"Samson" debuted with only a score of 53, and it dares to compare itself to GTA?

I’d give it a 6. Because it’s not a completely unplayable pile of junk, but it’s still a whole Liberty City away from the “GTA-like” label so many people are throwing around.

Samson has recently officially launched on Steam. It’s developed by Liquid Swords, led by Kristofer Sundberg, who previously worked on Just Cause and Mad Max. Based on that lineup alone, veteran players are bound to take a second look—after all, there really aren’t that many open-world action games like this on the market these days.

That said, a strong résumé doesn’t guarantee a strong finished product. Right now, Samson has only a 53% positive rating on Steam, putting it firmly in “Mixed” territory. Its Metacritic critic average is also 53: out of 13 outlets, only 1 gave it a positive review, 8 were mixed, and 4 were negative. Even IGN Germany only gave it a 5, explicitly saying they didn’t have especially high expectations to begin with and still ended up disappointed. That’s already being polite.

Player feedback is fairly representative. Most of the positive reviews focus on the atmosphere, pricing, and ambition. Put simply, it’s aiming for something fairly big, and the city does manage to carry a bit of that mood. Certain nighttime scenes and the oppressive feel of the streets can bring to mind those rough-around-the-edges but energetic open-world games from the early console era. But the negative feedback is just as concentrated: the production feels cheap, the animations are stiff and awkward, and the hand-to-hand combat feels bad. For an action game, those issues are practically the equivalent of GTA having no steering when driving or Sleeping Dogs having no impact in its fights—how are you supposed to play that?

What annoys me most is this kind of game where “the ambition shows up first, and the polish arrives late.” You can have a limited budget, sure, but action transitions, hit feedback, and basic presentation—those are your storefront. Plenty of mid-budget games in the 2000s weren’t exactly flashy, but at least their core systems weren’t fighting against themselves. Samson right now feels more like the framework has been put up first, while the parts inside still haven’t all been tightened down.

To their credit, the developers have already pushed a day-one patch on Steam and said they’ll keep fixing issues. That’s certainly the right move, but a day-one patch isn’t a resurrection token. All it really shows is that the team knows what they failed to clean up; it doesn’t magically restore the game’s reputation. Players aren’t testers. They paid money to get in, only to end up validating your basic game feel for you—that doesn’t fly anywhere.

If you’re thinking about buying it now, my advice is simple: if you’re especially interested in open-world crime games, wait and see how future patches and player reviews shake out; if you came for the words “GTA-like,” don’t rush in. What’s here clearly doesn’t justify that level of comparison. Right now, it feels more like a game with some atmosphere and some ideas, but one that stumbled badly at launch and still comes off as half-finished.

At the end of the day, Samson isn’t without merit. The problem is that it slipped up first in the very areas where it most needed to stand firm. Veteran players have seen this kind of thing plenty of times before. It’s not impossible that the game could recover later on, but this launch has basically burned through the first wave of trust already.