Samson is GTA 4 with good hair and no money
The Steam page for Samson invites comparisons to GTA: open world, cars, combat, and a grimy criminal narrative that could be unconvincingly presented as a view on contemporary America. In practice, it’s more limited: it’s a bit like GTA, but specifically GTA 4, and just the opening section, except with more melee combat, less mission variety, some distractingly detailed visuals and a truly remarkable array of bugs.
The aesthetic is strongly reminiscent of the sort of mid-budget 90s action film in which character actors dimly recognisable as guest stars from Frasier conducted car chases in boxy Fords and shootouts in indistinct warehouses, with the crucial difference that Samson is not issued a gun: the only combat is melee, which uses two moves, one dodge, and some short-lived weapon pickups. Driving, meanwhile, is limited to a handful of different vehicles, some of which are equipped with nitrous and all of which are equipped with an implausible ability to leap sideways for the purposes of bashing another vehicle off the road. It reminds me a little of Sleeping Dogs, the last great nearly-man of the GTA pretenders, but the resemblance is regrettably superficial.
