It pains me to write this, believe me. I really want to like Samson. In fact, for all intents and purposes, I do like it. I like the setting, plot, map, atmosphere, essentially everything about how the game is designed. What I don't like is that the the game is nowhere near ready for a public release. Listen to me closely: it is truly nowhere near ready for your money.

Mind you, I not only toughed my way through the initial releases of Cyberpunk and Starfield, but actually enjoyed them in their unpatched day 1 states. Indeed, I am willing to stupe that low for a game I'm excited about - but Samson makes those look like paradise. We're talking No Man's Sky levels of incomplete.

In my <2hrs of play, I already have a massive laundry list of issues that I am astonished survived any amount of QA. Even while trying to stick as to-the-script as possible, I keep running into problem after problem after problem. So many systems and mechanics are at such odds with one another, and so many moments and possibilities are so unaccounted for in how those systems and mechanics operate, that it plays like a mid/late alpha build, or like a free standalone mod for an old Bethesda game. This doesn't come down to a few broken lines of code, there is an overall fundamental lack of any interaction between things like camera behavior, combat animations, NPC behavior, object placement, you name it, it probably clashes with something.

This is quite surprising coming from a team spearheaded by the co-founders of Avalanche, who have quite a strong track record of mechanically fluent large-scale games. This is a very small game that's also utterly mechanically dysfunctional.

Just to list a few things I've run into:

• Various gaps in the terrain geometry, revealing the out-of-boundaries void.
  
• All cars drive exactly the same. Same accel, top speed, redline, handling, braking, sound effects, all the same. It's quite weird having an E36 knockoff sound and drive exactly like the Chevelle knockoff you spend most of your time driving around in.
  
• The (too zoomed in) camera doesn't zoom out for group fights, so you constantly get blindsided by enemies completely invisible to you. Increasing FOV does not fix this. Why this game didn't take QOL notes from other brawlers like God Hand or Sleeping Dogs is beyond me.
  
• There is no manual lock on, nor any indication to who you're locked onto. You are force-focused onto whoever is in the direction of your last attack, and Samson orbits/faces them until you get far enough away. Once again, this is a NIGHTMARE of a polish/refinement issue for group fights, of which there are many.
  
• Escaping a helicopter is as enjoyable as being gaslit. Drive under 60mph, and it stays locked onto you. Go over 60mph, and by the time you've escaped its reach, you've driven far enough to run into the next batch of cruisers.
  
• The map is so zoomed in, and can't be zoomed out, that cops will re-detect you before you're aware AT ALL of their location unless you want to constantly look behind you while driving at highway speeds in an inner-city environment.
  
• During "cooldown", cops follow you to the literal ends of the Earth, have perfect awareness of your exact location no matter how much distance you have on them, respawn and populate the streets like ants, and have x-ray vision.
  
• Sliding your car AT ALL at high speed is game over. You can't regain control, you must come to a dead stop. It's almost like the code establishes a flat rule that higher speed = harder to straighten out. It's awful, and for a game so centered around driving cars, you'd think they'd have slightly more robust physics.
  
• Your attack animations CONSTANTLY cancel themselves out for no reason. It is infuriating.
  
• Some enemies will parry and dodge your attacks with 100% consistency while outright refusing to initiate one of their own. Seriously, if you stop attacking them, they'll just stare at you while dancing around you with their hands up, it's insane.
  
• Parrying is borderline useless in group fights, because the animation is slow enough that you'll get clobbered by the next guy before you land a counter hit.
  
• Dodging is also useless since enemies magnetize to you.
  
• While freeroaming, I stumbled into a group fight with 5 or 6 enemies and decided to run away. About 10 minutes later, on the other side of the map, the whole group caught up to me, still in the same fight stance/formation as before (as in they literally boxer-skipped their way to me, hands up the whole time). I ran away again and then eventually ran back into them, except then, I was able to KO all of them, one by one, without any opposition.
  
• I took down a "notorious street racer" by hitting his car once, evaporating it into thin air, leaving him (a generic copy-pasted NPC otherwise seen roaming the streets) standing completely unbothered and unscathed in the street. I punched him, and he didn't fight back. I honestly thought I had a stroke.
  
• The animations are so unbelievably goofy, low quality, and uncanny, that they seem AI-generated. Hold sprint while moving forward and then wiggle your character left and right rapidly with hair and cloth physics enabled - it looks absolutely ridiculous.

