While Rockstar continue to delay GTA 6, there’s at least one developer out there with the guts to release their open-world crime ’em up. In Samson you slip into the well-worn getaway driver shoes of the eponymous hero as he takes illicit jobs to earn off a debt to the crime family holding his sister hostage. Made by a team led by Just Cause and Mad Max lead Christofer Sundberg, does Samson capture the explosive magic of Avalanche’s games? Julian and Mark have been tearing up the streets of Tyndalston to find out.
Julian: I’ll start by saying the GTA comparison made by whoever wrote the intro is setting expectations a little high. (It was me, I wrote that intro.) Samson is a much smaller game made by a much smaller team with a much smaller budget, so anyone going in needs to set their expectations lower.
After a getaway job goes sideways, you’re left holding the bag of a $100,000 debt that you can only pay off by completing local jobs back in your hometown of Tyndalston. That might be beating up a goon who wronged your friend, delivering drugs to spots around the district, picking up stolen cars and dropping them off at the docks like a made-for-TV take on Gone In 60 Seconds.
A few things mark Samson out from other open world games. For one, every day you’ve got a minimum debt repayment to make, otherwise you’ll get a visit from debt collectors. Another is that jobs take time to complete and cost action points to attempt. You start the game with six action points and you refresh them each time you go to bed. So, with most jobs costing between two or three points, there can be a little juggling to maximise your earnings. A getaway job might earn you $2000, but cost half your day’s action points, whereas three two-action point missions could earn you more overall. However, if you fail any of the jobs it costs you points to attempt them again, so failure in any one of them might mean you can’t complete enough jobs in the day to pay down the debt, which gets you a visit from the goon squad.
It’s a neat idea, but how have you been finding it to play out, Mark?
Mark: My enduring memory of playing Samson is going to be spending two hours trying to punch my way out of an impenetrable junk fortress. I was about five or six hours into the driveabrawling when I fell into a cubby hole between two staircases – an enemy I had to batter fell in first, I just followed him in, out of fear I’d fail the mission if I didn’t. Having knocked him out, I thought I’d just climb over the couple of abandoned appliances and bits of sheet metal filling the corner. I could not.
Trying to climb up on the broken fridge that offered the only way out simply saw Samson drop back into the hole after the animation failed to find him higher ground to stand on. I tried running, dodging, and punching my way around the limited space, in the hope I’d somehow collide with my surroundings in a way that’d glitchily teleport me to freedom. It didn’t. So, after a fair amount of fidgeting in frustrated denial, especially upon discovering the game’s sole autosave had been made once I was already trapped, I was forced to start an entirely new game.
I’d have given up right there and then if I hadn’t been getting a kick out of Samson’s petty crim simming. Given my latest run’s featured a character I killed being surprisingly resurrected due to a mission ordering mess up and has ended up with me being totally soft-locked in another mission which keeps auto-failing for no reason I can discern, I’m not sure I’d make the same choice in hindsight.
Julian: Oof. Oooooof, Mark. The bugs I’ve run into on my playthrough are nowhere as gamebreaking as that. There are lots of small things, like finding my car clipping and bouncing on geometry as I drive through Tyndalston. Or finding destructible objects like chain link fence gates and sandwich boards become indestructible if I hit them at the wrong speed or angle.
The worst I have encountered, though, are when mission scripting breaks because I’ve interacted with something else in the open world. Like, in one mission where I was tailing a guy called Mikey to catch him in the act of betraying his gang, I passed some homeless people discussing whether or not they should take some pills they found in the street. Possibly drugs, but also possibly rat poison. I could simply walk on by, tell them to chow down on the road candy, or direct them to a clinic. (I told them to go to the clinic). I picked up Mikey’s trail and followed him till he stopped and stood stock still in the street. My objective switched to ‘Take out all ambushers’ but no one came to attack me. I eventually started punching anyone in the area, which alerted the cops, who then arrived on the scene and refused to leave their cars. To save them their buggy embarrassment, I restarted the mission.
On the next attempt I interacted with a sightseeing spot – those points of interest that tell you a bit of backstory about a nearby building and eventually unlock more action points – and when I caught up with Mikey the same thing happened.
On the third attempt the ambushers spawned, beat the crap out of me, and I woke up in the clinic with all my cash gone. Worst of all, there wasn’t a sign of the homeless guys I’d told to go get checked out, which makes me feel like my good Samaritan impression when I first bugged out Mikey was all for nought.
Has it been all bad for you, then?
