Samson: A Tyndalston Story is the debut game from independent developer Liquid Swords, and it has a lot going for it. It’s got a team of learned developers behind it, led by Christofer Sundberg, the founder of Avalanche Studios and creator of the Just Cause series, and it’s not trying to bite off more than it can chew.

Which is to say, this is a double-A-sized game that isn’t trying to be some big, Grand Theft Auto-sized game despite the numerous comparisons to GTA that have been made about the game. Liquid Swords and Sundberg have been adamant about how Samson is not GTA.

When I previewed the game and got to speak with Sundberg in February, during a presentation ahead of my gameplay session, unprompted, Sundberg told myself and the few other members of the media in attendance quite clearly that “we [Liquid Swords] have never compared ourselves to GTA. Never ever. Samson is not GTA, and it’s not AAA.“

“It’s a focused, mid-budget game built for intensity over scale, and priced accordingly, and it’s designed around tight systems instead of endless content sprawl. So our ambition is different, our scope is different.“

Well, for one thing, Sundberg is right. Samson: A Tyndalston Story is absolutely not GTA, though you’ll certainly understand why the comparisons are there after just a few minutes with it. But it is not GTA. Not on scale, not on polish, and certainly not on quality.

Not GTA, Not Bad

Before getting into the worst of it, it needs to be acknowledged that Samson has a lot of good bones, and not just because his bones don’t constantly break with all the fights he gets into. Samson: A Tyndalston Story follows the titular character, Samson, whose full name is Samson McCray. He’s a nails-for-breakfast-eating tough guy whose prowess as a getaway driver and brawler in Tyndalston earned him an opportunity at a big score with a job in St. Louis when close friends of his asked for his help.

The job, like most jobs, criminal or otherwise, went south, and McCrae ended up spending some time in prison. To save her brother from getting shanked on the yard, Oonagh, Samson’s sister, cuts a deal with the bosses who ordered the St. Louis job in the first place, the same ones that Samson now owes a huge chunk of change to in order to pay off what they missed out on, because him and his team messed up in the first place.

Now, you’re stuck grinding every day, doing whatever odd criminal jobs come your way. Like Tyndalston’s personal Fiverr guy for criminal activity. All the money you make goes to those St. Louis bosses, and every day you have to pay a certain threshold in order to keep them happy. Miss a day or two, and debt collectors will start to follow you around in events that the game calls ‘Strikes,’ where they’ll try to beat you up for not ringing the daily bell.

Speaking of fights, that’s another area of Samson (the game) that not only sets it apart from GTA but is also one of its more interesting features. It’s entirely melee combat focused – never mind why in this town of hard-nosed criminals, everyone has seemingly decided to abstain from guns and knives unless it’s in a cutscene or you’re a cop – just focus on the fact that it’s cool and cinematic to get into these over-the-shoulder, third-person brawling style fights that, at first glance, can feel close to Sifu without the martial arts.

It’s something different, and not perhaps what you’d expect in a game like this, where it could have easily been another flavour of a third-person cover shooter. It’s a brawler, and I can respect and appreciate that it’s trying something that I at least feel like I don’t see too often. Especially since the other layer to the combat is the environmental design, which is a cool wrinkle that can sway fights in your favour if you’re clever enough with how you use the space around you.

I also appreciate what is essentially the two modes Samson is split between. Its main story and side missions are narratively tied together, but focusing on one or the other almost feels like playing a different game, and that comes entirely from the different stakes and pressures presented. It’s an incredibly interesting push-and-pull between the two thanks to Samson’s Action Points system.

Each mission you undertake, story or otherwise, costs Action Points. You get six points per day (to start), and most missions cost two to three points. You have a daily due to pay every day, and while story missions do include a payout, it’s not exactly sizable, and it’ll never be enough to cover your daily debt, so you have to do some side missions if you want a chance at making your payments.

You also can’t just avoid the side missions to complete the story. Miss your payments for too many days in a row, and you’ll put your sister in more danger in St. Louis. It really forces you to engage with everything, and failure at any point, whether it’s a story mission or side mission, feels even worse because of the downward spiral it causes.

You’ll start to face the aforementioned ‘Strikes.’ You’ll have to either spend your money on getting out of the red or keeping your car maintained for jobs. Takedown jobs, in particular, happen to pay a lot while also likely leaving your car in need of some repair. But you can’t, or at least shouldn’t, take those jobs if your car is already wrecked. Yes, you can use a car you find on the street (you can’t actually steal a car from a person who is driving it, only ones that are idle, which should probably be the line in the sand if nothing else, as to whether a game is a GTA-like or not), but those break down even faster than your car. Which, for some reason, is canonically (and affectionately, I presume) called the Magnum Opus.

It’s a temporary solution, and using it could lead to more failed missions. Which puts you another day late, ups the ante with Strikes, and puts the heat on even more.

That’s why each win feels like getting a bit of relief from the pressure. It all really works for me, and I really do admire how wonderfully placed the stakes are, how this system works to really drive home the ‘intensity over scale’ mantra. It’s not a very long game, but those few hours in the middle of your playthrough, where you’ve found a flow, spending each day punching someone’s clock before you’re driving towards the end, the game really achieves that design goal and makes you feel that short-term intensity.

I see what I believe the vision for Samson: A Tyndalston Story was, and it’s a game I could really get behind. Which is why it really sucks that it is broken and repetitive as hell.

Not GTA, Not Good

Okay, in all honesty, my description of Samson so far is a little romanticized, because I very rarely got to play that version of Samson. What I got for the majority of my 15+ hours with it, which is not an accurate reflection of my time spent finishing the game since I had to restart it twice to get past a broken story mission that blocked progression, was a very unpolished, underbaked, and soggy-bottom version of Samson: A Tyndalston Story.

