Samson Review (PC)

Massive open worlds are awesome and all, especially when they respect your time. You’ll find exciting quests on random paths that advance the story. Some NPCs will behave like real-life people, responding to your actions and decisions in dynamic ways. Perhaps the busy work is one of those rare pursuits that you genuinely are happy to be pouring hundreds of hours into. But let’s be frank here. It’s not every open-world action adventure RPG that sticks the landing. Oftentimes, expanding the world is at the detriment of enjoying actual gameplay. 

Enter Samson, a new semi-open world action-adventure keen to change that. Rather than design an open world at a massive scale, they reduce it to a small, sizable city, where many of your quests take place. The quests themselves are straightforward and may even begin to feel linearly structured toward meeting an end goal. You engage in car chases and street fights, but waste no time playing minigames and meandering off to paths unknown. 

It’s laser-focused, keen on cutting down the amount of time you spend exploring and collecting stuff, and that may or may not sit well with your soul. If you’re looking for a focused experience, then there might be something here for you, at least if you can contend with the gameplay and technical issues further explored in our Samson review.

Heavy Load to Carry

I quite like the story in Samson. After a major heist gone wrong, the titular Samson protagonist and getaway driver takes the fall. The car engine broke down or whatever. Anyway, the sister bargains for his release in exchange for cooking the books for some megatime criminals. Now that’s two things Samson has to repay: a looming debt from the botched heist and rescuing his sister from her captors.

You’ve got no money to your name. Even your disgusting crib is on loan. No fret. You still have contacts back at the crime-ridden town you grew up in. They can line up small-time criminal jobs for you that, hopefully, help pay back your debt. “A day at a time, buddy,” I encourage Samson (or myself) as I step out on the first day of what’ll be a long road to freedom. Tyndalston is a city inspired by ‘90s Philadelphia or New York. It’s broken down, on the brink of chaos and destruction. It’s holding on by a thread, with crime rates going up and a new drug, White Whisper, flooding the streets.

You can definitely draw similarities to crime noir stories of other games and media. But there’s something special that sets Samson apart from the rest. Every day is a chance to pay back what you owe, taking up your pick of crime jobs you deem profitable. But also, those crime jobs likely to pay more carry the most risk for failing or death. And they cost more Action Points as well, which you have a limited amount of per day. It’s absolutely vital that you don’t die during a mission because you’ll lose all the money you’ve made on that day.

Risk Versus Reward

And so, a tantalizing risk versus reward assessment inserts itself into your mission choices. Perhaps you might want to call it a day when the sun sets, taking home what you’ve made so far. Perhaps you might risk winding on into the night because the more you make, the faster you can get your sister’s captors off your back and bring her home. Amid all this is also a crime mystery to do with the new drug and gangs, but it never really pays off for multiple reasons.

There’s a shallowness to the story and character development. Or even how the missions advance the story. You’re risking your life during dangerous story missions, and yet they remain the same menial crime jobs you’ve been doing day in, day out. The gangs you fight, there’s hardly any rivalries explored among them or their motivations. The new drug is not delved into, who its backers are, and the impact it’s having on the streets. Well, you do see the impact, but that’s more about how decayed the city itself is, how downtrodden and reeking of despair just by its details.

Fine, narrow it down to the main plotline about paying off your debt. Whenever you aren’t able to pay the amount of money required for the day, whether it’s because you failed a mission, or worse, died and lost all your cash, it would have been great to see a more impactful repercussion for it. I mean, your sister’s captors do send goons your way, and you beat them to a pulp. But that’s most of what you’ve been doing already during your missions. The idea is that your sister might actually get killed if you’re unable to pay your debt, but that threat never really materializes. 

Beat ‘Em Down

Enough paying off debts, already feeling the pinch of its relatability on real life’s paying bills. You’ll be spending much of your mission runs beating down bad guys with your bare hands. Sometimes kicking them down. Other times, grabbing and tossing them into a pile of garbage. Fun, fun stuff. You can even perform cool finishers when built up and timed, twisting and breaking their bones. It’s often groups of gangs mowing you down, and you quite enjoy returning the favor. Sucks there’s no blood or gore, teeth breaking, and all. It’d surely match the gritty, dark tone of this world.

Problem is, the combat execution is all kinds of awkward in how it controls and looks. It’s hardly accurate, with no lock-on feature that makes it frustrating when taking care of multiple guys around you. You never really know when enemies are blocking your attacks. Scratch that, you never really know when you’re blocking or parrying, which is pretty problematic in establishing a skill and flow that feels satisfying. No, Samson doesn’t feel satisfying at all, especially after multiple run-ins with the flurry of bad guys this game has. 

Oh yeah, it gets worse. The enemies themselves behave awkwardly. They aren’t the smartest guys around, barely having any coordination or strategy. You might see them standing around and only reacting when you provoke them. Others will be parked in plain sight when you’re supposed to be finding and knocking them out. The enemy AI in Samson needs work. And that polish might as well be added to the animations. Samson has so many glitches at launch. Enemies get caught in walls and cars, almost like they’ve figured out it’s that it’s the way you can’t get to them. 

Drive ‘Em Off the Road

When you’re not on foot, you’re in the driver’s seat, driving to pick up packages, chasing down bad guys, or getting chased by the cops. And I must admit, the driving feels awesome, and it’s the strongest gameplay element of Samson. Although I wonder whether that’s because everything else has its bar set so low. Anyway, the cars are rundown, unreliable pieces of shit you can’t help cursing at when they don’t do what you want them to. But that’s the fun of it, trying to steer and drift a rusty, damaged car; your life literally on the line. 

The main car outlasts all others you can pick up in the world, and therefore requires more money to repair. And you aren’t exactly swimming in cash, needing every last penny to survive. So, you’re often forced to use old cars that break down after the least collision, which you’ll be doing a lot of trying to drive bad guys off the road. Your car is your weapon during car chases, using it to bump into enemies. 

All of that considered, and glitches and bugs that hopefully get fixed in the upcoming patch update, one last thing I’ll mention is the repetitiveness of the missions. With a story setting of a desperate protagonist willing to make money in whatever way they can, you’d expect some fun ideas of heists and crime jobs. Instead, all you’ll mostly be doing is beating down a certain number of bad guys, chasing them down, and picking up the cash they have. And there are the car chases, getting away from the cops. Otherwise, there’s very limited mission variety, which waters down the motivation to go out every day to do the same things all over again. 

Verdict

Unfortunately, very few darts actually land on the board as far as Samson’s execution is concerned. The idea is definitely there, from the interesting premise of balancing the risk versus reward of odd crime jobs to the narrowing down of gameplay to what matters most: combat. Both hand-to-hand and vehicular combat are featured in most of your playthrough, but their execution and polish leave a lot to be desired. 

For $24.99, though, you might still feel inclined to give it a chance and support the devs to make more games like this. It’s Liquid Swords’ first go at it, and perhaps given the time to smooth rough edges, they might actually hit the sweet spot of carefree street gangster fun.