Samson Review

In some ways, Samson reminds me a little of 2025’s MindsEye. That is, like MindsEye, it’s regularly gorgeous, has some neat vehicles, and is intentionally narrower and far less GTA-adjacent in scope than it may look like at first blush. However, also like MindsEye, Samson is pretty bad. With extremely janky combat, predictable car chases, and a small pool of constantly repeating missions, this open-world driving-brawler hybrid became a dull and annoying slog long before I reached the end of my 12-hour stint with it. Worse, even though I’ve cleared the mammoth $100,000 debt that drives Samson’s daily grind of crime, a game-breaking bug has left me soft-locked out of actually finishing the main missions and rolling credits. It’s as if this game doesn’t want me to finish it properly any more than I do.

Samson’s setup is simple: you are ex-con Samson McCray, who’s recently returned to his neighbourhood of Tyndalston. It’s the 1990s, but disappointingly the choice of time period has virtually no impact besides forcing McCray to use payphones. There’s certainly no ’90s music on the car radios. In fact, there’s no car radio at all, so there isn’t even anywhere players could potentially mod or dump their own.

McCray has a $100,000 debt being held over his head by an out-of-town crew using his sister as leverage, and must make daily payments to keep them both alive in the long-term. Parallel to this, there are 14 story missions involving some criminal rivals of McCray and his Tyndalston pals, of which Samson served me up seven before getting gummed up by some kind of bug that has prevented me from seeing the rest.

The sense of urgency and pressure this places on your actions is quite compelling for a brief time. There’s a finite amount of jobs you can take on per day, and the sense of urgency and pressure this places on your actions is quite compelling for a brief time. Before I grew weary with the general sloppiness of the brawling, the bugs, and the overall repetitiveness of the missions themselves, chipping away at the huge sum was an admittedly compulsive loop.

Each day is broken up into three sections – afternoon, evening, and night – and you initially have six action points to devote to taking on missions that cost two or three apiece. You must complete jobs to scrape together enough cash to service your debt every single day, and if you come up short you’ll be greeted by hired goons paid to pound it out of you the next morning.

Allow me to note that I’m well aware Samson is not exactly a big budget game and, on the Venn diagram of open-world action-driving games that operate on the fringe of Grand Theft Auto’s turf, there admittedly isn’t exactly a ton of crossover. At its core, Samson is really a straightforward open-world brawler with a basic driving component, and that’s it. However, its narrow scope isn’t its problem; the problem is how drastically unfinished and unrefined it all is.

Make no mistake: Samson is regularly very good-looking. From the way the midday sun pierces into McCray’s crumbling apartment, to the wafting steam emanating from manholes on the rain-slick streets, Samson’s visuals have truly been wonderfully realised. Tyndalston itself is also a genuinely fascinating place to inspect, thanks to its remarkable level of detail. The world is better described as more of a single neighbourhood rather than a city on account of its small size, with the main part of town just a few blocks wide and flanked by two waterside industrial zones – plus there’s a thin strip of freeway across a river accessible via several bridges. However, keeping it small has clearly allowed developer Liquid Swords to dress it with layers upon layers of credible urban grime. From the piles of garbage and stripped-down cars to the splashes of unique graffiti and hastily scrawled slogans, Tyndalston feels lived-in in a way that not all open-world games manage.

Tyndalston feels lived-in in a way that not all open-world games manage. Unfortunately, Samson’s admirable aesthetics can’t counteract the shonkiness of its combat, the dullness of its driving, or the dreariness of having to do the same missions over and over for no measurable payoff.

Samson’s strictly hand-to-hand brawling is clunky and graceless – and there’s no firearm combat at all, which begs the question of whether this whole game might have been better off set in a different country altogether. Cops will occasionally fire on McCray, but they often forget they’re armed. At one point I killed a man surrounded by police in the forecourt of a precinct, and not one of them thought to pull a pistol. Enemies appear to have very little environmental awareness, struggling with tight spaces and doorways, and getting hung up on props and clipping through parts of the world. Sometimes they just ignore your presence altogether.

With no lock-on available, fights typically devolve into spamming McCray’s light attack button and swinging the camera around as you swipe at the air trying to connect with opponents. There’s also a slow and highly telegraphed heavy attack that lands with a pleasing-enough meaty crunch, but it’s not something you can use much when surrounded by enemies.

Combat isn’t particularly responsive, either. For instance, staggered opponents will have a prompt appear above them for a finishing move – but getting this to trigger feels inconsistent. I often found myself simply spamming the button with no result, before subsequently giving up and windmilling another salvo of punches out ahead of McCray until his fists find some face flesh by accident.

Extracting him from combat is even more frustrating. Mashing the dodge button is effective enough, but his ability to actually sprint away is seemingly blocked when being swarmed by thugs – that means trying to turn and slowly jog in the opposite direction will just get you punched in the back of the head a bunch.

