feels like a collection of good ideas that never quite come together. You can see what the developers have tried to do, but it seems as though they haven't had the resources to bring it to life properly.

So, would I recommend Samson? No, not in the state the game is in right now. And I struggle to see how it could be salvaged without significant changes to some absolutely central systems.