No, this list is nowhere near comprehensive. Considering the amount of talent that Liquid Swords contains, I can only chalk this up to sheer laziness. I have an incredibly hard time believing they're incapable of releasing a game that doesn't have these issues (and more), so I'm left resenting the fact they paid so little attention to a host of issues they probably knew were present.

Also, I'm sorry, but UE5 sucks, and everyone needs to stop using it. It's piss ugly, runs like crap, and exaggerates shading and lighting effects to absurdly overwhelming degrees. This game has the stylistic intrigue of a low budget solo-dev Unity asset flip, but with the aforementioned UE5 slop-FX smeared across it, and all of the performance issues that come with them. I hate looking at it, and it will take a LOT more than some performance patches to make it tolerable on a technical level. To that end, Samson needs fundamentally different DNA, because these UE5 issues seem to persist in every single game that runs on it. Hell, even the Oblivion remaster still runs like crap despite being a year old and being backed by a far larger studio and budget than Samson, and that was with all development efforts focused on visuals, performance, and refinement, since its core logic was carried over from the original. Samson has to worry about all of these ON TOP of the rest of the broken code with a tiny fraction of the manpower, budget, or customer base.

Seriously, go drive around during the day and tell me you aren't partially blind afterwards. The game tries to make your eyes bleed. Puddles are as bright as mirrors, the exposure is maddeningly high, road textures are so over-defined that they look like burlap from shallow angles, and occlusion shadows are so overly noticeable that they made their surroundings look nearly cel shaded. All of this occurs while dipping well below 60fps at 1080p on a 3080/5700X3D on medium settings with DLSS set to "Performance." Fixing these issues probably requires uprooting so many fundamental aspects of the game's code that I just don't foresee it being feasible, but I hope I'm wrong.

I will say, though, that the map is genuinely well laid out. It's fun to walk around, explore, and interact with. The combat is great as long as you don't have more than 3 opponents. The driving is fine, even enjoyable, at low speeds. I can see some of that Avalanche open-world magic on occasion, but otherwise, it's severely unfinished.

Anyways, under absolutely no circumstances can I recommend Samson. In its current state, it should be getting playtested in-house. I worry its issues are too deep and aplenty to fully amend, so godspeed to the developers.

