It’s somewhat strange that there aren’t many indie games taking inspiration from Grand Theft Auto. Driving around a city while taking on crime jobs is a great loop, so when Samson was announced, I was excited to play it. That excitement turned to annoyance in very short order, though, as the game is just plain bad in most ways, from its awful driving and terrible combat to its poor balance and meaningless game focus. The incredibly bland characterization certainly doesn’t help matters either, all combining to make for a subpar experience across the board.
Samson begins with a storyboard cutscene explaining that the titular character owes $100,000 to some bad people and that he’s returning home to run jobs to pay it off. The premise is actually kind of unique. You’re supposed to pay off a few grand each night until you repay the hundred grand, but this is completely separate from the game’s main story missions, which see Samson unravel a conspiracy involving a mysterious drug dealer who’s imposing on the turf of Samson’s boss. This story moves too quickly, isn’t interesting, and all of the characters are unmemorable and generic.
Samson himself is especially bland, as he may as well be a cardboard cutout. He says nothing interesting and displays almost no personality whatsoever, which can be levied against most of the game’s other characters. The story missions (of which there are only about 14) end with a shockingly obvious twist that wildly telegraphs itself much earlier on, but there’s no reason to care about any of the cast, making the experience feel flimsy, weak, and laughable. Plus, again, the entire narrative is separate from the debt repayment angle which is actually pointless, as paying the debt off rewards you with a single phone call scene and nothing else. The entire game is a waste of time.
The game’s main two pillars are its driving and combat. For cars, you can summon Samson’s by default, or you can steal any car that’s parked on the street. The ones you steal can’t boost and aren’t as fast as Samson’s, but considering that any damage that Samson’s takes must be repaired (at about $1,000 per full repair), early on, it can be easier to just steal them instead of bothering with his once it gets totaled for the first time. The car handling is some of the worst I’ve ever seen, as steering feels like it barely moves them, and you practically have to swerve awkwardly just to change your heading in a reasonable manner.
The combat might be even worse. Samson has light and heavy attacks, as well as a dodge and parry. Although the third-person camera while walking around feels standard, the combat camera is more glued to his back and there’s no lock-on function, so you have to weirdly turn the camera to focus on enemies. This is especially painful when enemies surround and wail on you while you’re trying to get your bearings. The light attack is far more useful than the heavy, as it usually only takes a few hits to open enemies up to a takedown. The heavy attack is incredibly slow and misses far too often to make it all that worthwhile.
Some enemies are resistant to the light attack, though, and will dodge and parry all of your swings, so you have to hit them with a heavy attack to open them up to further punishment. I noticed that the input for heavy attacks doesn’t always work, of course, which frequently happens with the takedown prompts too. I’d beat an enemy into submission, see the takedown prompt over their head, mash the button, and then have to give up and just start swinging again when it didn’t work, which happened over and over again. The takedown prompt also often fails to show up to begin with. Animations are weird and janky across the board as well, although the dodge move is fairly useful.
I can’t say the same for the parry, which has an odd window that made little sense to me. The timing is both poorly indicated and kind of hard to pull off, but it’s especially annoying because even when you do pull it off, it isn’t particularly useful. It’s literally better to just dodge. When in combat, Samson tends to lock your ability to run, which is insane since there are times when you’re meant to escape. You’ll be surrounded by enemies as you head to your car, and Samson will just slowly walk while getting punched; it’s horrible. Every aspect of the movement just feels poor for the most part.
There are times when Samson needs to climb objects to reach higher ground, but most attempts end with the animation canceling and Samson refusing to actually climb. He can jump, too, but it’s worthless as he typically can’t land on anything anyway. The game wants you to focus on completing missions every day, and you start the game with six daily action points by default. All missions take two or three action points, and you’ll have to drive back to Samson’s apartment to rest up and start the next day. Weirdly, the times of day are only noon, evening, and night. I guess he couldn’t be bothered to wake up early to pay off his debt and save his sister faster.
