Samson Is A Clunky, Broken Mess That GTA IV Lovers Might Still Want To Check Out

Back when I was in middle school, I saw my first real fight between three young men in the cafeteria. At the time, people were yelling, and it was scary. Looking back later, I realized how silly it was. Three dudes swinging wildly, punches going every which way as they shoved and bumped around like they were wearing blindfolds. I thought about that fight and how funny it looked nearly every time I got into a punch-up in Samson: A Tyndalston Story, a new semi-open-world action game out now on PC.

That’s a problem, because punching and shoving people makes up around 50 percent of this flawed Grand Theft Auto IV-esque roguelike about paying back a big debt while solving a street-level mystery involving gangs and drugs. The other half is driving around the decaying American city of Tyndalston in big, boxy cars circa the mid-90s. And while that is a more enjoyable part of Samson, it, too, has issues, bugs, and other shortcomings that make it hard to enjoy this gritty 10- to 20-hour adventure.

Paying back your debt one day at a time

Samson: A Tyndalston Story has a very simple setup. Samson and his sister, both criminals, left Tyndalston a few years back to do bigger, more profitable crimes. But then a big job goes bad, and now they owe people $100,000. Samson’s sister cuts a deal to make herself collateral while he goes back to Tyndalston to do work for his old, small street gang buds and pay the debt back a few grand a day.

This setup is the foundation of Samson’s best idea. You see, each morning Samson wakes up in his shitty apartment and picks from a few randomly generated jobs set around the somewhat small city of Tyndalston. These can take the form of beating up people, taking out some rival vehicles, killing a target, stealing some packages, being a getaway driver, or other low-level criminal work. Complete the mission and you get some cash, and the day moves forward. You then pick another job, hopefully finish it, make some more cash, and then you reach nighttime. Depending on how much energy Samson has left by that point—each mission costs action points to complete—you might be able to squeeze in one more job, or you might just head back to your “crib” as the game calls it to crash on the couch and send some money back to St. Louis.

The catch is that if you die or fail a mission and don’t have the AP necessary to retry it, you lose all your money, time moves forward, and you might be unable to send a big enough payment back to St. Louis that day. Do that too many times and you and your sister are screwed. This means every mission in Samson has some stakes to it, and pressing your luck to try multiple high-paying but more challenging jobs might screw you in the end.

It’s a genuinely cool way to mix some roguelike elements into this GTA-like experience, and it makes mission failure a part of the narrative in a way most open-world games don’t attempt. Don’t expect a ton of variety, however, as after just a few hours, I was encountering the same missions over and over.

Kick, punch, it’s all really bad

Sadly, actually playing Samson is often a chore, and I ended up failing missions sometimes not because I made a mistake or risked too much, but because something broke or glitched.

The game’s biggest problem is its melee combat. It is the only way you really interact with the world and enemies. There are no guns to be found. No grenades to throw. No sneaking missions and stealth kills. Every single time you encounter a bad guy in this game, you punch them a lot until they fall down and stop moving. Toward the end, I thought maybe the game was going to change things up and have me be part of a sneaky heist. Nope. Just more rooms filled with thugs to fight. And all of this combat is just a big ol’ mess.

© Liquid Swords / Kotaku

Animations are stilted and clunky, often making it hard to understand what’s even happening. Am I blocking? Am I parrying? Are they blocking or parrying? I often had no idea. It doesn’t help that enemies will often surround Samson and punch from different angles, breaking his animations in odd ways. I lost track of the number of times I finished an enemy who was already on the ground, leaving Samson to aggressively punch and twist his hands in the air for a bit.

Eventually, I leveled up more and unlocked enough skills that I could power through most fights without dying or even taking too much damage, but I wouldn’t describe any of the time I spent punching people in Samson as fun. Some of the finishers look cool, and one-on-one fights can feel cinematic at times, but 90 percent of the punching in Samson reminded me more of teenagers flailing in front of lunch ladies than hardened criminals trading blows.

The other big part of Samson is driving. If a mission or job doesn’t involve Samson beating up 10 or 12 or 15 enemies over and over again, it will inevitably involve driving to locations and/or taking out other vehicles using your car as a weapon. And I did enjoy driving a lot more than fighting. Cars in the game aren’t souped-up supercars and fancy SUVs. Everything you get your hands on is covered in dust and dents. All cars are shaped like boxes, control like boats, and only come in awful beige, green, brown, or purple variants. These are the cars that populate the background shots in action movie chase scenes. But I love this part of Samson. Cars handled like out-of-control metal giants, and slamming into other cars was often a lot of fun.

The annoying quirks of Samson* (*the game, not the main character)

The problem is that some weird design choices and bugs make driving a frustrating experience in Samson as well.

For one thing, most vehicles in the game can only take a few good crashes before they stall out and have to be left behind. Even Samson’s personal muscle car, which is tougher than your average in-game vehicle, breaks down quickly. And the only way to repair it is to spend a not-small amount of money at a repair shop. But considering I was always trying to pay off my daily debt, I never wanted to waste cash on fixing my car. So for most of the game, I used random vehicles and didn’t get to have fun in my powerful muscle car.

Samson: A Tyndalston Story

• Back-of-the-box quote:

  "Welcome to the ugliest city in America, where everyone fights like drunk teenagers."

• Developer

  Liquid Swords

• Type of Game

  Single-player semi-open world action-adventure game with roguelike elements and upgrades.

• Liked

  City looks gross in a good way, street-level action, cars are fun to smash up.

• Disliked

  Melee combat is a slog and feels awful, a lot of bugs, map feels small, odd design choices.

• PLATFORMS

  PC (Played)

• Played

  Played 12 hours and saw credits roll.

• Release Date

  April 8

Another weird design quirk: Samson can’t steal cars that are being driven by someone. This can be a serious problem if you total a car on a highway and are forced to run all the way down an exit ramp to find the nearest parked car. This happened to me a few times. It sucked. The game does offer you the ability to spawn in your muscle car from anywhere at any time, but it was often in dire need of costly repairs, so I just ran to a nearby car instead. Not much fun! I rage quit at least twice when my car randomly flipped into the air and wrecked on the highway during a mission.

And that kind of thing happens a lot in Samson. I encountered many, many, many bugs in my 12 hours with the game. I had enemies get stuck behind fences and doors, forcing me to chase them down to complete a mission asking me to beat all baddies up. Numerous times, I found enemy cars just parked in the middle of the street, making them easy to take out. Sometimes when I picked up NPCs, my car’s doors would open and close a few times as if ghosts were getting in and out. Objective markers would vanish, or health bars would stick around long after the enemy was gone.

None of these issues ever completely broke my game. A quick reload or a bit of troubleshooting would fix stuff. But the frequency with which they happened made it hard to shake the feeling that this game needed a bit more time in the oven.

Still, despite all of that…I do think there’s something unique here. The story goes off the rails in the game’s second half, and melee combat is a huge mess. But the gritty, gross city of Tyndalston looks perfectly rusted and broken. I feel like I should take a shower after playing it. And the grounded, gang-focused, street-level action is vastly different from what can be found in most similar games, like GTA V, Saints Row, Far Cry, and Watch Dogs 2. While I enjoy those games a lot, it was nice to spend a few nights in the muck, slamming old cars against other old cars all in the pursuit of a few hundred bucks.

For those who loved GTA IV‘s grittier tone, especially those opening hours, and who can put up with a lot of jank, Samson: A Tyndalston Story could be worth checking out. Just expect a lot of road bumps on this urban adventure.