Trending
Samson may not be the most hyped game you'll come across this spring, but its GTA-lite approach and grim criminal underworld story of personal catharsis is nothing short of interesting on paper. It's also coming from developers who worked on one of the most underrated action games ever - Mad Max - so Samson had both my curiosity and attention for a while now.
Add a criminal simulator gameplay concept to the mix, and you have a game with the potential to scratch that GTA itch, something the studio was openly but cautiously aiming for. "There are times when you want to put GTA down and pick up something else," Samson studio founder said. "I think there's a space for us there." It's an admirable ambition, but history hasn't been kind to games making that particular promise, and Samson is unlikely to change that.
STORY
In Samson, you play as legendary getaway driver Samson McCray, a largely uncharismatic and bland criminal who has a massive debt to pay to a gang holding his sister hostage. A job went south, a lot of money was lost in the process, Samson's sister stepped in to negotiate, struck a deal, and now stays with the St Louis gang as a guarantee that he will pay back every penny.
So Samson's days are pretty much doing the same thing over and over again until he clears the $100,000 he owes.
Basically, you leave your apartment at noon, spend action points doing missions to earn cash, pay off your daily debt of $3,000, exhaust your action points, go home, sleep, and do it all again the next day. Three missions per day, including story content. That's your loop.
I understand the intent. It's supposed to capture just how depressing it is to wake up every day with that burden on your back, grinding through dangerous criminal work to save someone you love. But good intentions don't save poor execution, and Samson starts to feel repetitive and boring well before you reach the finish line.
Outdated mission design
The concept would have more strength to carry you through if it wasn't for weak mission variety and poor mission design. I lost count of how many times I drove to the same random spot on the map to start a mission, then drove across town to pick up five crates scattered around an area. It's supposed to be a job about stealing from a rival faction, but it makes no sense. Why is this valuable gear just lying around in the most random places?
Missions generally consist of beating people up, destroying vehicles, stealing items, or acting as a getaway driver. There's rarely any story behind them; you get a two-sentence briefing, and that's about it. Fairly quickly, they start to feel like chores. I understand that's the point thematically, but this is still a video game, and at some point, it has to be fun.
Side missions reward between $1,000 and $2,000 for harder jobs, while early story missions only pay $500. In the early game, before you get a handle on the clunky mechanics, hitting your $3,000 daily target is a genuine struggle. Later on, you'll have cash to spare simply because you've memorised how every mission works. That says a lot.
Fail to pay what you owe, and the St Louis gang sends debt collectors. Fail three days in a row, and you get a strike. Three strikes and your sister is gone for good. It's a decent pressure system in theory, but the repetition drains it of any real tension.
Samson review screenshots
Generic crime story
Running alongside the debt storyline is a second story beat built around other things Samson finds himself involved in. One night, catching up with work associates, you're attacked by an unknown group, and one of your friends gets wounded. You'll then turn the city upside down to find out who was behind it and why. Unfortunately, none of it lands with any weight. There's no strong hook, no memorable characters despite the voice actors doing a solid job, and nothing that keeps you genuinely invested. It's a generic crime story that does the bare minimum.
The pacing suffers too, because the missions grind constantly interrupt story progress. Lower-skilled players will feel this most acutely, forced to spend action points on cash-earning missions instead of advancing the plot, which makes the already thin narrative feel even more disjointed.
One thing I did find genuinely touching is Samson's relationship with his sister. The two are close, weathered serious family hardship during childhood, and Samson will often reminisce about those moments as you walk around the city and stumble across spots where the two of them used to hide. On top of that, after completing each mission, he quietly says: "This is for you, Oonaugh." These are brief moments, but they land. They remind you that Samson is out there risking his life for someone who stuck her neck out for him, and that's more emotional grounding than anything the main plot manages.
Tyndalston: Bleak, depressing, but unique
The city of Tyndalston is something else entirely. It's incredibly atmospheric and crafted to the tiniest detail: graffiti on buildings, rubbish scattered across streets, muddy side alleys, abandoned factories. It gives off a feeling of despair and depression, no matter where you turn.
Drug addiction, homelessness, human trafficking, and people who can't afford medication or treatment. It gets under your skin as you navigate streets that feel like even God gave up on them. The NPC chatter as you walk by is consistently bleak, dark story after dark story, reminding you that this is a place that offers no opportunities to anyone unwilling to break the law. It heavily reminded me of Dogtown in Cyberpunk 2077, and that's perhaps the highest praise you can give a game world.
It's one of the few parts of Samson that genuinely stuck with me, and it made me think: if the production values were higher, if the cinematics were stronger, if the team had put more effort into making this a tight and memorable story, my overall verdict would look very different. But Samson isn't the first game to have a wonderfully unique world and fail to do anything meaningful with it.
