Samson: A Botched Launch, A Saving Patch — The Full Review

A small-time criminal with big ambitions

Liquid Swords is the studio founded by Christofer Sundberg, the man behind the Just Cause franchise at Avalanche. So expectations for Samson were anything but casual. People were hoping for an open-world action game rooted in the grimy realism of street crime — no superheroes, no fantasy worlds. The pitch: play a low-level delinquent clawing his way up through the underworld, with no safety net and no special powers. A game about risk management, social survival, and personal ambition. On paper, it's exactly the kind of proposition the PC catalog is missing.

So when Samson finally dropped, we dove in. And came away disappointed — not because of the ideas, but because of the game's catastrophic technical state at launch. Progression bugs, corrupted saves, scripts that refuse to fire. Sundberg himself called the launch state "unacceptable." That kind of honesty is rare, and it deserves credit — but it doesn't change the fact that a large chunk of day-one players got a gutted experience. This review is based on the launch version, with notes on the announced fixes.

Specs and configuration

Samson runs on PC exclusively at the time of this review. Liquid Swords' in-house engine handles dense urban environments with advanced object physics and an ambitious NPC simulation system. On a mid-range setup (RTX 3070, Ryzen 5 5600X, 16GB RAM), the game runs at around 55–65 fps at 1080p on high settings. Some occasional dips in heavily populated areas, but nothing that kills the experience on the performance front. The real problem isn't the framerate — it's the code.

Getting a feel for it: when the concept holds up

Let's start with the positives: when Samson works, it's fascinating. You play as a character at the bottom of the criminal food chain in a fictional industrial city, navigating a multi-layered reputation system. Every action leaves a mark: assault someone in a busy alley, and you risk being spotted by witnesses who can tip off the cops or rival gangs. Botch a job for a local boss, and doors stay closed for weeks of in-game time.

The progression feels like a cross between the early hours of GTA San Andreas and the social tension of a more action-grounded Disco Elysium. The writing is genuinely careful — characters talk like people who grew up on the street, not like gangster movie archetypes. Side missions flesh out figures who are either compelling or flat-out repellent, and the game never editorializaes. It's up to you to decide how far you're willing to go to move up.

The hand-to-hand combat system deserves a special mention. Taking cues from old-school brawlers, it's built around the timing of blocks and counters rather than button mashing. Think Sleeping Dogs — less fluid, but more brutal. Every fight has weight, every mistake costs you. It's satisfying when it works. And that's exactly where the bugs come in.

The bugs: from cosmetic to game-breaking

It would be dishonest to gloss over this. Samson at launch is a minefield. Over roughly thirty hours of testing, we personally catalogued four distinct categories of problems.

First tier: cosmetic bugs. NPCs with desynced walk animations, visibly popping textures, flickering shadows in certain interiors. Annoying, but not catastrophic.

Second tier: gameplay bugs. Doors that stop opening after a script fires, enemies frozen mid-fight, mission objectives that don't update even after you've completed the required action. We had to replay three entire sequences because of these breakdowns.

Third tier, and most serious: save corruption. At launch, Samson offers a single auto-save slot. Which means that if a bug contaminates your file, you start over from scratch. Multiple players have already lost between six and fifteen hours of progress. The promised patch will add multiple save slots — something that should have been there from day one, full stop.

Fourth tier: hard crashes. Rare, but real. Two desktop crashes in thirty hours, always under the same conditions (large crowd plus simultaneous scripted events). Liquid Swords has confirmed they've identified the causes.

Art direction and sound design

Where Samson earns its keep is in its art direction. The city — never explicitly named, somewhere between the Balkans and an Eastern European industrial metropolis — is visually coherent and suffocating. The poor neighborhoods practically smell like damp concrete through the screen: crumbling postwar housing blocks, grimy covered markets, streets lit by cheap Chinese shop signs. The aesthetic carefully sidesteps any Hollywood glamorization of crime in favor of something mundane, plausible, and everyday.

The color palette leans cold — grey-blues punctuated by flashes of yellow and orange that flag danger zones or opportunities. This isn't a game trying to be beautiful — it's trying to be real. And on that front, it delivers.

The soundtrack backs that choice with intelligence. No heroic scoring. Dense urban soundscapes, background radio chatter, diegetic music bleeding out of bars and passing cars. The combat sound design is particularly sharp: hits sound like they hurt, broken bottles have a precise crack, footsteps on gravel sound different from footsteps on asphalt. These are exactly the kinds of details that build immersion — and that the bugs subsequently shatter.

Content and replayability

Samson's main campaign clocks in at twelve to fifteen hours depending on your approach. That's short for a game at this price point — but the side content, if you engage with it properly, can easily double that runtime. The catch is that some of those side quests are precisely the ones hit hardest by script bugs at launch.

The open world is deliberately compact. No continent to cross: three distinct neighborhoods, each with its own factions, codes, and opportunities. That tightness is an intentional design choice that prioritizes density over sprawl. Ancillary activities include goods trafficking, underground gambling, legitimate odd jobs as cover, and recruiting contacts. The game encourages replayability through a system of alternate endings tied to your alliances.

A New Game+ mode has been announced for a future update. As it stands, replayability is limited but genuine for players who want to explore the narrative branches. The real obstacle to getting full value out of the game is whether you can trust it not to torpedo your progress — a problem the patch should go a long way toward fixing.

Strengths

• + A strong, cohesive concept that stands out in the open-world action space
• + Sincere art direction that sidesteps every gangster-film cliché
• + Character writing and dialogue well above the genre average
• + Multi-layered reputation system that gives every action real meaning
• + Brutal, satisfying hand-to-hand combat when it works
• + Immersive, well-crafted sound design
• + Studio transparent about its problems and responsive post-launch

Weaknesses

• − Launched in a technically unacceptable state, by the studio's own admission
• − A single save slot on day one — an unforgivable oversight in 2025
• − Progression bugs that break entire sequences with no workaround
• − Main campaign too short for the asking price
• − Some framerate drops in dense areas
• − Uneven side content, with several secondary quests feeling rushed

Verdict: wasted potential from a botched launch

Samson is a game that deserved better than what it went through at launch. Liquid Swords clearly has ideas, a world, and a vision. The concept of a small-time criminal navigating a hostile environment without superpowers or easy moral answers is well-executed when the code cooperates. And Christofer Sundberg's public acknowledgment of the game's unacceptable launch state speaks to a studio that isn't hiding behind its marketing.

But a game is also judged — above all — on the day players pay for it. And on that day, Samson handed them corrupted saves, broken missions, and lost progress. That's a breach of trust, regardless of how good the follow-up patch turns out to be.

The score below reflects the game as it exists at the time of this review, with real room to grow if the announced fixes deliver. If you can afford to wait a few weeks for the studio to get the game in shape, Samson could turn out to be one of the year's sleeper hits on PC. As it stands, it's a rough diamond that was cut way too fast.