Samson Review: A Small, Repetitive Sandbox

When Samson: A Tyndalson Story was first revealed, you could tell straight away that it wasn’t going to be competing with the likes of Grand Theft Auto, despite its urban crime premise. It was marketed as a more condensed, focused action-adventure (one retailing for just $24.99 at launch), and I was more than ready for that. Like a lot of people, I’ve been burnt out on open-world extravaganzas, and a more concise take on the gritty urban crime genre seemed right up my alley.

I want to make it clear that my expectations for Samson were not unreasonable—I went into it expecting a middle-of-the-road indie romp, hopefully with a compelling story and some fun mechanics, but nothing too crazy. Unfortunately, now that I’ve rolled credits on the game, I can say that my middling expectations were not met in the slightest. If games like Hollow Knight and Clair Obscur are inspiring stories of the indie scene’s potential, then maybe we can think of Samson as a cautionary tale: a reminder that not all underdogs come out on top, as sad as that may be to admit.

While not totally without its merits, Samson is ultimately a frustrating, hollow, and unpleasant experience that I can’t recommend to anyone, regardless of personal taste. Its core gameplay loop wears thin almost immediately; its story, while barebones, ranges from yawn-inducing to laughably bad; and its shoddy technical state and baffling design choices only serve to exacerbate these fatal flaws.

Samson Is a Small, Repetitive Sandbox

Samson kicks off with a very rudimentary animated prologue explaining how Samson has just gotten out of prison, and how his sister Oonagh is being held by a rival gang for a $100,000 ransom. Samson has to return home to the streets of Tyndalson, link up with his old gang, and engage in various criminal undertakings to earn enough money to free his sister. This informs the gameplay loop: the player can choose from a selection of several jobs within the tiny Tyndalson map, each of which will net a monetary reward and consume units of time, kind of like in Persona. You have to meet a certain dollar threshold each day, and higher-paying missions usually take up more time.

Here’s where Samson runs into its first issues: individual jobs have no real story or structure, they consist of the same three tasks (racing, taking down other cars, and fist-fighting), and, worst of all, they repeat. To clarify, this means that you will replay several missions as part of the main campaign. And no, there are no variations between mission playthroughs, nor is there a scoring or reward system that incentivizes better performance. It’s hard to fully convey just how painfully underwhelming and dull this becomes.

It would be a little bit better if the moment-to-moment gameplay were rock-solid, but it’s just not. To the game’s credit, the driving mechanics are decent and weighty, and I probably had the most fun while engaging in the Street Trials jobs, which are basically super-technical time trials. The other car-based missions involve either racing to specific locations on the map or ramming into other vehicles to incapacitate them. Even though driving feels fine, the aforementioned lack of variety means that once you’ve played one category of driving mission, you’ve effectively played them all.

Missions that don’t revolve around driving revolve around fist-fighting. There are technically different “on foot” mission types, but the ways that they alter the core brawling gameplay are so minor that they are hardly worth mentioning. For instance, the Jack missions are essentially the same as the fighting-only Beatdown missions, but you have to collect various generic items after or during the fight. The fighting mechanics themselves are shallow and awkward, often feeling unresponsive, but you get used to them after a few hours. Sadly, it doesn’t blossom into a satisfying and robust combat sandbox, just a serviceable one.

There’s a common saying in the gaming community, often applied to massive AAA open-world games from developers like Bethesda and Ubisoft: “as wide as an ocean, but as deep as a puddle.” Samson‘s map is so tiny that you’ll memorize it before too long, but it has no content worth exploring, no secrets, no fun side quests, no gear or collectibles to grind. The world of Samson is both as wide and as deep as a puddle.

Story Doesn’t Come Close to Saving Samson

There are basically no cutscenes in Samson: almost all the story is conveyed through straightforward dialog exchanges either in person or on the phone, without any cinematography, editing, or unique animations. If the narrative actually had some substance, this might have been acceptable, but Samson‘s story feels like it was written in a single night. There are no stakes—Samson talks to Oonagh on the phone regularly, and she never seems to be under any duress or pressure—and every line of dialogue is so generic that it can be hard to pay attention at times.

In addition to the aforementioned jobs, Samson also features 14 story missions, though these are essentially unrelated to the Oonagh plot, which makes the overall narrative feel even more disjointed. These story missions focus on Samson’s “crew,” a loosely-defined organized crime outfit that is as cliché as you could imagine: everyone is rough and no-nonsense, but of course, this is the “good” gang, not like the other “bad” gangs that do evil and dishonorable things. It all comes across like a privileged teen’s idea of what organized crime is like—I can’t even say that it’s a poor imitation of the likes of GTA or Sleeping Dogs, as Samson makes no attempt at playfulness, humor, or character-building. In a game this barren on the gameplay front, a good story would have gone a long way, but Samson‘s writing doesn’t even crack the bar for competence.

Samson Is a Glitchy, Poorly Designed Mess

On top of everything else, Samson has myriad miscellaneous issues on the optimization and design fronts, which further detract from any strengths the game may have otherwise had. I encountered too many glitches to count, ranging from minor or amusing graphical oddities to crashes and mission-breaking bugs. For instance, I still haven’t been able to complete the 13th chapter of Samson due to a bug that stopped me from completing chapter 12. Thankfully, a completely unrelated glitch made the 14th chapter available from the very start of the game, so I was still able to witness Samson‘s nonsensical and anticlimactic finale.

There are a number of bad design choices in Samson as well, like how if you fail a mission, you lose all the money you’ve earned up to that point in the in-game day, and you have to start the mission over from the beginning to boot. Alternatively, you can spend one extra unit of time to start the mission over without losing money, but both of these outcomes are simply too punishing, especially when mission failures can be triggered by glitches or other trivial factors, like accidentally stepping outside a combat arena. There are several other miscellaneous quirks, like being unable to heal and hold a weapon at the same time, but I digress.

I take no joy in lambasting a studio’s debut, but to downplay Samson‘s fundamental flaws would be to misrepresent it. I could say that you might enjoy the game if you temper your expectations, or that it will be improved once Liquid Swords fixes its devastating bugs, or even that beneath its repetitive gameplay and bland story is the beating heart of passion, but the reality is that Samson is more than just a decent-but-flawed game. It’s a passionless, joyless, derivative chore, and I wouldn’t suggest playing it unless you’re being paid to do so.

Samson releases on April 8, 2026 for PC. Game Rant was provided with a Steam code for this review.