I’ll preface only by saying that I’ve been told a patch is coming at launch today, which could fix some of the technical issues I’ve seen. So bear in mind that the technical issues I faced, like the game running like a slideshow every few seconds even after I dropped the settings on my PC could (and hopefully are) gone if you’re playing this right at launch.

But they very well might not be, and frame rate problems are unfortunately only the beginning of the ways in which Samson is, at least right now, on day one, an unfinished game.

For starters, missions are broken even when they’re not broken, and what I mean by that is they don’t feel fixed. Takedown missions, for example, are events where you get in the Magnum Opus and chase down a few cars for one reason or another. The car combat is the other core to Samson’s gameplay, and calls back to Sundberg and other members of Liquid Swords’ experience working on Mad Max.

But those cars will drive in nothing but a constant loop around the city until you catch them all. They’ll also drive themselves into a crash or (more often) freeze up. I once finished a Takedown mission by slowly ramming into the side of a car that got stuck on nothing.

The driver wouldn’t move, the car wasn’t wrecked (yet), and because we were on the highway, there were dozens of NPC cars around, stopping me from really getting any kind of speed going to do more damage per hit. Just a slow, back-and-forth of forward and reverse, doing chip damage until I got to hear an encouraging line from Samson and check another job in the ‘complete’ file.

The structure of it doesn’t feel like a finished mission. It gets boring fast because the only real variety between every Takedown job you’ll take is where they start and how many cars you’re looking to smash up. Beatdown missions are no different in their repetitiveness. You’re going somewhere and beating the crap out of a bunch of people.

A Shadow mission is just slowly walking behind someone until they take you to a place to beat the crap out of a bunch of people. Jack missions ask you to collect a select number of items, always packaged as these nondescript boxes with the same blue tape on them. In between picking them up, you’ll likely also beat the crap out of some people.

You won’t see a ‘boss’ of sorts or someone try to fight you in a novel way. You won’t see anything unexpected happen. Every kind of job (of which there are eight, four on foot and four in your vehicle) starts and ends the same way for what it is.

There’s an attempt to differentiate them with bits of storytelling in their description, but none of that information functions within the main story. Maybe you’ll see a different side mission or hear something from Oonagh that connects the two within Samson’s history in Tyndalston. Maybe that happens. It gets you nothing more than a small moment of acknowledgement to yourself.

And that combat, for all its cinematic appeal, is just as bad as you would expect it to be thanks to the rest of the game’s technical issues. God forbid you try to drive fast or pull off a combo and then quickly be ready to block an incoming attack. Something is breaking along the way, whether that’s the animation or the frame rate just pausing and skipping, or both. It’s great (read: awful) when that happens, and then suddenly you’ve taken two heavy hits from two people fighting you at the same time, and then a third light punch all of a sudden knocks you out and makes you fail the mission.

Meanwhile, one of the people you were supposed to beat up has just ragdolled on some of the environment that he was practically just standing next to and suddenly died after ever so slightly coming into contact with it. I’ve also had the game crash on me, side missions where enemies I was supposed to fight didn’t load in, and, once again, because it feels worth repeating, played through it all while fighting a whole host of technical and frame rate issues.

Unfinished and Underbaked

The title of this review, ‘Not Bad, Not Good’ is pulled from a line in the game, something that Samson will say at the end of a day where you’ve missed your daily goal, but not by too much. It altogether feels like a pretty good way to describe Samson: A Tyndalston Story as a game, because there are a lot of ‘not bad’ parts to it, and just as many ‘not good.’

What it has going for it is that many of its ‘not good’ issues can be fixed. The frame rate can be fixed so that even my laptop, which has a 3070Ti with a Ryzen 9 6900HS and 32GB of RAM, can run it smoothly at 1080p, something that has been unattainable for me outside of the first 15 minutes of my session so far, as performance only got worse the longer I played in a single sitting.

Broken missions can be fixed in a patch. Abysmal enemy AI can be fixed in a patch. Animation issues, visual issues, gameplay tweaks – all of that can, and very likely will, come in a future patch, hopefully sometime soon if those fixes are not already included in today’s launch patch.

But even after all that, what ultimately leaves Samson unfinished is the repetitive missions that offer no gameplay variety. It’s the thin story and character writing that feels like everyone is constantly talking in one-liners pulled from every popular criminal drama across American film and TV in the last forty years.

It’s the fact that even the ‘Story Deck’ missions that are designed to be a bit more organic in how they’re set up, since you can only start one by finding it across the city and engaging with it are just as one-note as the rest of the missions. That all of the NPCs you meet share the same few vague faces and none of their expressions are ever convincing.

It’s unfortunate, but Liquid Swords has come out of the gate with a game that manages to get a little more than halfway to the finish line, thanks to its truly strong bones and gameplay systems, but stumbles hard and doesn’t reach baseline requirements to make it all the way across.

PC version tested. Review code provided by the publisher.

You can find additional information about our standard review process and ethics policy here.

5.5

WCCFTECH RATING

Samson: A Tyndalston Story

About the author: David has been writing about videogames, technology, and culture since 2020, with a focus on reporting daily news across multiple publications, including GameDaily.Biz, GameSkinny, and PlayStation Universe before joining Wccftech in 2025. David started contributing as Canada/US reporter for Wccftech’s gaming section in 2025. Besides being up-to-date on the industry’s movements, he loves interviewing developers, reviewing games, and writing intricate essays about the symbolism and layered meanings to be found in rich narratives as he’s done for publications like GamesIndustry.Biz, LostInCult, and others. Outside of games he loves movies, music, theatre, his hometown, and his family, though not necessarily in that order.

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