SAMSON Review — Mean Streets

Grand Theft Auto competitor SAMSON enters the ring to give players a familiar yet utterly new experience to latch onto, capturing the themes, aesthetics, and overall feeling of grungy crime movies as you take on gangs, the law, and the city of Tyndalston itself in a desperate and dangerous bid to get paid.

SAMSON follows our titular character right after he gets out of prison. He was arrested for a job gone bad, and Samson’s sister made a desperate deal to keep him safe in prison, but now the shadowy individuals involved have come collecting. With his sister held as collateral and nothing but a genuinely awesome car to his name, our protagonist has to pay off the debt day by day by taking on dangerous criminal enterprises, starting small and working his way up the ladder.

What I found particularly interesting is how SAMSON challenges the traditional Grand Theft Auto formula with an Action Point system. While the game is open-world, the developers really wanted you to feel the pressure of having a day-to-day debt to pay off. Each mission you complete moves the time of day forward, from noon to evening to night, meaning that you can only get three jobs done in a day, and even less if there is an important story mission that demands your attention at a certain time slot. Each day comes with new missions, so you are challenged to maximize time efficiency and profit. Take on the hardest missions for the most cash, but be careful not to fail them and ruin the chance altogether.

These missions can be anything from beatdowns to getaway driving to deliveries, with a good amount of variation between them. They lack the same story and cinematic elements as a Grand Theft Auto title, usually just giving you a short blurb beforehand, but they can occasionally surprise you with some environmental storytelling and dialogue.

The best missions, in my opinion, always involve driving. Given that Samson himself is supposed to be a former getaway driver, it makes sense that a lot of attention was paid to the driving and car physics. They are not the most advanced in the world, opting for a more basic health-bar system rather than advanced vehicular destruction, but it is still fun to speed through corners and sideswipe other vehicles off the road. I would compare the driving and vehicular combat to the Saints Row reboot we got a few years ago, which had some pretty great driving in it despite its poor reception.

The combat mechanics in SAMSON are serviceable, if not the most amazing part of the experience. Emulating the pulpy, brawly style of crime-action thrillers, SAMSON’s combat mechanics have you throwing fists and using improvised weapons in tight, close-quarters combat, which gives the action elements a much stronger identity than genre competitors like Grand Theft Auto or Saints Row. The combat itself, however, plays pretty close to the Batman: Arkham franchise, with a lot of mixed-input attacks that come out fast with no real concern for physics, stamina, or realism. It more or less works, but I experienced occasional button-input delays that really made the experience feel bad, especially in larger groups of enemies that would essentially stunlock you in place, which is pretty realistic, I guess.

SAMSON is an absolutely beautiful game, rendering the city of Tyndalston in gorgeous realism that is clearly stylized around gritty crime flicks. A sort of washed-out filter makes the city feel cold and grimy, and the stylized HUD really sells the vibe the developers are going for. The game does not feel afraid to connect to its film and television roots and is not trying to sell a totally immersive experience. Again, it is like you are playing a crime film as opposed to some hyper-realistic life simulation.

These visuals come at the cost of performance, and I did experience occasional frame drops and freezing that interrupted my gameplay. It was not enough to call the game unplayable or even really all that disruptive, but when it did happen, it was very noticeable. I suspect the game could be better optimized and that a day-one patch or something similar will fix this issue before too long.

Other small bugs would occasionally rear their heads in SAMSON, and they were a little more noticeable. One in particular happened after jumping off a small ledge, where Samson would get stuck in the falling animation and continue to walk around in that pose. Again, these minor errors were not too disruptive and seemed to involve the game’s physics engine mostly, and I am sure they will be patched out before too long.

The AI is far from perfect as well. Between people stopping in the middle of the road and people begging for my help from thugs, only to say, “He won’t mess with us again” when I get my ass kicked, I found myself chuckling at the weirdness of the game’s NPCs far more often than I found myself immersed.

On the whole, SAMSON is an interesting, exciting, and unique take on the genre, delivering an action-movie-style approach to open-world crime games. The Action Point system is an incredibly interesting mechanic that changes up the typical open-world gameplay with a ticking clock that must be addressed by the player each day.

While there were some minor bugs and performance issues, and the hand-to-hand combat was not the most amazing or fun to play, my biggest complaint about SAMSON was just that I wanted more from the story. More cutscenes, more dialogue, more environmental storytelling. Many of the missions feel like they just kind of happen. You read a short paragraph, you show up, and fighting immediately breaks out. It is not the worst way in the world to handle the game, especially with so many missions available to take on, but it definitely feels like small efforts to make the game more immersive and expand on the storytelling would have gone a long way.

That being said, it is hard to argue with the incredibly generous asking price for SAMSON, which comes in at just $25 and delivers a Triple-A experience. With that overly generous price in mind, it is easy to ignore the small imperfections of SAMSON, as the title easily over-delivers on that price with a Triple-A experience.

Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC review of SAMSON. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! SAMSON is available on Steam and Epic Games.