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.

You are, to quote the opening cinematic, Legendary Getaway Driver Samson McCray, a Vidal Sassoon Niko Bellic with a gruff voice and a luxuriant Unreal Engine-powered bouffant, returning from prison to the 1990s mean streets with a sweet muscle car and a $100,000 debt to the mob, for which they’re holding your Legendary Criminal Accountant sister as collateral. The chief goal is to pay that down by taking a series of criminal odd-jobs in the relentlessly grimy open world of  Tyndalson, which looks like a denser, dirtier take on GTA 4’s starting location of Hove Beach.

From the off, this is an exercise in cost efficiency, which the developer Liquid Swords has freely admitted is due to running out of money. The aforementioned cinematic is a storyboard and the story itself is largely expressed by phone calls with the aforementioned sister, which is fine because motion capture would not improve it: you’re only really here to drive cars and punch people. It's the first in a series of neat compromises that artfully conceal some of the game’s limitations. 

You start each day with a map packed with missions, six action points and an amount of money you need to pay back before the day ends. Each day contains three time periods of two action points each, and each mission can only take place at a set time of day and consumes a set number of action points commensurate with the amount of money it pays. Fail a mission and you have to spend an action point to repeat it. Fail to make your repayment amount for the day, and you’ll be greeted by goons when you arise the next morning.

This means you’ve got a constant goal of chipping away at the money owed, and you need to balance the time and the financial return of cash missions against the narrative ones which move the story forward. It’s quite a smart way to paper over the fact that the world is quite small and the missions quite basic, and the world itself is nicely detailed and artfully constrained: less Liberty City, more Confinement Neighbourhood.

Elevated trains rattle over the grimy, graffiti’d streets but there’s no way to board them, suspension bridges end up looping you back to the main play area, and the handful of vehicle models available by your run-down apartment are repeated across the entire city. The mission structure strives to hustle you through things quickly enough that this doesn’t become obvious. Unfortunately, to achieve this would require considerably more flamboyance than the game’s po-faced mid-budget thriller aesthetic can offer. 

The driving is broadly enjoyable in a cartoony sort of way, but the enemy AI leaves much to be desired. Chase missions end up traversing the same wide loop repeatedly and with remarkable clumsiness, often pausing for a ten-point turn to navigate each corner. Those in which you outrun pursuers routinely see new enemies spawned in front of you, presumably to offset the ones behind having their own corner-based distractions. Evasion is less a matter of skillful driving and more a case of flailing into a situation where the AI can’t quite work out where you are, which happens more often by luck than judgement. 

Missions in which you have to ram people off the road, meanwhile, become exercises in rationing your car’s health: you can’t hijack other vehicles so if yours expires you have to find a parked one to steal. The game gives you an implausibly generous amount of time for this, presumably in recognition of the fact you often have to run half a mile before you find a new vehicle to rejoin pursuit, which makes the act of actually chasing people feel pointless if you succeed and maddening if you time out. 

Outside of vehicles, the chief activity is melee combat. This is an honest-to-goodness opportunity, given that combat of all stripes is the least satisfying element of GTA and there’s plenty of room to improve it, as demonstrated most effectively in the Hong Kong puglistics of Sleeping Dogs. There are occasional environmental takedowns that suggest that United Front's swansong might even have been an inspiration - but mostly it’s about beating up waves of indistinct enemies who approach from all sides without any sort of telegraphing, which swiftly becomes an exercise in grim button-mashing. There’s the ability to pick up melee weapons or trigger some sort of time-limited ultra, but it’s quite hard to do either when you want to, and you shouldn’t try either next to a vehicle lest Samson abandon combat and spend 30 agonising seconds breaking into it while the surrounding enemies pause and watch. 

In all instances the chief source of charm is the jank, which of course aligns perfectly with our brand but is hard to endorse spending money on. Cinematics, after that storyboarded opener, are all done in-engine: all unsettling stares, glitching facial expressions and clipping through doors. Goons will trap themselves in level geometry. Pursued cars will veer off the road and explode, or encounter something that fires them into the sky. Samson himself grunts randomly and distractingly at all times, in a way that might have been intended to represent physical exertion but in practice sounds like he’s suffering from a slipped disc. The game has been patched since I played, with more planned, but the "Mixed" Steam reviews suggest there's still a long way to go.

A representative experience: one mission called for me to defeat a snitch being held in a police station. Having been denied access the police station, I slowly and laboriously ran over four policemen guarding it with my slow, low-traction car, which went unremarked until I hit the fifth one and triggered a chase response. I attempted to escape in a police car, but the animation took so long that a policeman was able to drag me out, in the process triggering a clipping error which fired me into the air.

I landed on some other policemen and flailed through some melee combat which somehow took out the snitch, thus flagging the mission as complete. I fled in a police car, only escaped by crashing into an area that it couldn’t spawn new pursuers into, and the next morning the car was gone but the hydrant I’d run over with it was still gushing. As an experience, this was not unentertaining, but not in a way I feel the developers intended; the highly readable patch notes speak to myriad such moments, from "NPC's taking a seat mid-fight" to "Players should no longer be able to get locked in the bathroom of the Mansion."

Playing Samson reminds me overwhelmingly of a plucky licenced game from the Xbox 360 era, like 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand or Wheelman: it feels like the result of a harassed team in the Midlands being given eighteen months, some half-finished movie posters and a ten-minute phone call with an aggressively disinterested Hollywood figure and somehow making a halfway interesting 6/10 game out of it. It’s the sort of game that should star Vin Diesel for reasons of licencing, narrative and simplicity of character model; doing it in the latest version of Unreal Engine gives it a level of graphical fidelity that feels slightly inappropriate, like a Criterion Collection release of Neighbours. 

This website is called Jank, and the game is nothing but, so some level of endorsement is inevitable: if you're a connoisseur it's worth playing before the magic gets patched out. I want to see more off-brand GTA-esque games, too - Sleeping Dogs and Saints Row were enjoyable riffs on a template that not enough games dare to approach, and attempts like this should be encouraged. The limited scope, mid-tier pricing and sheer entertainment value of the glitches give Samson a charm that's absent from fellow challenger MindsEye, and ultimately it makes me want Liquid Swords to get another try with more money. If you give them yours now, though, know what you're letting yourself in for.