You can choose to take on story missions or jobs for more cash and experience. The story missions start out way too short and simple, but they do become more involved by the end, even taking you to some somewhat fleshed-out locations. The missions, on the other hand, are incredibly repetitive and boring. They either see you drive or move around on foot, but they’re a chore across the board. The on-foot missions vary from having you beat up several guys, collect packages in an area, or tail someone. None of these are fun at all. The driving missions are even worse, as they call for you to make deliveries, take down other cars, or win a checkpoint race.
The car takedown missions are never worth it, as the car combat is somehow even worse than the regular combat. It simply barely works at all as your main form of attack is a ram that isn’t at all reliable. Your car will end up taking just as much damage usually, so you can subtract the grand needed to repair it from the mission itself. Some takedown missions can require you to disable three or four enemy cars too, which can feel borderline impossible with how damaged your car will be just from taking down one. It’s like nobody on the dev team even considered this.
The races are, again, even worse. They’re the hardest missions in the game due to how terribly the checkpoints are set up. They’ll often require you to make extremely sudden turns with little warning, and since the car handling is so poor you simply can’t make these with ease. I literally had to carefully memorize every single one of these races to beat them and they weren’t worth it in the least. There are also getaway missions where you need to escape the cops or an enemy gang, but Samson loves to cheat here. You’ll be escaping only for an enemy car to magically teleport nearby and cause you to start the escape all over again.
I want to make a special shoutout to the worst getaway mission in the game, where if you don’t pull into the area in a specific way, it becomes impossible to escape since cop cars will block your exit. The mission design is legitimately pretty awful across the whole game, but this mission might just take the cake (especially considering that the mission itself makes no sense). On top of that, the payoff amount of each mission is all over the place, as many missions pay so little that they’re not even worth doing. Again, it’s like the dev didn’t consider this at all.
You get experience for beating enemies and completing missions, but harder missions usually don’t grant much more experience. By the time I’d cleared Samson’s debt, I was only level 19 out of 40 since the game doesn’t give you anywhere near enough experience to reach higher levels. You get perks and stat boosts from some skill trees, but many of the perks are kind of useless, and the fact that you pretty much can’t level up enough to finish them out diminishes their usefulness further. The game’s open world is its lone decent feature, but it mostly feels empty. There are a few side events that are few and far between, too, but these aren’t worth seeking out.
The only thing with any value is viewpoints. Finding these will eventually grant you extra AP that can allow you to do more missions per day, but these can be hard to find once you locate the majority of them, and you can only gain three additional AP. It doesn’t help that it’s easy to end up with one AP left, which means that you just have to go to bed anyway. Finally, the AI is just horrid throughout the whole game. AI drivers constantly crash into things, enemy NPCs get stuck or freeze in place, and even allied NPCs have trouble making it from point A to point B without falling over. A major cutscene even had an NPC bumble into it and repeatedly fall over. It’s all a joke. Oh, and the game’s performance is absolutely terrible. It ran at 30-40 fps for me on capable hardware.
I also have to mention how pointlessly punishing the game tries to be. If you get knocked out, you’ll lose all the money you’re carrying unless you have some perks to mitigate this. Failing a mission means that you lose the AP invested, or you can spend one more AP to try it again. You can get through a whole mission only to get hit by a random car at the end and have it all be for nothing. The good news is that you can completely skip all of this by either quitting to the menu or shutting down the game, as it doesn’t autosave when you lose. It’s amazing that they couldn’t even get this right.
Samson is an awful game packed with poor gameplay at every avenue. There is almost no fun to be had here unless you just want to gawk at how miserable everything is. It’s honestly impressive to me just how badly nearly every aspect of this game was flubbed, and I deeply regret the time I spent with it. If you enjoy absolute trainwrecks, you may get some laughs out of it, but anyone with any standard for game quality will want to steer very clear of it. Hopefully, your steering is more functional than the game’s.
It’s somewhat strange that there aren’t many indie games taking inspiration from Grand Theft Auto. Driving around a city while taking on crime jobs is a great loop, so when Samson was announced, I was excited to play it. That excitement turned to annoyance in very short order, though, as the game is just plain bad in most ways, from its awful driving and terrible combat to its poor balance and meaningless game focus. The incredibly bland characterization certainly doesn’t help matters either, all combining to make for a subpar experience across the board.
