Samson review – the poor man’s GTA 6

Samson – making the wait for GTA 6 even worse (Liquid Swords)

With GTA 6 still months away, a new indie studio formed by veterans of the Just Cause franchise present a lower budget indie alternative.

The question of why there are no GTA clones anymore is a puzzling one. Few, if any, publishers have the money to compete directly with Rockstar Games but not only are there now very few open world games set in the real world but there are still bafflingly few of any kind with a criminal setting. You don’t have to be a gigantic open world, live service juggernaut to copy GTA; just a simple, smaller scale, crime thriller would do.

Samson is exactly the sort of game we would’ve expected to see in droves, in the lead-up to GTA 6’s release. An obviously lower budget indie game that still has the same mix of fighting, driving, and general gangster-ing as Rockstar’s games.

It’s not as well written (to put things mildly) and the open world is tiny, but the graphics are decent for the price and, in theory, it scratches an ill-attended itch. All the ingredients are there but in the end it presents the most obvious reason for why there are now so few GTA clones: because making that kind of game is hard.

Samson is set in the peculiarly named city of Tyndalston and revolves around the titular protagonist, who has just been released from prison and is trying to raise $100,000 to pay the ransom on his kidnapped sister. Naturally, this does not involve any bank loans, or at least not any voluntary ones, as you’re force to put your old criminal gang back together and do enough crimes to earn the money.

That’s not a bad set-up for a video game, since it gives you a great deal of freedom in what exactly you try to do and where. As long as you get the money it doesn’t matter from where, although every job you take uses up a certain amount of time before your deadline, and your sister, expires.

Also, if you fail a mission, you either lose the majority of the money you’ve earned that day or you have to give up more time to restart the mission. Which is a particular joy when it happens near the end of the day or because of a bug outside of your control.

At this point, you’re probably imagining an enjoyably varied range of criminal activities, of which GTA itself provides plentiful examples. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. All of them involve just two activities: car racing and street fighting, since there’s essentially no ranged combat.

The small number of variables constantly repeat, with each job blurring into the next, as most of them don’t have any story elements or distinguishing features. If there is a break for some storytelling, like talking to your sister on the phone, it’s always very brief and never in an orchestrated cut scene – you just watch Samson walk and interact as normal while a few lines of cliched dialogue play out.

The combat is pretty terrible (Liquid Swords)

To be fair, the car racing is okay. It’s not the sort of thing you’d build an entire game around but it’s not much worse than GTA in that respect. The game doesn’t do anything interesting with the mechanics though, with racing missions boiling down to nothing more than time trials, driving to a specific spot on the map, or ramming an opponent off the road, Chase H.Q. style.

This represents the best action in the game but the fact that your car breaks down very easily, and has to then undergo costly repairs, is a chore. Especially as you can’t carjack passing cars, like you would in GTA.

There’s far less to distinguish the different types of fighting missions and while you might sometimes have to collect an item or two, they’re all just mass brawls that we suspect the developer intended to work like Yakuza but are far too simplistic and unsatisfying for that.

There are a dozen or so predetermined story missions but weirdly these have nothing to do with your sister and instead revolve around the collection of one-dimensional thugs that make up your gang. Needless to say, Rockstar’s writers and designers have nothing to fear.

Given all these problems, it almost feels like kicking someone when they’re down to point out just how badly the game runs at launch. Samson is filled with graphical glitches and hiccups, including getting stuck in scenery and levitating above the ground – which happens to both you and other characters. On top of that the game is prone to a hard crash back to the desktop where, to be honest, you’re better off remaining.

Although this is the first game from developer Liquid Swords the studio was formed by many of the same people behind the Just Cause series, but that does not show at all. A low budget and a rush to meet the release date are probably the main causes of the problems (and exactly the opposite ones facing GTA 6) but as much as you might have sympathy for the developer this is a terrible game and fixing the technical complaints is not going to change that.

Formats: PC
Price: £20.99
Publisher: Liquid Swords
Developer: Liquid Swords
Release Date: 8th April 2026
Age Rating: N/A

The driving missions are as good as the game gets (Liquid Swords)

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