Some fights can be avoided by staying in your car, but there’s a limit to what you can achieve behind the wheel. A bit of this is the result of Samson’s habit of having invisible enemies drag McCray out of his vehicle and toss him several storeys into the air – just far enough away that you’ll automatically fail the mission. This may well be a trade off for all the times enemies will go through the animation of yanking him out of his car without actually doing so, leaving you able to continue driving.

More annoying, however, is how enemies generally have a supernatural ability to simply skate out of the way of your speeding vehicle – like animals and pedestrians in licensed racing games that aren’t permitted to let you run down living beings. Unless the environment prevents it, your car will often just push enemies out of danger like identical poles of a magnet. This is not only annoying, but it looks awful and unfinished, particularly when trying to mow down large groups. For some reason, however, enemies are completely oblivious to reversing cars – so if you back towards baddies, they’ll simply run mindlessly toward your rear bumper until you smear them onto the asphalt.

Unfortunately, the driving pillar of Samson’s action isn’t any sturdier. There are a smattering of driving-specific missions – including checkpoint races, deliveries, takedowns, and getaways – but none of them are especially enjoyable.

Getaways are probably the most disappointing, since the wanted system transparently cheats to get a fix on you. Even when you’ve broken line of sight, if you stop, police will continue to make all the correct turns to get you. Failing that, Samson will simply spawn in a new police cruiser out of nowhere directly behind you. Think you’re safe tucked away down an alley, far from the initial pursuit? So did I, until a police car blinked into existence metres away and slammed straight into me – seconds before the cooldown timer had finished.

Takedowns are disappointing, too. Despite Samson’s trailers hinting at the prospect of thrilling crashes as enemy cars wipe out and tumble alongside you, this doesn’t really happen much. What we typically get is rival vehicles bumbling around town on predefined routes. You’ll know when a T-bone is on the cards because, after a few takedown missions, you’ll know exactly where your targets are going to turn. Watching your rivals doing the same laps of the neighbourhood makes for very formulaic chases.

Occasionally they’ll get hung up for no apparent reason and refuse to proceed, giving you an easy target to smash into. However, sometimes that takes too long and the moment you wreck that car, the other vehicles are too far away and you’ll instantly fail. Other times your own car won’t survive long enough, meaning you’ll have to hoof it to the closest parked one – Samson bafflingly doesn’t let you carjack vehicles with drivers in them already. If you’re lucky, there’ll be one close by. If you’re not, you’ll be running for a while.

Takedown missions often end the millisecond you cause enough damage to your final target. At that point, the action will freeze to congratulate you on your success, but the moment play resumes the target car will disappear off the face of the planet. Sometimes all the cars in the area will disappear.

Much like the 2015 Mad Max game’s Magnum Opus, there’s an overt attempt in Samson to have players become attached to McCray’s personal vehicle. It’s perhaps not a coincidence considering there’s a good deal of talent at Liquid Swords who formerly worked at Mad Max developer Avalanche and, as a total car dork, it’s something I fundamentally understand.

In practice, however, it just doesn’t work. The cost of repairing McCray’s car is roughly as much as a typical mission will pay out, so the requirement to constantly do so in order to keep using it is too big a burden – and an unnecessary one at that. I quickly pivoted to using stolen cars to complete missions. Aside from mild variations, excluding McCray’s one-of-a-kind muscle car, I think there are only about four different traffic cars in Samson. That’s really very low for the genre, however (with the exception of a few checkpoint races with particularly unforgiving time limits that I quickly learned to avoid), I eventually found I could reliably complete missions in any one of them.

I took down the same street racer on several occasions in an old Ford Econoline-style van, and at one point I disabled a whole four-car convoy in a boxy old off-brand Chevy Caprice. The ’90s European and Crown Vic-inspired sedans don’t feel appreciably slower than McCray’s car, and I completed plenty of checkpoint races in them. I see what Liquid Swords was trying to do, but it pushed me away from McCray’s car rather than increasing my desire to nurture it.

There’s a whole XP system with perks and upgrades, but none of them feel meaningful. They largely just increase attributes like health and power and such, which means little when enemies get similarly stronger alongside you.

Reaching the end of my loan repayments only took me halfway through the XP levels, so I can’t really say if you’ll eventually outpace your enemies if you level up all the way. That said, there’s simply no good case to keep playing Samson after hitting that point. Clearing the debt got me a giddy phone call from McCray’s sister, Oonagh, and… that’s it. From that point on it’s noted McCray can keep what he earns, but there’s no purpose to have cash on hand other than to afford car repairs – and I have no desire to keep playing the same recycled missions I’ve already completed three or four times each.

If you want an open-world brawler with a little drama baked around it, play Sleeping Dogs, where the hand-to-hand combat drastically outclasses Samson in every way. If you want satisfying car chases in hefty American land yachts, play Driver: San Francisco. If you want an open-world action driving game designed to foster a relationship with a single vehicle (that simultaneously showcases the best of what a core part of the Liquid Swords team is capable of), play Mad Max. And if you want an open-world crime epic that actually feels like it's set in the ’90s, just dust off a copy of GTA: San Andreas.