In Samson: A Tyndalston Story you play as Sam McCray in the gritty, grungy fictional city of Tyndalston. A bit like a mini-New York, Tyndalston has all the gang culture, hoodlums, lowlifes and car chases you'd expect. The streets are grimy, lined with uncollected trash bags, trash cans, car wrecks and steaming vents and drains.
Developer Liquid Swords includes talent involved in games such as Mad Max, Assassin's Creed, Just Cause and Red Dead Redemption 2.
Tyndalston was clearly once a thriving industrial & fishing city, but now has become a depressed, drug-infested dump that's succumbed to a plague of the White Whisper drug that is poisoning the entire city. But Tyndalston is hiding a darker secret–people are turning up dead with body parts missing. Together with your friends Carter (an honest cop!), Father O'Malley and buddy Tommy, you set about cleaning up the streets.
After a failed heist in St. Louis lands Samson behind bars, his sister Oonagh makes a desperate deal with a mob to get him out. This means they want payback, starting at a minimum payment of $2000 a day, you need to accrue $100,000 to finally pay them off and save your sister. You start each day with 6 Action Points. Each mission costs you 1, 2 or 3 of these. You can earn up to 9 in a day with perks and if you fail then those AP stay spent. Pressure is added because missing a payment introduces you to the St. Louis mob's "3 strikes and you're out" penalty scheme, plus the next day sees a gang of debt collectors come around to beat you up–plus your payment goes up. This is not only a constant threat, but also adds tension to every mission.
When on foot 'RB' is light attack, 'R Trigger' heavy attack, ‘B’ is dodge and ‘LB’ is parry/block, 'L3' to sprint, 'L3' & 'R3' to trigger adrenaline attack when the gauge is full. The fighting is brutal, not often fair (enemies don't just stand politely to one side and queue up to fight you like in some games) and can be glitchy. Enemies seem to be able to hit you from impossible distances, and every fight can turn on one lucky (or unlucky) blow. I'd advise caution when selecting the difficulty level at the start, as it cannot be changed mid-game and getting knocked out will cost you most of your cash. The real kicker is that if you have three bad days and fail to make your minimum payment, it's GAME OVER. Most of the missions are challenging but (mostly) doable– a good guide is that if the pay sounds too good, it's probably a tough mission. You're going to have to learn to parry, evade and use Sam's Adrenaline Rush PDQ!
The hard line continues throughout the game. Get knocked out in a fight and you're DEAD‐½ your money gone. Fall into water and you're DEAD‐½ your money gone. Fall from a height and you're DEAD‐½ your money gone. Get run over by a cop when you're innocently crossing the street and guess what? You're DEAD‐½ your money gone! A perk can decrease this penalty slightly but it still feels incredibly penal and unfair. This is compounded by non-existence of restart points, meaning if you fail a mission you have to go back to the point at which you accepted the mission, sit through what can be lengthy cutscenes and then travel back to where you got your arse kicked…
I was disappointed with how fragile the melee weapons are, but you can throw them at an enemy, which as long as they don't duck/avoid it, will be stunned, possibly leaving them open to a finisher (‘R3’).
The 'Arenaline Rush' gauge builds up whether it's through driving thrills or fisticuffs, and when triggered ('L3' & 'R3') turns either Sam or his car into a tougher, harder hitting madman/machine for a few seconds. Adrenaline builds up naturally, but there are also Adrenaline Shots to be found lying around. You can stack painkillers but not adrenaline shots, which seems daft given how little they add to your gauge.
While I think the car handling and damage is realistic–more realistic than say, GTA V, with low grip levels and vehicles that feel heavy and like their brakes need attention–the steering lacks GTA's subtlety, meaning squeezing through narrow gaps in traffic can be a twitchy affair. I'd have liked the default view to be a tad higher as your vehicle obscures your view sometimes. Fortunately, I found that holding 'Left' on the 'D-pad' raised the view slightly, although weirdly this isn't mentioned in the controls menu! There's nothing scripted about the street races, car chases and takedowns, so the traffic is a real randomizer.
In‐car the controls are pretty standard, with handbrake on ‘B’, ‘side ram’ on 'X' and nitrous boost on 'A'.
Samson has obviously been influenced by Grand Theft Auto, but also maybe by Burnout, Driver, Wheelman, Sleeping Dogs, Watchdogs, Max Payne, Mad Max and even the Mafia series.
Movies & TV-wise I sensed the makers had seen the likes of The Driver, Bullitt, French Connection, The Getaway, Starsky & Hutch, Ronin, Drive & Baby Driver ‐ and probably any movie that includes gritty action and aggressive getaway driving and car chases… There are tons of that staple of the car chase movie genre, smashable objects (crates, boxes, stacks of tyres, paper & pallets) and fire hydrants, traffic & street lights that snap off if collided with. Trees and telegraph poles however, are to be avoided at all costs!
Gas stations are dotted around the map and you can repair car body damage, tyre damage and replenish nitrous separately. There are also sandwich boards here, there and everywhere that can only be smashed with a vehicle; some are just collectibles in the form of election boards for a man named Devries, some replenish nitrous and some repair a tiny bit of damage–really tiny.