It pains me to write this, believe me. I really want to like Samson. In fact, for all intents and purposes, I do like it. I like the setting, plot, map, atmosphere, essentially everything about how the game is designed. What I don't like is that the the game is nowhere near ready for a public release. Listen to me closely: it is truly nowhere near ready for your money. Mind you, I not only toughed my way through the initial releases of Cyberpunk and Starfield, but actually enjoyed them in their unpatched day 1 states. Indeed, I am willing to stupe that low for a game I'm excited about - but Samson makes those look like paradise. We're talking No Man's Sky levels of incomplete. In my <2hrs of play, I already have a massive laundry list of issues that I am astonished survived any amount of QA. Even while trying to stick as to-the-script as possible, I keep running into problem after problem after problem. So many systems and mechanics are at such odds with one another, and so many moments and possibilities are so unaccounted for in how those systems and mechanics operate, that it plays like a mid/late alpha build, or like a free standalone mod for an old Bethesda game. This doesn't come down to a few broken lines of code, there is an overall fundamental lack of any interaction between things like camera behavior, combat animations, NPC behavior, object placement, you name it, it probably clashes with something. This is quite surprising coming from a team spearheaded by the co-founders of Avalanche, who have quite a strong track record of mechanically fluent large-scale games. This is a very small game that's also utterly mechanically dysfunctional. Just to list a few things I've run into: [list] [*] Various gaps in the terrain geometry, revealing the out-of-boundaries void. [*] All cars drive exactly the same. Same accel, top speed, redline, handling, braking, sound effects, all the same. It's quite weird having an E36 knockoff sound and drive exactly like the Chevelle knockoff you spend most of your time driving around in. [*] The (too zoomed in) camera doesn't zoom out for group fights, so you constantly get blindsided by enemies completely invisible to you. Increasing FOV does not fix this. Why this game didn't take QOL notes from other brawlers like God Hand or Sleeping Dogs is beyond me. [*] There is no manual lock on, nor any indication to who you're locked onto. You are force-focused onto whoever is in the direction of your last attack, and Samson orbits/faces them until you get far enough away. Once again, this is a NIGHTMARE of a polish/refinement issue for group fights, of which there are many. [*] Escaping a helicopter is as enjoyable as being gaslit. Drive under 60mph, and it stays locked onto you. Go over 60mph, and by the time you've escaped its reach, you've driven far enough to run into the next batch of cruisers. [*] The map is so zoomed in, and can't be zoomed out, that cops will re-detect you before you're aware AT ALL of their location unless you want to constantly look behind you while driving at highway speeds in an inner-city environment. [*] During "cooldown", cops follow you to the literal ends of the Earth, have perfect awareness of your exact location no matter how much distance you have on them, respawn and populate the streets like ants, and have x-ray vision. [*] Sliding your car AT ALL at high speed is game over. You can't regain control, you must come to a dead stop. It's almost like the code establishes a flat rule that higher speed = harder to straighten out. It's awful, and for a game so centered around driving cars, you'd think they'd have slightly more robust physics. [*] Your attack animations CONSTANTLY cancel themselves out for no reason. It is infuriating. [*] Some enemies will parry and dodge your attacks with 100% consistency while outright refusing to initiate one of their own. Seriously, if you stop attacking them, they'll just stare at you while dancing around you with their hands up, it's insane. [*] Parrying is borderline useless in group fights, because the animation is slow enough that you'll get clobbered by the next guy before you land a counter hit. [*] Dodging is also useless since enemies magnetize to you. [*] While freeroaming, I stumbled into a group fight with 5 or 6 enemies and decided to run away. About 10 minutes later, on the other side of the map, the whole group caught up to me, still in the same fight stance/formation as before (as in they literally boxer-skipped their way to me, hands up the whole time). I ran away again and then eventually ran [i]back[/i] into them, except then, I was able to KO all of them, one by one, without any opposition. [*] I took down a "notorious street racer" by hitting his car once, evaporating it into thin air, leaving him (a generic copy-pasted NPC otherwise seen roaming the streets) standing completely unbothered and unscathed in the street. I punched him, and he didn't fight back. I honestly thought I had a stroke. [*] The animations are so unbelievably goofy, low quality, and uncanny, that they seem AI-generated. Hold sprint while moving forward and then wiggle your character left and right rapidly with hair and cloth physics enabled - it looks absolutely ridiculous. [/list] No, this list is nowhere near comprehensive. Considering the amount of talent that Liquid Swords contains, I can only chalk this up to sheer laziness. I have an incredibly hard time believing they're incapable of releasing a game that doesn't have these issues (and more), so I'm left resenting the fact they paid so little attention to a host of issues they probably knew were present. Also, I'm sorry, but UE5 sucks, and everyone needs to stop using it. It's piss ugly, runs like crap, and exaggerates shading and lighting effects to absurdly overwhelming degrees. This game has the stylistic intrigue of a low budget solo-dev Unity asset flip, but with the aforementioned UE5 slop-FX smeared across it, and all of the performance issues that come with them. I hate looking at it, and it will take a LOT more than some performance patches to make it tolerable on a technical level. To that end, Samson needs fundamentally different DNA, because these UE5 issues seem to persist in every single game that runs on it. Hell, even the Oblivion remaster still runs like crap despite being a year old and being backed by a far larger studio and budget than Samson, and that was with all development efforts focused on visuals, performance, and refinement, since its core logic was carried over from the original. Samson has to worry about all of these ON TOP of the rest of the broken code with a tiny fraction of the manpower, budget, or customer base. Seriously, go drive around during the day and tell me you aren't partially blind afterwards. The game tries to make your eyes bleed. Puddles are as bright as mirrors, the exposure is maddeningly high, road textures are so over-defined that they look like burlap from shallow angles, and occlusion shadows are so overly noticeable that they made their surroundings look nearly cel shaded. All of this occurs while dipping well below 60fps at 1080p on a 3080/5700X3D on medium settings with DLSS set to "Performance." Fixing these issues probably requires uprooting so many fundamental aspects of the game's code that I just don't foresee it being feasible, but I hope I'm wrong. I will say, though, that the map is genuinely well laid out. It's fun to walk around, explore, and interact with. The combat is great as long as you don't have more than 3 opponents. The driving is fine, even enjoyable, at low speeds. I can see some of that Avalanche open-world magic on occasion, but otherwise, it's severely unfinished. Anyways, under absolutely no circumstances can I recommend Samson. In its current state, it should be getting playtested in-house. I worry its issues are too deep and aplenty to fully amend, so godspeed to the developers.