Samson’s Many Flaws Explained, and What Went Wrong

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Samson is an open-world crime game heavily inspired by Grand Theft Auto. It offers a beautifully detailed city to roam, thrilling car chases through rundown streets, and intense close-quarters fighting. The game’s story unfolds with roguelike elements, offering varied missions centered around themes of debt, making amends, and family. This combination of features suggests the game has strong potential to attract a dedicated following and pave the way for a more expansive sequel.

What caused the recent problems? Despite strong marketing and everything seeming to go well, things unfortunately fell apart. The main issues stem from technical problems with Samson and a number of features that weren’t fully developed due to difficulties during the creation process. The important question now is whether the Samson developers will address these issues, and thankfully, there are signs that they might.

Samson’s Bugs Make An Underbaked Experience Worse

Samson had the potential to be a fantastic open-world game, similar to GTA, but it’s held back by several noticeable problems. While the game is visually impressive, that shouldn’t be dismissed, its relatively small open world isn’t a major issue – in fact, it’s one of the few things that still makes it enjoyable. The biggest problem right now is that the gameplay systems feel unfinished and underdeveloped.

The development of Samson took a significant turn when Liquid Swords, the game’s developer, had to reduce its team size by half and remove several planned features. Notably, they cut role-playing game elements and guns, which were common in the games that influenced Samson‘s design. These reductions, combined with a smaller team and budget, are noticeable in the finished game. While Samson doesn’t have any truly awful parts, it also lacks anything that really stands out.

The hand-to-hand combat feels awkward and unfinished. Although a few fights come close to the quality of the Arkham games, most are clunky, with stiff animations and can be really frustrating. Enemies sometimes don’t move, and attacks often feel delayed, making combat repetitive since you’re mostly just hitting the same enemies repeatedly. The missions aren’t very interesting either, which is a big problem for a game that makes you replay similar scenarios over and over. While the initial missions might be enjoyable, you’ll experience everything Samson offers within about six hours, leaving half the game still to play.

Honestly, the game is just riddled with bugs. It’s super frustrating! I’ve been falling through cars, enemies sometimes just disappear or stop fighting, and quests are constantly broken – I’ve finished objectives and the game doesn’t even register it! Driving feels really wonky, and the enemies and cops just never give up chasing you. It’s a long list of problems, and while the price is surprisingly low, it doesn’t really make up for how broken everything feels. It quickly gets old and honestly, it’s just not that fun to play as it is right now.

Samson’s Developer Is Actively Fixing The Game

There’s still reason to be optimistic about Samson. The developers, Liquid Swords, have already released a patch to fix initial problems and have plans for further improvements. They’re actively supporting the game to make sure it’s playable and are being open about their progress, which is good news. While a complete turnaround like Cyberpunk 2077 is unlikely, Samson doesn’t necessarily need that level of revival to succeed.

I’m really enjoying what Samson offers, and I think it’s going to be even better once they fix all the little bugs and glitches. It’s important to remember this is a budget game – it only costs $25! – so you can’t expect it to be as massive or polished as something like GTA or Saints Row. It’s smaller in scope, definitely, but it still puts a fun spin on that familiar open-world crime formula. It reminds me a bit of Mafia: The Old Country in that it doesn’t try to be GTA, even if that might have been the original plan before some changes happened during development. Honestly, I think being a budget title is a good thing. We don’t get many games like this – with this setting and gameplay – and having a cheaper option to tide us over between big GTA releases is fantastic. I really appreciate it!

I think that once the initial problems with Samson are fixed, and after a bit more refinement after release, it has the potential to become a surprisingly excellent game, especially within the open-world genre. It’s hard to say for sure, but it’s clear that Liquid Swords cares a lot about Samson, and with a little more time and polish, it could really shine. Right now, Samson is a bit rough around the edges – I’m not ignoring the bugs and glitches – but I predict people will start to change their minds soon, and its Steam rating will likely improve from ‘Mixed’ to ‘Mostly Positive’.

So, I’m really curious – is anyone planning on checking out Samson once they’ve fixed all the bugs and issues? Let me know what you think in the ComicBook Forum – I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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2026-04-11 03:10