The city of Tyndalston sits, metaphorically and literally, next to Los Santos. “Samson,” the debut title from 20-person studio Liquid Swords, is a gritty open-world crime saga that wears its inspiration so plainly it feels like a direct challenge. But ambition alone isn’t enough when competing in the arena of a genre defined by a juggernaut. Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto series, with its thousands of employees and billions in revenue, sets a bar that is almost impossible to touch. This hands-on experience with Samson reveals a game that is not only a flawed and deeply derivative clone but also one fundamentally broken by its own overreach, offering a clunky, buggy, and narratively bankrupt experience that serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of chasing a king.
The Uninspired World and Hollow Protagonist of Samson
You are Samson McCray, a blandly gruff white man freshly released from prison and returning to his suburban hometown of Tyndalston. His defining characteristic is a $100,000 debt, a plot device that forces him into a daily grind of jobs to pay off a mounting tally before he sleeps. This premise could be fertile ground for a gritty commentary on desperation and survival. Instead, it is executed with the narrative depth of a mid-2000s B-movie. Samson himself radiates a cheap, macho energy devoid of charm or complexity—a character more likely to inspire unease than engagement.
The world of Tyndalston mirrors this lack of inspiration. While technically an open environment, it feels like a hollow stage built solely for mission markers. The jobs themselves are monotonously repetitive, almost exclusively involving beating someone up, either on foot or from behind the wheel of a car. There is no sense of a living, breathing city, no side narratives or world-building details that reward exploration. It is a functional, and frankly boring, replica of a template established decades ago.
A Core Combat System That Is Fundamentally Broken
The entire gameplay loop of Samson hinges on its combat, and here the game fails catastrophically. With firearms reportedly cut from the player’s arsenal due to development constraints—though still bizarrely featured in the story and used by enemies—the melee system must carry the entire weight. It cannot. The fist-fighting is clunky, plagued by significant input delay, and lacks any fluidity or tactical depth.
Enemies attack relentlessly, and getting surrounded often leads to a stun-lock situation where you are simply pummeled without recourse. The occasional breakable melee weapon offers no real relief. This makes every on-foot job a frustrating chore, a battle against the game’s own dysfunctional mechanics rather than a satisfying challenge. When the central activity of your game is irredeemably poorly executed, the entire experience collapses.
Vehicular Action and the Ghost of Missing Features
The driving and vehicular combat aspects of Samson are described as “perfectly adequate.” The car handling is serviceable, and missions involving chasing and ramming other vehicles can be momentarily functional. However, this standard was met by games like The Simpsons Hit & Run over two decades ago. It feels basic, not innovative.
More damning is the glaring absence of guns for the player. Liquid Swords told PC Gamer that intricate systems, including firearms, had to be cut due to the “reality of the industry” and staff layoffs. Yet, guns remain a pivotal story element, with early missions involving arms dealers. This creates a bizarre dissonance: the game constantly points to a feature it cannot deliver, highlighting its own shortcomings rather than cleverly working around them. The cut content haunts the final product.
An Early Build Plagued by Performance and Bugs
Beyond its design flaws, Samson is technically unstable. The early build played for this hands-on was riddled with bugs that frequently broke missions and immersion. One pursuit mission ended with the target car flipping onto its side, preventing the character from exiting and triggering a cutscene. The NPC then teleported into the street, but the scene played out with him facing away from Samson, ultimately soft-locking the mission because interaction prompts failed to appear.
Collision detection is wildly inconsistent, with characters often getting stuck on geometry or being launched into the sky following minor impacts. Samson’s own car was once flung sky-high in a manner reminiscent of Grand Theft Auto 4’s infamous swing set glitch. Performance on PC was erratic, with one instance of setting fire to a drug stash causing the frame rate to plummet to an unplayable 2-3 FPS for over 30 seconds. These issues transform the experience from a playable game into a frustrating beta test.
The Narrative Void: A Story With Nothing to Say
Perhaps the most profound failure of Samson is its narrative emptiness. The setup—a man forced into crime by debt—is a cliché that hasn’t been interesting since the early PlayStation 2 era. The game does nothing to interrogate this premise, offer moral complexity, or develop its characters beyond cardboard cutouts. Dialogue is flat, missions are devoid of contextual stakes, and the world feels devoid of a soul.
It attempts to mimic the tone of crime epics like Grand Theft Auto but lacks the writing, satire, or cultural observation that gives those games their edge. Samson McCray’s journey is a series of hollow tasks, not a compelling story. In a genre where narrative can be a driving force, this void is fatal.
Samson is a stark lesson in scope and ambition. Liquid Swords aimed directly at the crown of open-world crime games, a genre dominated by a studio with resources magnitudes larger. The result is a game that feels not just like a poor imitation, but a broken one—a product where cut content, dysfunctional core mechanics, technical instability, and a narrative void compound into an experience that is difficult to recommend even as a curiosity. It underscores why smaller studios often thrive with focused, original ideas rather than attempting to clone a behemoth. The old adage holds true: you must be exceptionally prepared when you come for the king, lest you miss entirely and fall on your own sword.
