Samson

Have you ever walked through a run-down part of town and imagined the potential that exists? For Samson, who grew up in the roughest part of his hometown of Tyndalston called The Ditch, that is his day-to-day life. However, as someone who got his hands on Liquid Swords' Samson, it ended up being my experience for more than an hour as I fell completely into the enthralling gameplay loop, but was left to imagine how great the experience could be if it were a bit more polished.

As Samson, you return home to The Ditch with a mountain of debt to repay. To keep the debt collectors off his back, he hooks up with an old friend who happens to be a major player in the streets of Tyndalston, Carter, to take on some jobs around the city. These range from beating down the door of a local business and roughing up the owner who owes him money to chasing down some rival gang members who just robbed a gas station that Carter oversees. The gameplay is varied and kept me on my toes; one sequence had me brawling through a warehouse, while another had me engaging in vehicular combat, while another, still, tasked me with helping an ally escape the cops after robbing a pharmacy. It's safe to say you're not playing a hero in Samson, but each mission I played delivered excitement in spades.

The gameplay typically felt great as I tested out the various mission types on offer. My favorite missions involved heavy hand-to-hand combat; Samson squares up against various enemies with light and heavy attacks at his disposal, as well as the ability to parry and smash enemies with environmental objects. Though this is very much a brawler, you can't just swing for the fences. Instead, I approached each encounter with caution and intentionality. Light punches, heavy punches, parries, and grabs often sufficed in my early-game encounters, but using the Adrenaline Rush meter, I could wail on rivals with slowed-down time and increased damage. I got myself out of more than a couple of sticky situations thanks to effective managing of Samson's Adrenaline meter.

It's a brawler at heart, but it's far from the only style of gameplay players can expect. Several of the missions also involve Samson getting into the driver seat, whether to help an ally flee the scene of a crime or to take down rivals who just robbed your friends. Escaping from the police involves leaving their patrol circumference and laying low until they call off the search, while taking down enemies on the mean streets of Tyndalston requires you to ram them using some rudimentary vehicular combat mechanics. I was less sold on this part of the game, as Samson's vehicle is also highly susceptible to damage, and when I smashed my rivals into the rails or even oncoming traffic, the enemies often drove away after sustaining less damage than I expected, while Samson's car took on more than I thought he would. I assume this will be fine-tuned for the final release, but it led to some frustrating restarts.

Perhaps the most novel part of my hands-on session presented itself in the game's structure. Rather than having unlimited time in The Ditch, Samson must effectively watch his calendar. Each day is split into three portions: morning, evening, and night. Each of these three times of day has a set number of Action Points (AP), and each job requires AP to attempt; if you fail a job, you can retry it, but if you end up abandoning it, you lose those Action Points and your day moves on without profit or experience. Each day, you need to earn and pay a set amount of money towards your overall debt, or else debt collectors will wait for you by your car or apartment to try and beat the money out of you. Because of this structure, I needed to be judicious about which jobs I selected and when. Some jobs, like one where I stole a stash from a rival gang, can be completed any time, while others, like a story mission that takes place at a bar, can only happen at certain times of day. As someone who loves calendar-based RPGs like Persona and Metaphor, as well as action-crime games like GTA and Saints Row, this feels like a beautiful melding of the genres' conventions.

But it's also important to note that, despite my positive thoughts on the gameplay loop, this is not a triple-A game, despite the triple-A inspiration. Liquid Swords is a smaller team with a smaller budget, and while Samson will draw inevitable comparisons to Grand Theft Auto, it is not the multi-billion dollar franchise that Rockstar has under its belt. Samson is a much more focused experience by design, a way to navigate the seedy underbelly of an East Coast-inspired fictional city, set in the '90s, with intentionally designed areas that are meant to push you forward not only in the level, but the story as well. And though much of your spare time in Samson is spent doing side-missions to raise money to pay off the main character's debts, this is not some massive game full of padding and activities to take part in. Each GTA feels like an action-packed season of prestige television, while Samson – though I only played the first segment of the campaign – feels more like a movie with far less padding that you can sit down and enjoy in a much quicker fashion.

Sadly, much of my experience was hindered by glitches. While this is common in pre-release builds, when Liquid Swords told me that Samson is set to release in just over a month from this publication, it made me a bit more nervous. Games come together at the last minute all the time, but nearly every mission I played had a different type of noticeable bug, ranging from the annoying audio and visual bugs to glitches that required me to exit and re-launch the game. Hopefully, this is just a symptom of playing an outdated build, and that a more recent version of Samson is a lot more stable, but I can only preview what was put in front of me.

There is absolutely still time for developer Liquid Swords to shore up the core experience of Samson, but we're coming up on launch in just over a month, so we are coming down to the wire soon. But ignoring the lack of polish, my time with Samson was a ton of fun, with a compelling loop that I could see myself engaging with for hours. My greatest hope for Samson is that, when it launches on PC on April 8, we won't be talking about the game's potential, but rather that the hooks that grabbed me during my gameplay session do the same to the wider player base, uninhibited.