Oh, SAMSON. How did things go as wrong as they have for a game that definitely had the promise and pedigree to be a breakout AA surprise? And yet, it has stumbled, its promising early footage and a very attractive price point failing to gain enough traction under the weight of the game’s technical issues and dated gameplay elements.
It’s a jarring clash between what was promised and the ground reality of a game whose development had a major shakeup, a potential contributing factor in a launch response that’s quite disappointing indeed. But is SAMSON in with a chance at earning back some goodwill, Crimson Desert style? Or is it going to be one of those games that should have incited curiosity but is instead going to be relegated to the bench amid a very strong lineup of titles in 2026?
Join us as we take a look at what’s wrong with this one and how it has ended up where it is.
A Solid Title Despite Its Flaws
Yes, SAMSON is flawed. But before we dive into what hasn’t clicked in its favor, it’s a good idea to look at what a good game it is when it manages to get its act together. Tyndalston’s definitely a part of its allure, its world-building and activity being a highlight of the experience. It gives the game a distinct visual identity and aesthetic and serves as the perfect stage for its gritty crime-action set pieces.
Get into a brawl, and you’re immediately shown why this one pulls its weight, with the entire thing being quite satisfying indeed. The story isn’t too bad either, and the way it makes good use of the daily debt system lends a sense of urgency to the experience. Your debts feel almost tangible, a troublesome monster breathing down your neck that refuses to back down or reduce its influence on your life despite your best efforts. As far as its premise and presentation are concerned, this one delivers.
We can’t say we weren’t entertained by it all, but the game’s issues were a presence as constant as your debts. Its mission designs were nothing new, and that immediately made it feel a tad too derivative and safe for a title that was looking to bring an innovative layer to the crime genre. Its NPCs felt like they were there only to send us on side missions, and made Tyndalston immediately feel a little less authentic despite its visual sheen.
The camera could become your most dangerous opponent in a fight, all too often, leading to frustration that should have arisen from the gameplay being challenging, but not the game itself. That was also prevalent when we were navigating Tyndalston’s streets and back alleys, with Samson often getting caught on objects in the environment, leading to awkward acrobatics to get him out, along with some clunky movement animations that immediately pulled us out of the experience.
There was a distinct lack of polish that killed SAMSON’s momentum, and made it a title that did not ever rise beyond being a serviceable action game with a unique twist. Things haven’t gone wrong for this one because its foundation was bad. It’s just that the execution needed to be a lot better than it has turned out. Allow us to explain.
A Sudden Shake-Up
The combination of a good premise and poor execution gets quite interesting when you remember that SAMSON was suddenly scaled down quite late into its development. We know that Liquid Sword laid off a significant portion of its team back in 2025, a time when the game should have been at a later stage in its development. But the reduction in manpower working on it led to it being taken down to an AA experience instead of its original AAA label.
That’s a good explanation of why SAMSON seems so chock full of strong ideas that the game isn’t able to nail down satisfactorily enough to be a tight, cohesive experience that has you gripped from start to finish. There were reports of major features being scrapped in order to accommodate the grim reality of the real world. It looks like Tyndalston wasn’t the only place where reality hit like a truck, and the debt system was actually a product of that adversity.
But its presence in the game meant that other systems had to be left behind, the plan being to include them in future titles that hinged on SAMSON’s success. It’s easy to see how SAMSON was a game that was meant to be much larger than it actually is. It was perhaps meant to be larger than life itself, presenting an experience that blended fast-paced action with narrative urgency in a way that would not let its players leave Tyndalston unless they were dragged away.
And yet, those very players are now likely all too happy to wait on the promised patch to the game before they can even be bothered to return, and that’s a real shame. There’s still a lot to like under the hood of this one, with its emphasis on physical combat instead of gunplay fitting very well with its narrative explorations of just how far a person can go when they are pushed to and beyond their limits, both mentally and morally.
Samson operates in a grey area, desperate to find a way out of circumstances that are spiraling out of his control. Liquid Swords finds itself in the same predicament, and while the potential for a turnaround is certainly there, it remains to be seen how the studio manages to get back in the good graces of its players. SAMSON’s vision might have survived the brutal reality of the real world but the reduction in its team’s manpower meant that the polish that its vision needed was clearly a casualty of the studio’s response to its own problems.
But turning things around is going to be an uphill task with discourse around the game’s launch being as focused as it is on problems rather than its potential.
Tough Conversations
Christofer Sundberg’s, Founder & CCO of Liquid Swords, statement acknowledging SAMSON’s issues, is probably a good start to getting in a bit of damage control. So is his assertion that the game is “here to stay”, which preceded the announcement of fixes for its bugs and further polishing of the experience to get it up to scratch with a very tight deadline. That shows commitment to helping the game achieve success, but we think the entire situation could have been avoided in the first place.
There’s a reason we gave SAMSON a 7/10 in our review, after all. It isn’t a bad game, far from it. We’ve seen harsher takes on it and understand where those players and critics are coming from. It isn’t going to be the masterpiece it could have been, thanks to the game’s character AI being as dull as it is, a facet we even mentioned in our review as one that might prove too costly to remedy. But there are other areas of improvement that are accessible, and they could make the game one that has enough merit to justify its lower price point.
Heck, we’d argue that its price point makes even its launch build a lot more attractive. We’d probably have been very hard on it if it had been priced higher. There’s a fairly decent game in there, but it needed far more time in the oven before it was served up to us all. But all isn’t lost if you’re wondering whether this one is doomed to fail. The response from Liquid Swords is quite encouraging and is probably a better form of damage control than the one we got for MindsEye last year.
We’d say that it’s going to be interesting to see where SAMSON goes from here, as it may have launched in a average state, but it comes with enough redeeming qualities for us to be invested in its recovery. We called it a rough diamond, and how its developers choose to polish it could be as interesting as its titular hero’s attempts to chip away at a mountain of debt that might make any lesser man think of leaving the country.
But SAMSON is here to stay, per its studio, and that confidence makes us optimistic about the chances of it becoming better than it is now. And perhaps, in the journey to that goal, it manages to win back its players along the way. This one’s a redemption arc worth looking at, and we’re hoping that a game that comes with a lot of potential manages to find a way to achieve as much of it as it can. Samson could really use some good news, and given our worry that a game with so much potential could fail to get the credit it deserves, so could we.
Time will tell if this one manages to salvage its reputation. But it’s going to be an interesting few weeks ahead either way.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.