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All it took for Samson to pique my curiosity was a very brief teaser<\/u> on social media, and then a follow-up post<\/u> by the game director that described it \u201cmore like Mad Max\u2026Payne\u201d meant it had my attention. And then, once it was officially announced<\/u> earlier this month, my interest immediately skyrocketed.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a gritty crime drama being developed by Liquid Swords, a team made up of a number of former Just Cause developers. It\u2019s due out early in 2026 on PC for $25, with console versions planned for later release. In it, you play Samson McCray, who finds himself in the city of Tyndalston after a job he was the getaway driver for went bad in St. Louis. His sister, Oonagh, had warned him not to take the job, and sure enough she was right. But she managed to cut a deal with the St. Louis crew: Samson has to pay back what was lost, with interest. And that\u2019s where this game begins: with our titular anti-hero staring down a debt that\u2019s accruing interest every day, needing to take whatever jobs he can in order to whittle the debt down.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\nCombat is hand-to-hand. Health pickups are bottles of painkillers (hello, Max Payne!), you\u2019ll do plenty of driving (hello, Mad Max!). And the world, says studio founder and game director Christofer Sundberg, will \u201cpush back\u201d on your action. \u201cWe’ve had this motto from the beginning that the city is a character in itself,\u201d he explained. \u201cSo the more you poke around, the more the world will react. Interacting with people on the street, objects, doing stuff that is unexpected to the world \u2013 it’s quite a depressing town. The world will react. We have a special narrative around law enforcement and why guns are exclusive to law enforcement and really hardened criminals. And the world remembers what you’ve done. You won’t get away with everything. There will be a reaction to your actions.\u201d<\/p>\n
The more you poke around, the more the world will react.<\/div>\n
Oh, and about that \u201cmore like Mad Max\u2026Payne\u201d comment? When asked to elaborate on that, Sundberg told me, \u201c[Some of] the team that worked on the Mad Max is working on Samson, and we’re taking that [experience] ten years in the future. The tone is equally dark as Mad Max. It’s not a post-apocalyptic world. [And] one of the greatest urban game stories ever told is Max Payne. [So] I guess it’s the tone that I’m after.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Samson Screenshots<\/h3>\n<\/output><\/p>\n
Samson originally had a much larger scope with a much larger team. But in early 2025, Sundberg and studio leadership made the difficult decision to lay off approximately half of the team<\/u>.\u201dWe made a very tough decision to scale down the team due to market conditions and how much trouble the industry is in right now. It stung a lot to have to let them go and it also meant that we had to change our focus. We shelved more of the heavier RPG stuff we worked on \u2013 our version of base-building \u2013 because we didn’t have the bandwidth anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
And so, the team that remains, it meant trying to deliver a narrower-but-still-deep experience. \u201cIt was originally a 100-hour experience. Now it’s more of a quick-and-dirty session-based experience. Completionists will get to spend at least 25 hours. But we are very respectful of people’s time.\u201d And that reduced scope is reflected in the $25 price point, too. \u201cWe see this as the first book in a series of books to be told about the city and character.<\/p>\n
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\u201cIt’s tiny compared to Just Cause 2, but it’s dense,\u201d he continued. \u201cThe size of the world isn’t the issue, it’s more about how we fill it with meaningful content. We always say that it’s \u2018big enough\u2019 and it’s very scalable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Getting back to gameplay, Sundberg says Samson is inspired tonally by films like Heat, Ronin, French Connection \u2013 stories, in his words, \u201cwhere violence is fast and decisive.\u201d And that influence is pretty clear on the screen. Samson looked to my eye like it was set in the 1970s, but Sundberg says it is in fact the \u201890s, chosen specifically for the layer of grit the decade still had caked on it. \u201cWe played around with the identity era crisis that the ’90s was. Cell phones didn’t really exist but they were still around. Cash was still king and people were still smoking.\u201d<\/p>\n
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I saw a mission played where Samson wandered outside into a seedy neighborhood. He jumped into a muscle car and drove to a mission waypoint that offered $1000 to be a getaway driver. After switching cars and meeting at the pickup point \u2013 in an industrial area that was still very seedy \u2013 the planned burglary happens, the building\u2019s alarm goes off, your crewmates get in, and you have to escape the pursuing police. The extra wrinkle is that the cops have a helicopter looking for you too, so it means you\u2019ll need to work extra hard to shake them. After plenty of driving around \u2013 Tyndalston seems fairly large, but again, don\u2019t expect it to be jammed full of open-world activities to do \u2013 you eventually duck off a road in an alley, under an overpass, turn off your headlights, and lose the pursuing police. <\/p>\n
This beatdown earned us $1000 to knock off of Samson\u2019s debt.<\/div>\n
The next mission I saw was a hit that tasked me with going into a club called Chubb\u2019s, finding the manager, and having to fight my way through \u2013 sometimes bare-knuckled, and sometimes with a crowbar in hand. Eventually you can build up your adrenaline meter and trigger an adrenaline rush, allowing you to hit harder for a short period of time. This beatdown earned us $1000 to knock off of Samson\u2019s debt.<\/p>\n
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Though my demo was brief \u2013 maybe 15 minutes or so \u2013 I saw enough to really like how Samson is shaping up. The Liquid Swords team is seemingly aiming to deliver a AAA experience at a AA scope and price (there\u2019s more info in an FAQ on the Steam page<\/u> if you\u2019re interested). If they can pull it off, then Samson has a chance to be well worth its low asking price.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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