Samson’s Crime Story Helps It Stand Out From GTA, But Jank Is A Problem
Summary
Like a lot of crime stories, Samson: A Tyndalston Story is about desperation, but it's the first game about jacking cars, punching gangsters, and stealing money that I've ever seen really turn that desperation into a gameplay loop.
Developer Liquid Swords' dark and dingy third-person action game puts you in the title role as a low-level thug and expert wheelman who is way down on his luck. As is often a trope in stories like this, the protagonist owes a lot of money to bad people. Samson smartly grabs the trope of a crook trying to dig himself out of the hole with more bad decisions by turning it into the underlying structure of its gameplay--you work off your debt by doing crime, raising the stakes on a series of open-world quests about beating people up, robbing folks, and escaping the cops. Fail to pay what you owe, and things start to spiral.
After about three hours with Samson, I find it intriguing, but frustrating. While the premise is a cool one, it means doing lots of open-world tasks to earn money, many of which get repetitive quickly and start to feel like busywork. And while the narrative might eventually redeem a premise that has you doing a lot of the same crime stuff over and over, I hit a soft-lock in the first two hours that kept me from advancing the story and soured me on a lot of the experience.
Like a lot of crime stories, Samson: A Tyndalston Story is about desperation, but it's the first game about jacking cars, punching gangsters, and stealing money that I've ever seen really turn that desperation into a gameplay loop.
Developer Liquid Swords' dark and dingy third-person action game puts you in the title role as a low-level thug and expert wheelman who is way down on his luck. As is often a trope in stories like this, the protagonist owes a lot of money to bad people. Samson smartly grabs the trope of a crook trying to dig himself out of the hole with more bad decisions by turning it into the underlying structure of its gameplay--you work off your debt by doing crime, raising the stakes on a series of open-world quests about beating people up, robbing folks, and escaping the cops. Fail to pay what you owe, and things start to spiral.
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Now Playing: SAMSON | Launch Trailer
After about three hours with Samson, I find it intriguing, but frustrating. While the premise is a cool one, it means doing lots of open-world tasks to earn money, many of which get repetitive quickly and start to feel like busywork. And while the narrative might eventually redeem a premise that has you doing a lot of the same crime stuff over and over, I hit a soft-lock in the first two hours that kept me from advancing the story and soured me on a lot of the experience.
While Samson has drawn some comparisons to Grand Theft Auto with its open-world approach and emphasis on driving and crime, the two aren't really all that similar. Samson takes a much darker and more serious tone than the satirical GTA games, for one. It's also more focused on small-scale side jobs that aren't as narratively expansive as what players expect from GTA. There's a pretty big city to drive around here, but Samson is trying to deliver a more focused crime-narrative experience than GTA usually does.
As the opening narration explains, the titular Samson was working in St. Louis with some amateur dorks when a heist went bad, and he was made to take the fall. The bosses held him accountable for all the money lost in the botched crime, and forces were arraying to have him murdered in prison. That's when his sister, Oonagh, stepped in, brokering a deal with the bosses to get Samson out of the slammer so he could pay them back in installments. Oonagh put herself up as collateral--she's using her accounting smarts to cook the books for the bosses, but they're really keeping her close to pressure Samson to make good on his daily payments. Presumably, if you come up short enough times, it's Oonagh who will end up footing the bill with her life.
It's a pretty good setup, although the path forward at first seems daunting and arduous. You owe a hundred grand to the mobsters, so you head home to the crime-ridden and drug-infested city of Tyndalston to start taking on crime jobs. Those jobs appear on your open-world map, and you earn a little money for each one, in hopes of making enough to pay your daily installment--$2,000 to $3,000, at least in the beginning--before you run out of hours.
You have a set number of Action Points available each day, and each job costs some, so you have to be judicious about where you allocate your resources. Tougher jobs pay more, but they might suck up more points in addition to being more dangerous. Fail a mission, and you lose the points you spent on it, with time advancing regardless. Die during a mission and you'll awaken at a local crime clinic, having lost both your Action Points and whatever money you were carrying--a major setback.
It is a cool system that Samson sets up for you to deal with. There's a lot of risk and reward at play as you do your jobs, which are divided into a number of categories like Beatdown, Getaway, Shadow, and so on. Some missions are driving-centric, while others take place on foot. And you're not only thinking about earning money to hit your daily cash quota; you also have to keep your car in good repair, since you'll use it for Getaway missions to escape cops or gangsters and Takedown missions where you have to smash up other vehicles. Driving missions inevitably cause damage that you have to pay to repair, and keeping your car full of nitrous oxide boosters, which are hugely useful, is costly as well.