Mark: Not all bad per se, but I can confirm that a gig grinding to a halt because the people who’re supposed to appear to beat you up just…don’t…is something I’ve also run into. It’s sad, because one of the things aside from scale which sets Samson apart from its inevitable pre-release comparisons – the likes of GTA and Sleeping Dogs – are the high stakes its daily cycle of debt repayment puts on all of the jobs. You literally pay for being an incompetent thug, which ratchets up the tension and keeps you invested even when you’re beating up the same bunch of goons for the second or third time. The problem is that the bugs which lead to key NPCs not being summoned or missions randomly failing fundamentally undermine those stakes by leading you to fail jobs due to technical hiccups which aren’t your fault.
Samson’s punishing nature should be its biggest strength and likely will be if Liquid Swords can swat all of the bugs, but at this point it’s the game’s biggest weakness because it means any big issues you run into aren’t just inconveniences you can try to get around by trying to jump back to an older save or spending ages trying different solutions in the affected job. Instead, they can ruin your playthrough and leave you wondering whether ploughing on is worth your time.
One silver lining is that jobs causing me problems have led me to spend more time simply wandering around Tyndalston’s ruined urban sprawl than I otherwise might. Though its sightseeing often boils down to a text box simply declaring that shady things used to happen in whichever location you’re looking at, Liquid Swords have nailed a GTA 4-esque vibe of a worn-down and unforgiving urban sprawl in their worldbuilding. I’ve really dug that, given GTA’s predilection for sun-kissed climes nowadays.
Julian: It’s no secret that Liquid Swords had a time of it trying to get Samson over the line. Friend of this parish Jeremy Peel has detailed the impact of the game’s mid-development layoffs, which saw chunks of the game torn out and saved for a potential sequel or DLC down the line. You only have access to melee weapons, not because that was the original plan, but because they took out gun combat when they narrowed the game’s scope. The game world also looks like it used to be larger, with multiple sections of a larger city, but it looks to be wholly contained to Tyndalston for now.
But I do like that in restricting the game it’s given it a distinct character. As you say, the streets you race down and run across not only look like their best days are behind them, but even then, those best days were ones where the fridge had given out, turning your milk to sour yogurt, a change you only discover when your pour a thick sweaty glug of the stuff into your morning coffee. I’ve found myself evading chasing gangs and police by running through the back alleys between tenement blocks, hopping chainlink fences and climbing piles of discarded pallets, and then breaking into a parked van to make my escape while my pursuers are stuck two blocks over. It feels like a smaller scale crime drama and I really enjoy that.
I also like that one of the systems that survived the cut is that debt repayment mechanic. Every day you go to bed trying to pay down a premium and, if you miss a payment or two, you wake up to big guys in tight suits kicking down your bedroom door and beating the shit out of you. It feeds that feeling that you are a petty criminal scraping a living on the edge of their existence. You’re not going to climb the rungs of a criminal ladder and end up owning the whole city.
That said, I do keep running into restrictions of what the team has been able to accomplish. The melee combat is simple and often clumsy, with light punches, heavy punches, and parries lacking much variety, and samey enemies making most fights repetitive. There are only a few models of cars driving the streets and, again, that lack of variety makes the world a little more dull. There are a few repeating mission types and I’ve found myself robbing the same lumberyard for boxes of goods twice in just a few in-game days.
Despite that, I do plan on continuing my playthrough – so long as I don’t get soft-locked like yourself.
Mark: I’m hopeful that I won’t be stuck forever. I’m sure this bad guy whose neck Samson’s clearly supposed to be able to snap in a semi-cutscene without being doomed to mission failure can be convinced to go quietly into the good night. Until then, I’ll keep driving around the ports, alleys, and lanes of Tyndalston in Samson’s wonderfully GTA 4-esque fleet of boat-sized rectangular seventies sedans and more streamlined but plasticky-looking 90s coupes. I’ll moodily gurn behind the wheel, musing on how these battered and broken streets have moulded me into the mush-mashing mean machine I am.
I’ll ram a few pedestrians off the road and be surprised at how brittle my ride is given its beefy appearance. I’ll prepare for another morning face off with debt collectors after the money I need to pay to keep my sister and plaid-shirted buddies from harm. I’ll look forward to thanking these collectors for the fact they always drop plenty of cash, as if they’re secretly keen to see me do well.
At its best, Samson feels like a GTA 4 roleplaying mod which puts you in the shoes of a random goon just trying to get by. The kind of thing you might install as an excuse to keep roaming Liberty City once the main story’s done. So, I’ll keep on living as a man far better with his floppy fists than Niko Bellic, but who feels similarly stuck in a 90s or 2000s movie about unforgiving urban underworlds shrouded in graffiti and cigarette smoke.
