Samson, the debut open-world crime game from developer Liquid Swords, arrived in rough shape. Glitchy. Repetitive. Janky enough that its own creative director, Christofer Sundberg, conceded it launched in a broken state with problems he called "unacceptable." Yet somehow, buried in that technical wreckage is a game that achieves something no other title has managed since 2011: it nails the effortless cool of Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive.
The film's opening escape sequence stays with you. Ryan Gosling's unnamed getaway driver doesn't screech through Los Angeles with tires wailing. He glides. He blends. When heat closes in, he parks on a side street, kills the engine, cuts the lights, and waits while police cruise past his ordinary-looking sedan. Maximum tension. Zero theatrics.
During my first major escape in Samson's grimy 1990s New York analogue, I found myself facing the same choice. Blue and red lights flooded the streets of Tyndalston. A simple button tap would cut my engine and extinguish the headlights. I pulled into an alley, held still, and watched the cops drive on by. Whether that mechanic is an intentional feature or an AI bug hardly matters anymore. It worked. It felt transcendent.
That moment of cinematic restraint amid reckless chaos encapsulates everything Samson attempts to do.
The Car as Character
Samson drives a stocky, roaring 1970s muscle car with an aftermarket roll cage and a nitrous oxide system. It's not flashy. It announces who he is: a blunt criminal living paycheck to paycheck. The machine conveys personality in a way Gosling's 1973 Chevelle Malibu did in Drive, the very car the actor now owns and keeps in his personal collection.
Liquid Swords isn't reinventing the GTA formula here. Several team members, including Sundberg, worked on Avalanche's Mad Max game, which understood something crucial: the bond between player and vehicle matters. In Samson, your car isn't just transportation. It's the only tool suited to the job.
The game uses a modified roguelite structure. Each day you're allocated six action points to spend on jobs. Spend them, return to your apartment, wake to a fresh allocation. Your car is always waiting, engine running. You don't steal random vehicles as a GTA player might. Vehicle theft requires finding parked, unoccupied cars, a limitation born from troubled development but one that paradoxically strengthens the core mechanic. The stolen options available are uniformly terrible: sluggish sedans, the occasional minivan, knock-off BMWs. Boring metal boxes that can't cut it in a high-speed pursuit or ramming attack.
Your muscle car is the only machine in the entire game with teeth.
That engineering choice manufactures obsession. After a few in-game days, I stopped throwing the car at problems recklessly. I took corners carefully. I judged ramming angles with precision, aiming for wheels to maximize impact and minimize damage. Repair bills run just over a thousand dollars for a complete fix. With rivals bleeding you dry through daily extortion payments and jobs barely covering the bleeding, every dent matters. A hospital visit empties your wallet entirely.
Crime isn't cheap in Tyndalston.
So you find yourself asking constantly: Should I spend two hundred dollars on a tire refill, or put that toward the daily shakedown? Should I take another job knowing damage will likely exceed the payout? You negotiate with your machine the way you might negotiate with a person.
And in exchange, it takes care of you. The upgraded NOS canisters, obtained by smashing voting advertisements across the city, launch you out of danger. The roll cage absorbs punishment. The wide, colossal front end shunts rival drivers into oncoming traffic. There's no other option. This was my car. My 1973 Chevrolet Chevelle Malibu, temperamental and scarred and wholly mine.
Samson never makes you feel as genuinely cool as Gosling cruising through Los Angeles in sunglasses and a scorpion jacket. The game is too fundamentally broken for that. But for those hours spent nursing a wounded machine through the neon grime of Tyndalston, chasing that one perfect escape moment that probably shouldn't have worked but did, you approach the feeling. You taste it.
Sometimes that's enough.
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