Samson’s Crime Story Helps It Stand Out From GTA, But Jank Is A Problem

Like a lot of crime stories, Samson: A Tyndalston Story is about desperation, but it's the first game about jacking cars, punching gangsters, and stealing money that I've ever seen really turn that desperation into a gameplay loop.

Developer Liquid Swords' dark and dingy third-person action game puts you in the title role as a low-level thug and expert wheelman who is way down on his luck. As is often a trope in stories like this, the protagonist owes a lot of money to bad people. Samson smartly grabs the trope of a crook trying to dig himself out of the hole with more bad decisions by turning it into the underlying structure of its gameplay--you work off your debt by doing crime, raising the stakes on a series of open-world quests about beating people up, robbing folks, and escaping the cops. Fail to pay what you owe, and things start to spiral.

After about three hours with Samson, I find it intriguing, but frustrating. While the premise is a cool one, it means doing lots of open-world tasks to earn money, many of which get repetitive quickly and start to feel like busywork. And while the narrative might eventually redeem a premise that has you doing a lot of the same crime stuff over and over, I hit a soft-lock in the first two hours that kept me from advancing the story and soured me on a lot of the experience.