It’s somewhat strange that there aren’t many indie games taking inspiration from Grand Theft Auto. Driving around a city while taking on crime jobs is a great loop, so when Samson was announced, I was excited to play it. That excitement turned to annoyance in very short order, though, as the game is just plain bad in most ways, from its awful driving and terrible combat to its poor balance and meaningless game focus. The incredibly bland characterization certainly doesn’t help matters either, all combining to make for a subpar experience across the board.
Samson begins with a storyboard cutscene explaining that the titular character owes $100,000 to some bad people and that he’s returning home to run jobs to pay it off. The premise is actually kind of unique. You’re supposed to pay off a few grand each night until you repay the hundred grand, but this is completely separate from the game’s main story missions, which see Samson unravel a conspiracy involving a mysterious drug dealer who’s imposing on the turf of Samson’s boss. This story moves too quickly, isn’t interesting, and all of the characters are unmemorable and generic.
Samson himself is especially bland, as he may as well be a cardboard cutout. He says nothing interesting and displays almost no personality whatsoever, which can be levied against most of the game’s other characters. The story missions (of which there are only about 14) end with a shockingly obvious twist that wildly telegraphs itself much earlier on, but there’s no reason to care about any of the cast, making the experience feel flimsy, weak, and laughable. Plus, again, the entire narrative is separate from the debt repayment angle which is actually pointless, as paying the debt off rewards you with a single phone call scene and nothing else. The entire game is a waste of time.
The game’s main two pillars are its driving and combat. For cars, you can summon Samson’s by default, or you can steal any car that’s parked on the street. The ones you steal can’t boost and aren’t as fast as Samson’s, but considering that any damage that Samson’s takes must be repaired (at about $1,000 per full repair), early on, it can be easier to just steal them instead of bothering with his once it gets totaled for the first time. The car handling is some of the worst I’ve ever seen, as steering feels like it barely moves them, and you practically have to swerve awkwardly just to change your heading in a reasonable manner.
The combat might be even worse. Samson has light and heavy attacks, as well as a dodge and parry. Although the third-person camera while walking around feels standard, the combat camera is more glued to his back and there’s no lock-on function, so you have to weirdly turn the camera to focus on enemies. This is especially painful when enemies surround and wail on you while you’re trying to get your bearings. The light attack is far more useful than the heavy, as it usually only takes a few hits to open enemies up to a takedown. The heavy attack is incredibly slow and misses far too often to make it all that worthwhile.
Some enemies are resistant to the light attack, though, and will dodge and parry all of your swings, so you have to hit them with a heavy attack to open them up to further punishment. I noticed that the input for heavy attacks doesn’t always work, of course, which frequently happens with the takedown prompts too. I’d beat an enemy into submission, see the takedown prompt over their head, mash the button, and then have to give up and just start swinging again when it didn’t work, which happened over and over again. The takedown prompt also often fails to show up to begin with. Animations are weird and janky across the board as well, although the dodge move is fairly useful.
I can’t say the same for the parry, which has an odd window that made little sense to me. The timing is both poorly indicated and kind of hard to pull off, but it’s especially annoying because even when you do pull it off, it isn’t particularly useful. It’s literally better to just dodge. When in combat, Samson tends to lock your ability to run, which is insane since there are times when you’re meant to escape. You’ll be surrounded by enemies as you head to your car, and Samson will just slowly walk while getting punched; it’s horrible. Every aspect of the movement just feels poor for the most part.
There are times when Samson needs to climb objects to reach higher ground, but most attempts end with the animation canceling and Samson refusing to actually climb. He can jump, too, but it’s worthless as he typically can’t land on anything anyway. The game wants you to focus on completing missions every day, and you start the game with six daily action points by default. All missions take two or three action points, and you’ll have to drive back to Samson’s apartment to rest up and start the next day. Weirdly, the times of day are only noon, evening, and night. I guess he couldn’t be bothered to wake up early to pay off his debt and save his sister faster.