GAMEPLAY
For a game marketed as a brawler, Samson's combat is a mild disappointment. The trailers made it look raw and impactful. When you actually play it, raw is still the word, but in the sense of unpolished, janky, and frustrating.
Animations look like they're skipping entire frames. Punches pass through enemies. The camera is all over the place. The game regularly throws close to twenty enemies at you at once, which sounds exciting until you realise the combat system isn't built to handle it cleanly. There's a parry mechanic with a generous window, and while it can provide a satisfying moment from time to time, it's all a bit shallow. The only time Samson manages a genuinely good combat moment is when you're standing perfectly still, timing parries and countering cleanly, but that can be tough to pull off due to the sheer amount of enemies and clunky camera.
I was also disappointed to find there's no environmental interactivity during fights. I expected to be smashing enemies into walls, shelves, and car windows, but none of that is in the game. You can pick up specific objects like pipes, bats, and bottles and use them as weapons, but that's a fairly minimal interaction and a far cry from true environmental combat.
On top of all that, bugs and collision issues pile on: your character flipping over enemy bodies, tyres launching into the air when you walk near them. It chips away at the little enjoyment combat does offer, and worse, it leads to unfair deaths that had me close to putting the controller down more than once.
Driving: close, but not close enough
Vehicle handling feels better than the combat, but still falls short of providing an enjoyable experience. Cars are heavy, swerve too dramatically, and suffer from the same collision inconsistencies that plague everything else in the game. They're not easy to handle, though they do become manageable after a few hours. The bigger problem is the jank that surrounds them. At one point, I couldn't nudge a simple bin with my car; moments later, driving at speed, my car flipped over nothing. Invisible obstacles were a recurring frustration that cost me a lot of action points on repeating missions.
Car combat does have its moments, but I'd lie if I said it comes close to Avalanche's Mad Max, which I adored. Yes, smashing a rival car into a wall, making it explode, spin and drop from bridges and highways in Hollywood film fashion is fun, but again, it all becomes a bit too repetitive, and the AI is too slow and dumb to make these chases and car battles engaging.
Cars have nitrous and can be fully wrecked, which can happen surprisingly fast, especially if you jump into a vehicle that isn't Samson's and comes with low hit points already. That sounds fun on paper until you badly damage a car mid-mission, with no replacement nearby. This means the whole thing is over.
Which brings me to one of Samson's most baffling decisions: you cannot steal cars off the road. You cannot pull a driver out and take their vehicle and continue the chase, even if your car is burning out beneath you. For a game positioning itself anywhere near GTA's territory, this is a significant omission. The strange thing is, you can steal parked cars, even locked ones. So you can break into a stationary vehicle, but not one that's right in front of you with the engine running. I genuinely don't understand the logic, and in practice, it causes real, repeated frustration.
The wanted system doesn't hold up either. One nitro boost out of the marked area, and the chase is over. The game clearly knows this is a problem because it compensates by cheating: even after police chatter confirms they've lost sight of you, the AI will track you down anyway, taking the exact road you used. I tested this extensively, and there's no question the game feeds your position to the AI to artificially extend chases. It creates the illusion of pressure without any of the smart design behind it.
The police behaviour generally is paper-thin. Block their road, burn your tyres right in front of them, shunt their car, run circles around them, and they won't react. Only damaging a police car or physically assaulting an officer triggers a response. I understand budgets are tight and not every feature makes the cut, but for a game built around crime and chases, it's another baffling call.
AltChar's final thoughts
I hate having to drag GTA into this review. The two games are nothing alike in scope, budget, or ambition. But when the developer puts them in the same sentence, it becomes hard to ignore, and Samson suffers badly for the comparison. This is a 15 to 20-hour experience built on a tight budget with a small team, and those constraints are visible in the animations, mission design, and story at almost every turn.
What holds Samson back most isn't the lack of polish. It's a handful of design decisions that compound each other: the repetitive daily loop, the weak mission variety, the combat that never clicks, and the inability to steal a moving car in an open-world crime game. The world is genuinely special, and there are moments when you can see exactly what Samson wanted to be, but unfortunately, it didn't quite manage to reach those heights.
At $24.99 (which is a great price to be fair), it's a solid deal if you're desperate for something in this space. Just go in knowing that Samson never fully delivers on its own potential, and given how promising that potential is, that's the most frustrating thing about it.
The Good
Tyndalston is a unique and atmospheric setting- The touching relationship between Samson and Oonaugh
- Car chases can provide moments of fun
The Bad
Clunky combat and driving- Bugs and general lack of polish
- Repetitive and outdated mission design
- Underwhelming story
- Poor cop chases
