Samson hands-on impressions: a boring, bland, and broken GTA clone

The developer didn't have the resources or experience to match their ambition

Grand Theft Auto 5 did not become one of the most popular games of all time by accident. Rockstar Games currently has approximately 6,000 employees, with almost all of them working on the sequel. It will likely be one of the most ambitious and undoubtedly best-selling games of all time.

On the other hand, Liquid Swords, the studio behind Samson, reportedly has 20 employees. Creating Samson, a game that bears too many similarities to GTA to not compare the two, was always going to be a mightily difficult project, and the result shows why smaller studios are better-suited for more focused ideas.

You are the titular Samson, surname McCray, and he's the blandest wannabe macho white man imaginable. He gives off major “protect your drink around him” vibes. Think Days Gone's Deacon St. John, but replace the motorbike with a muscle car, although even then, at least Deacon had some charm.

Samson recently got out of prison, returned home to Tyndalston, the city suburb in which he was raised, only to owe $100,000 worth of debt. Each day, you must complete jobs — almost all of which involve beating someone up — to earn cash and pay back a specific amount before you sleep. In theory, this is a setup that could offer commentary on horrible things people in tough situations can be compelled to do to survive. The problem is, the game just has absolutely nothing interesting to say, and is reminiscent of overdone, cliché stories from 20-plus years ago.

Jobs can either be completed on foot, which always involves plenty of melee combat, or in your car, where the focus is on vehicular combat. The latter is fine; driving feels perfectly adequate, if nothing special, although countless other games do that style of mission better, including The Simpsons Hit & Run, which is 23 years old.

Guns technically exist in Samson, although as far as I’ve played, they're only usable by enemies, including the police. Apparently, Liquid Swords planned to include guns — alongside intricate RPG-like systems — but told PC Gamer they had to be cut due to the "reality of the industry." (The studio also laid off staff.) If that's the case, though, it would have been better to remove them entirely, not just from Samson McCray. The fact that guns still play such a pivotal role in the story, including an early mission focused solely on visiting an arms dealer, only makes their glaring omission more obvious.

To make up for the lack of guns, melee combat would need to be polished to a shine, but it's unfortunately not. The entire game hinges on fist-fighting (and picking up the odd, breakable melee weapon), but it's clunky, there's significant input delay, and the relentless nature in which enemies punch you if you get sandwiched means there's very little you can do. It's irredeemably dysfunctional and makes most jobs in Samson a chore to complete.

Then there are the high number of bugs, at least in the early build I played. On one job, where I had to deal enough damage via vehicular combat to the car I was pursuing, I T-boned the target so hard, it flipped onto its side. A cutscene where Samson questioned the suspect in broad daylight was supposed to ensue, but the character didn't emerge from the car, so I got out of my vehicle and walked around the wreckage. The other character then teleported into the street to let the cutscene begin, but because I was about five meters behind the character, the scene played out with him looking away from me. Then, when the option came to either sucker punch or spare him, I couldn't select either, presumably because I wasn't close enough. The only solution was a hard reset, starting the mission over.

Numerous times, other characters have gotten stuck on an object or have been thrown into the sky due to a funky collision detection. Even Samson's car got flung high into the sky, Grand Theft Auto 4 swing glitch-style. Performance on Windows PC leaves a lot to be desired, too; it's serviceable at best, but it was at its worst when I set fire to a stash of drugs marked on the map. The game plummeted to around two or three frames per second for at least 30 seconds, until the fire effect ended.

Samson is a wildly ambitious game, but the team appears to have lacked the resources to meet those ambitions, made even more notable by the unmistakable comparisons to one of the biggest games in history. What's that saying again about what you shouldn't do when you come for the king?