Did *Samson* crash and burn right out of the gate? A 53% approval rating is really hard to stomach.

The frame rate has tanked. For a game built around action and hyped by quite a few people before launch as a potential “GTA-like dark horse,” Samson’s Steam debut really does feel like charging up a big move for too long, only to miss when it finally comes out. After launching on April 8, it was priced at 88 RMB on Steam China, but it still doesn’t support Simplified Chinese. For domestic players hoping to jump in right away, that already costs it some basic first-impression points.

What stands out even more is the reception. As of this writing, Samson has only a 53% positive rating on Steam, with its overall review status sitting at “Mixed.” For an ordinary small-scale title, you might still brush that off with a “they can patch it over time”; but the expectations it built up early on were far from low, with some players even seeing it as a potential dark horse for 2026. But once the full release landed, the media didn’t provide any meaningful endorsement, and negative feedback in the player community kept snowballing. That kind of gap between expectation and reality hurts the most.

Then there’s performance, which is the main battleground of the current controversy. According to testing by overseas media, with ray reconstruction enabled and the game running at native 4K on max settings, even today’s top-tier graphics cards struggle to hold a steady 60 FPS. With frame generation and AI anti-aliasing technologies all turned off, the RTX 5090 manages only around 52 FPS at native 4K, while the RTX 4090 drops to about 38 FPS. For action game players, that’s not some minor fluctuation in numbers—it means the very foundation of the game’s feel starts to fall apart.

There’s another key signal here: at high resolutions, the performance burden falls almost entirely on the GPU, while the CPU has only a very limited impact on frame rate. In other words, this isn’t the kind of issue you can easily fix by casually tweaking your setup; it looks more like the optimization pipeline itself hasn’t properly sorted out resource allocation. If you’re here for high-fidelity urban exploration, you first have to ask whether your GPU can handle it. If responsive controls matter more to you, then this frame-rate performance is basically a warning sign in advance.

From a buyer’s perspective, my advice is simple: don’t rush into the launch version. 88 RMB isn’t outrageously expensive, but it’s definitely not cheap enough to justify going in blind—especially when there’s still no Simplified Chinese support. In its current state, the game hasn’t secured its reputation, and its performance still isn’t stable. It feels exactly like one of those flashy-looking moves in a match that turns out to be all negative frames when you actually throw it out. Unless you specifically want to see for yourself how this “GTA-like” game stumbled, waiting for follow-up patches and more community feedback would be the safer choice.

One last point: Samson’s cold reception this time is also a warning to other games in the same vein. Open-world action games fear two things most: expectations being raised too high, and launch performance collapsing. The former magnifies flaws; the latter directly cuts into the lower bound of how the game feels to play. For competitive-minded players, the story can be skipped and the cinematic presentation can be tolerated, but the chain from input to feedback cannot break. As things stand now, Samson is still far from being a “dark horse.” It needs to get the fundamentals back in place first.