If you fail to make your daily payment, things start to snowball, although I haven't yet seen how bad they can get. The bosses don't take kindly to you failing to hold up your end of the bargain, and they'll start to sic squads of debt collectors on you. A couple of these thugs are waiting for you on your first morning after arriving in Tyndalston, and presumably they'll get more dogged and more dangerous the more payments you miss--to say nothing of what might happen to Oonagh if you screw up too much.
So it's all a pretty good setup for a game, with lots of decisions to make and a lot of punishment for poor play and failure. In one mission, I beat my job quota by a healthy extra grand, only to get dropped by a bunch of thugs on my last job of the day and lose everything. It was a devastating blow and had me worrying how things would change in Tyndalston if I blew my payment. In a crime story like this, that's all about desperate people doing desperate things, it's a legitimately cool way to bring the stakes close to home for the player. Thanks to a strict autosave feature, you can't just restart a mission or load an earlier save when you screw up. Your actions have consequences, and Samson remembers.
As interesting as that setup was, however, I struggled with Samson almost from the start, thanks to some clunky controls and irritating bugs. The main thing that feels weird is Samson's melee combat system, which you'll engage with a lot as you fight people in many of its missions. The trouble is that combat is very loose, which makes it tough to be accurate with your thrown punches or parries. Enemies usually come at you in groups, often getting behind you where you can't see them coming because of Samson's tight third-person camera perspective, and the only way you can avoid incoming blows is with a dedicated dodge button or a parry that lets you catch a punch and counterattack if you time it right.
In practice, enemies will all attack in rapid succession, making it impossible to parry in lots of cases and forcing you to dodge clear, but the dodge is just a quick sidestep, so you end up hammering that button a bunch of times in a row and hoping for the best. There's no lock-on targeting, either, so deciding who you want to dodge or parry, and who you want to punch, is difficult to convey to the game. It gets especially frustrating when thugs pick up items like bottles and heave them at you from a distance, because they do massive damage and are damn near impossible to see coming in the chaos. It all makes for a combat system that feels weirdly slipshod, as you throw punches that miss wildly and backstep three or four times to get clear of a bunch of guys coming at you at once.
As you fight, you build up a super-powered Adrenaline ability you can activate that powers up your punches and makes you do more damage, and it feels like that inclusion was the developers providing a release valve for the built-up imprecision of the combat system. You might struggle dealing with a particular target reliably, but at least you can hulk out and go to town on a few guys to drop them quickly.
Driving feels altogether better, especially when you're driving Samson's car rather than one of the random ones you can jack. Drifting around corners to beat the cops can be a lot of fun, although the rules for actually losing them are a little confusing--they always seem to dial in on you even after you give them the slip.
Car combat is just as frustrating as melee combat, though. I'm not sure exactly how the vehicle damage system is supposed to work in Samson, except that you get a major bonus if you somehow manage to T-bone another car. For the most part, I was just bouncing bumpers with my opponents, before we would both kind of get pushed off the road a bit and have to stop and reverse to get back on the pavement to continue the chase. There's an Adrenaline boost for car damage, too, and again, it feels necessary to make these missions work in a timely manner.
But the most egregious issue for me was the game soft-locking me out of completing its story missions. Early in the game, Samson reunites with his crime pals from childhood in their local dive bar, before somebody busts in with a TEC-9 and tries to take one of them out. Another of the buddies is hit and Samson is dispatched to find out who ordered the hit and stop them.
The third story mission sends you to find the gun dealer who sold the TEC-9, who immediately gets squeamish upon seeing you and summons a ton of guys to beat you down. This fight escalated much more quickly than I expected and I was killed--the only time I died in my three hours of play--but every time I tried to replay the mission, it stalled out when I knocked on the weapons dealer's door. I couldn't find a way to advance it, and so was locked out of pushing the story forward until I started the game over.
Samson has some cool ideas at play, and I'm interested to see how they play out, especially as the narrative unfolds. I really want to see how the game pushes desperation on you as time goes on--one has to assume you're not going to pay back $100,000 in $3,000 increments, and the pressure of failure has the chance to ratchet up the intensity and make for a truly fascinating, affecting crime story. I want to see where it goes--there's just a lot to push through to find out.
Samson: A Tyndalston Story is out now on Steam and the Epic Games Store for $25. Read our interview with Liquid Swords co-founder Cristofer Sundberg about battling layoffs and games industry problems through Samson's development.