Samson is almost entirely mission-based with few random events to speak of, although stealing a ‘street stash’ or interrupting cops evicting people illegally never gets old. The various collectibles and the sandwich boards add a bit of variety and interest but Sam's life very much consists of; do missions, fix car, sleep, do missions, rinse-repeat.
Visuals
Tyndalson is a bit glitchy but, for the most part, looks amazing, amazingly grungy–like The Division with cars. The vehicles are well-modelled and show a lot of damage. I could only spot about four different civilian traffic vehicles (a Ford Crown Victoria-like, a BMW 5 series/Mercedes hybrid, a Pontiac Star Chief, a GMC van–all in various versions, plus a stock Cop car and police van, and of course, Sam's personal vehicle, which is a unique sort-of Skylark or Chevelle SS-alike which can be customised and tuned at the various garages. The lighting, dust & smoke all look awesome, but where's the splash when you crash or fall into water, or throw an enemy in? There are nice, subtle touches like the noise when your Combat/Vehicle Rush gauge fills up, moths attracted to lights at night and nuts and bolts falling from wrecked cars. However, the lack of subtlety in Sam's movement (his animation goes straight from walk to run then sprint (with L3), with nothing inbetween) can be jarring. Sam's inability to climb ladders and clumsy clamber-jumping over some obstacles can lead to some unintentionally amusing moments too, although his inability to simply step over a 6-inch pipe isn't one of them. Having said that, most of the animation is really good, with a few exceptions like NPCs getting into a van without opening the sliding side door, or during fisticuffs where the collision detection goes awry, the NPC AI decides it can hop on top of crates and even levitate. We also saw a lot of clipping and floating objects (‘gravity fails’.)
The high level of detail isn't confined to the cars and the streets of Tyndalston. Samson and his enemies show battle scars and cuts as fights progress. Sam's hands even look bloodied & bruised.
Lipsync is often poor or missing entirely, which seems strange as Sam can be having a conversation with an NPC who has perfect lipsync, while he has none–or maybe he learned ventriloquism during his time in the slammer?
Samson could have done with a few more speech samples (he says “Another Day In Paradise” a lot), as could the NPCs who tend to say the same thing repeatedly–but maybe that's a side effect of all the White Whisper?
Tyndalston is a varied and believable, if small, city. Reused assets are rare, but become more apparent the further into the game you get. The developers deserve plenty of credit for designing a realistic setting though.
Certain jobs will get you wanted by the cops. This exhibits some bizarre cop AI that sees them hunt you relentlessly, with driving skills akin to the Hazzard County Sheriffs or The Keystone Cops, until you get outside their "search zone", which doesn't work like the flawed GTAV-style 'sight cones', but they will spawn in front of you just when you think you've lost them–just like GTA! They're nearly always easy enough to lose though, even when a police chopper is activated.
Anti GTA?
In many ways, Samson is the anti-GTA. Los Santos is mostly sunny, bright and has wide highways. You have a vast range of vehicles to steal or buy, if damaged their repair is cheap. GTA has a huge range of weapons, all of which you can carry at once... And of course, GTA has a budget bigger than many countries' GDP.
Tyndalston is a moody, dingy dump with a permanent cloud over it. Its narrow streets require precision driving and your only car is initially easily damaged and expensive to fix. You can steal plenty more, but only as long as they're unoccupied for some reason. Samson has no firearms, and can only carry one melee weapon in the boot (trunk) of his hooptie '70s muscle car. Samson reportedly had its budget limited and development was curtailed due to industry pressures. The Southend map looks like a larger play area was planned, a downtown area in particular is visible across the river but not accessible. With the unfortunate demise of the developer, DLC looks unlikely, but who knows what will happen to the IP if Samson sells enough copies…
One thing that would even annoy a catholic priest like the lovely Father O'Malley are finicky and even some entirely glitched action/pick-up item icons, as well as occasional frame rate stutters when the game is presumably loading a new area. We experienced these on Xbox Series X and PS5 Pro.
I'd like to praise Liquid Swords for the way things hang around in Tyndalston, makeshift weapons, pickups (like painkillers, adrenaline shots and cash) rarely disappear, so even if you're maxed out you may be able to "hoover up" all the dropped stuff after a big fight. Cars also hang around, I saw a car I smashed in a Takedown mission stayed on the street all day! This makes it a bit of a shame that you can't round up a few choice vehicles and store them in the parking lot opposite Sam's apartment.
Then on the flipside you get ridiculous occurrences like; you arrive at a job in stolen car you used in the previous getaway job, accept a "hit" job which must be accessed on foot, call your car in order to retrieve your weapon and FAIL the mission because 25 yards down the street is TOO FAR AWAY! Aaaargh!
A price of only £20.99 would suggest Samson isn't very good or has an extremely short lifespan, but it's actually a rather good 'AA' title and lasts a good 10-12 hours, thanks to plenty of story chapters, side missions and collectibles. The problem is that after a while you'll feel that they could have called the game Sameson–a lack of variety and scope mean too many missions feel the same. Regardless of all the gripes, I found Samson to be a highly addictive game that I probably played longer that I should…
Many thanks to Liquid Swords