*SAMSON*’s Debut Flopped! Why Is Its Combat System Getting Slammed as a Total Collapse?

They made the most fatal trade-off here: they laid out the scale of the open world first, but failed to polish the core combat loop of an action game to a deliverable standard. SAMSON officially launched today. This new title from Liquid Swords had originally drawn a lot of attention because of the team’s background—after all, its lead, Christofer Sundberg, had previously worked on titles like Just Cause and Mad Max. But judging from the outcome, players were not initially discussing the setting, the map, or the presentation. Instead, they focused all their firepower on the feel of the combat, which is almost the worst possible start for an action game.

From a design perspective, when players collectively criticize an action game, it is usually not because of a single imbalanced value, but because input response, hit detection, camera coordination, and weapon impact all go wrong at the same time. Right now, criticism of SAMSON in overseas communities is highly concentrated. Some have outright described its combat system as “absurdly bad,” while others believe its combat performance is even worse than old games from the last century. Those assessments sound harsh, but they reflect a very real issue: when the player character’s reaction to getting hit feels more exaggerated than the enemies’, and gunfire frequently misses for no clear reason, players quickly lose trust in the system, and even strong content afterward struggles to keep them engaged.

From a technical standpoint, poor combat feel is usually not as simple as a single parameter being tuned incorrectly; it is more like an entire set of underlying interactions failing to come together properly. For example, shots missing unexpectedly may involve aim assist, ballistic detection, enemy collision volumes, and animation synchronization; meanwhile, if the protagonist seems to “suffer” more when hit, that could stem from imbalanced stun duration, camera shake, and audio weighting. If these kinds of problems are still surfacing so intensely on launch day, it basically indicates that the core combat was not treated as the highest priority during testing, or that the issues were identified but there was no time for rework—in which case the signs of a rushed release become very obvious.

From a business logic perspective, the biggest fear for a new open-world IP at launch is not ordinary negative reviews, but a structural collapse in word of mouth, because that directly cuts off the conversion path for hesitant buyers. The signals in the article are already very clear: after release, SAMSON triggered intense backlash due to its poor performance, and its prospects have therefore been cast into shadow. For games like this, players are usually willing to tolerate some repetitive content, and even imperfect day-one optimization, but only if the core combat can stand on its own first. Otherwise, the entire product’s sense of value starts to feel like a complex system with no onboarding—users jump in and choose to leave almost immediately.

If you are still on the fence right now, my advice is simple: do not rush to buy it. At the very least, wait for follow-up word of mouth and patch feedback before making a judgment. Liquid Swords’ track record should have been a plus, but a résumé can never replace the quality of the finished product—especially in action games, where system feel is the real standard of acceptance. Whether SAMSON still has a chance to turn things around depends on whether the developers are willing to treat combat as a problem requiring reconstruction-level work, rather than just a few light fixes. If they only tweak some values, that will most likely not be enough to save the first impression that has already collapsed.