You can choose to take on story missions or jobs for more cash and experience. The story missions start out way too short and simple, but they do become more involved by the end, even taking you to some somewhat fleshed-out locations. The missions, on the other hand, are incredibly repetitive and boring. They either see you drive or move around on foot, but they’re a chore across the board. The on-foot missions vary from having you beat up several guys, collect packages in an area, or tail someone. None of these are fun at all. The driving missions are even worse, as they call for you to make deliveries, take down other cars, or win a checkpoint race.
The car takedown missions are never worth it, as the car combat is somehow even worse than the regular combat. It simply barely works at all as your main form of attack is a ram that isn’t at all reliable. Your car will end up taking just as much damage usually, so you can subtract the grand needed to repair it from the mission itself. Some takedown missions can require you to disable three or four enemy cars too, which can feel borderline impossible with how damaged your car will be just from taking down one. It’s like nobody on the dev team even considered this.
The races are, again, even worse. They’re the hardest missions in the game due to how terribly the checkpoints are set up. They’ll often require you to make extremely sudden turns with little warning, and since the car handling is so poor you simply can’t make these with ease. I literally had to carefully memorize every single one of these races to beat them and they weren’t worth it in the least. There are also getaway missions where you need to escape the cops or an enemy gang, but Samson loves to cheat here. You’ll be escaping only for an enemy car to magically teleport nearby and cause you to start the escape all over again.
I want to make a special shoutout to the worst getaway mission in the game, where if you don’t pull into the area in a specific way, it becomes impossible to escape since cop cars will block your exit. The mission design is legitimately pretty awful across the whole game, but this mission might just take the cake (especially considering that the mission itself makes no sense). On top of that, the payoff amount of each mission is all over the place, as many missions pay so little that they’re not even worth doing. Again, it’s like the dev didn’t consider this at all.
You get experience for beating enemies and completing missions, but harder missions usually don’t grant much more experience. By the time I’d cleared Samson’s debt, I was only level 19 out of 40 since the game doesn’t give you anywhere near enough experience to reach higher levels. You get perks and stat boosts from some skill trees, but many of the perks are kind of useless, and the fact that you pretty much can’t level up enough to finish them out diminishes their usefulness further. The game’s open world is its lone decent feature, but it mostly feels empty. There are a few side events that are few and far between, too, but these aren’t worth seeking out.
The only thing with any value is viewpoints. Finding these will eventually grant you extra AP that can allow you to do more missions per day, but these can be hard to find once you locate the majority of them, and you can only gain three additional AP. It doesn’t help that it’s easy to end up with one AP left, which means that you just have to go to bed anyway. Finally, the AI is just horrid throughout the whole game. AI drivers constantly crash into things, enemy NPCs get stuck or freeze in place, and even allied NPCs have trouble making it from point A to point B without falling over. A major cutscene even had an NPC bumble into it and repeatedly fall over. It’s all a joke. Oh, and the game’s performance is absolutely terrible. It ran at 30-40 fps for me on capable hardware.
I also have to mention how pointlessly punishing the game tries to be. If you get knocked out, you’ll lose all the money you’re carrying unless you have some perks to mitigate this. Failing a mission means that you lose the AP invested, or you can spend one more AP to try it again. You can get through a whole mission only to get hit by a random car at the end and have it all be for nothing. The good news is that you can completely skip all of this by either quitting to the menu or shutting down the game, as it doesn’t autosave when you lose. It’s amazing that they couldn’t even get this right.
Samson is an awful game packed with poor gameplay at every avenue. There is almost no fun to be had here unless you just want to gawk at how miserable everything is. It’s honestly impressive to me just how badly nearly every aspect of this game was flubbed, and I deeply regret the time I spent with it. If you enjoy absolute trainwrecks, you may get some laughs out of it, but anyone with any standard for game quality will want to steer very clear of it. Hopefully, your steering is more functional than the game’s.
by Andrew Farrell
