There is a version of Samson: A Tyndalston Story that exists in the version pitched in trailers and interviews, the one that promises a pressure-cooker crime story where every decision matters and every day chips away at you. It sounded like a more focused answer to the open-world bloat problem that these crime third-person games have been having. The real problem is that Samson is anything but a good game.
You play as Samson McCray, a man buried under debt based on one bad decision that your sister tried to talk you out of. The setup is that Samson is trying to claw his way out of a situation that only gets worse the more you engage with it. They really lean into the griminess of it all, but it more comes off as try-hard and edgy for edgy’s sake without anything to really back it in a meaningful way.
And once the systems and mechanics start showing themselves, that initial questioning of whether you made a good decision playing this game becomes a lot clearer. No.
“The real problem is that Samson is anything but a good game.”
The core gameplay loop revolves around limited time and limited actions. Each in-game day gives you a small pool of things you can do, and every choice pushes something else off the table. In theory, this should create tension. In practice, it often just creates frustration. With each “job” you take on, you use up an amount of stamina points, and once you run out of stamina, you need to end the day to be able to take on any real money-making missions to have enough for your end-of-day payout.
The problem isn’t the limitation itself. It’s how repetitive and shallow the choices of these jobs really are. Missions don’t really offer enough variation in how you approach them or how they play out, so every job type ends up playing out the same way. There are also times during side missions where you can make dialogue choices, but they never really felt meaningful. After day one or two, it feels less like you are deciding between interesting jobs but more like you’re deciding which slice of the same experience you want to engage with on that given day.
Combat is where things start to unravel after you take down the first two enemies. There’s a big spotlight on hand-to-hand fighting in Samson. Hits land with some impact, and there’s an attempt to make positioning and timing important. It just never comes together, though, because no matter what moves you’ve unlocked or how you’ve upgraded, the animations always feel stiff, enemies always seem to react the exact same way, and encounters are just awkward exchanges where you’re fighting the controls as much as the bad guys.
Driving offers a bit of a break from that, but it is not much of one. Cars handle really poorly, with a floaty feel that makes navigating the city more of a chore than it should be. Not to mention, more than once I was doing a chase-the-bad-guy-and-break-down-their-car mission where some of the controls just stopped working.
There is a mechanic where, if your car is too damaged, you cannot side-ram or boost, but even when I would start a mission with full car durability and boost, Samson’s car just wouldn’t perform those actions. Instead, they turned into a slog of slowly chasing enemies around in a circle, waiting until I could gently tap them for an inconsequential amount of damage. It is a real shame they tout Mad Max in their trailers, because when I think of Mad Max, the driving was great, and there was real weight to everything. Here, though, you are wrestling with corners and traffic while the game tries to convince you it is high-stakes.
Then, there is the narrative. When building a crime drama, the story and mood should be the focus, but there was so little here pulling me forward that I found each day a slog. With a city that “changes with your choices” and you being stuck in the city until you can clear your debt, there are ideas here that could have really set Samson aside.
“The gameplay struggles to stay engaging.”
But none of the big moments land because of how frustrating they are to get to. Since you have to deal with the day system, there can often be bigger beats that are blocked by needing to be somewhere during a specific chunk of time, or locked behind enough money. It just throws the pacing right out the window.
There’s also a big sense that the game doesn’t fully trust its own ideas and mechanics. There is this strange sense of urgency and consequence, but so much repetition that progressing anything in the game becomes a chore, and the padding times out, and the day system just kind of takes all the urgency away. It doesn’t help that for a game where “choices matter,” I never felt any of the choices were distinct enough to justify them.
Technically, the game doesn’t do itself many favours either. There are performance dips that show up from time to time, small bugs that pile up, and an overall lack of polish that’s hard to ignore. As I mentioned before, with the car chase, I also ran into an issue where the adrenaline button just wasn’t working, so when I dipped to low health, even though I had five shots, I wasn’t able to heal at all.
As it stands, Samson: A Tyndalston Story systems don’t support the narrative as well as they should, the gameplay struggles to stay engaging, and the structure works against the experience more often than it enhances it. It’s a shame that the trailers show a much better version of the game. I just wish I had gotten to play that version instead of the one we actually got.
