All it took for Samson to pique my curiosity was a very brief teaser on social media, after which a follow-up post by the sport director that described it “extra like Mad Max…Payne” meant it had my consideration. After which, as soon as it was formally introduced earlier this month, my curiosity instantly skyrocketed.
It’s a gritty crime drama being developed by Liquid Swords, a workforce made up of plenty of former Simply Cause builders. It’s due out early in 2026 on PC for $25, with console variations deliberate for later launch. In it, you play Samson McCray, who finds himself within the metropolis of Tyndalston after a job he was the getaway driver for went dangerous in St. Louis. His sister, Oonagh, had warned him not to take the job, and certain sufficient she was proper. However she managed to reduce a take care of the St. Louis crew: Samson has to pay again what was misplaced, with curiosity. And that’s the place this recreation begins: with our titular anti-hero staring down a debt that’s accruing curiosity day-after-day, needing to take no matter jobs he can so as to whittle the debt down.
Fight is hand-to-hand. Well being pickups are bottles of painkillers (whats up, Max Payne!), you’ll do loads of driving (whats up, Mad Max!). And the world, says studio founder and recreation director Christofer Sundberg, will “push again” in your motion. “We have had this motto from the start that the town is a personality in itself,” he defined. “So the extra you poke round, the extra the world will react. Interacting with folks on the road, objects, doing stuff that’s surprising to the world – it is fairly a miserable city. The world will react. Now we have a particular narrative round legislation enforcement and why weapons are unique to legislation enforcement and actually hardened criminals. And the world remembers what you’ve got performed. You will not get away with every part. There might be a response to your actions.”
Oh, and about that “extra like Mad Max…Payne” remark? When requested to elaborate on that, Sundberg instructed me, “[Some of] the workforce that labored on the Mad Max is engaged on Samson, and we’re taking that [experience] ten years sooner or later. The tone is equally darkish as Mad Max. It isn’t a post-apocalyptic world. [And] one of many best city recreation tales ever instructed is Max Payne. [So] I suppose it is the tone that I am after.”
Samson initially had a a lot bigger scope with a a lot bigger workforce. However in early 2025, Sundberg and studio management made the troublesome determination to lay off approximately half of the team.”We made a really powerful determination to scale down the workforce due to market circumstances and the way a lot bother the business is in proper now. It stung loads to have to allow them to go and it additionally meant that we had to change our focus. We shelved extra of the heavier RPG stuff we labored on – our model of base-building – as a result of we did not have the bandwidth anymore.”
And so, the workforce that is still, it meant making an attempt to ship a narrower-but-still-deep expertise. “It was initially a 100-hour expertise. Now it is extra of a quick-and-dirty session-based expertise. Completionists will get to spend at the least 25 hours. However we’re very respectful of individuals’s time.” And that lowered scope is mirrored within the $25 value level, too. “We see this as the primary e-book in a collection of books to be instructed concerning the metropolis and character.
“It is tiny in contrast to Simply Cause 2, however it’s dense,” he continued. “The dimensions of the world is not the problem, it is extra about how we fill it with significant content material. We all the time say that it is ‘sufficiently big’ and it’s extremely scalable.”
Getting again to gameplay, Sundberg says Samson is impressed tonally by movies like Warmth, Ronin, French Connection – tales, in his phrases, “the place violence is quick and decisive.” And that affect is fairly clear on the display. Samson seemed to my eye prefer it was set within the Nineteen Seventies, however Sundberg says it’s in truth the ‘90s, chosen particularly for the layer of grit the last decade nonetheless had caked on it. “We performed round with the identification period disaster that the ’90s was. Cell telephones did not actually exist however they have been nonetheless round. Money was nonetheless king and folks have been nonetheless smoking.”
I noticed a mission performed the place Samson wandered outdoors right into a seedy neighborhood. He jumped right into a muscle automotive and drove to a mission waypoint that provided $1000 to be a getaway driver. After switching automobiles and assembly on the pickup level – in an industrial space that was nonetheless very seedy – the deliberate housebreaking occurs, the constructing’s alarm goes off, your crewmates get in, and you’ve got to escape the pursuing police. The additional wrinkle is that the cops have a helicopter in search of you too, so it means you’ll want to work additional arduous to shake them. After loads of driving round – Tyndalston appears pretty massive, however once more, don’t anticipate it to be jammed stuffed with open-world actions to do – you finally duck off a highway in an alley, beneath an overpass, flip off your headlights, and lose the pursuing police.
The subsequent mission I noticed was successful that tasked me with going right into a membership referred to as Chubb’s, discovering the supervisor, and having to combat my method via – typically bare-knuckled, and typically with a crowbar in hand. Finally you may construct up your adrenaline meter and set off an adrenaline rush, permitting you to hit more durable for a brief time period. This beatdown earned us $1000 to knock off of Samson’s debt.
Although my demo was temporary – perhaps quarter-hour or so – I noticed sufficient to actually like how Samson is shaping up. The Liquid Swords workforce is seemingly aiming to ship a AAA expertise at a AA scope and value (there’s extra information in an FAQ on the Steam web page in case you’re ). If they’ll pull it off, then Samson has an opportunity to be properly value its low asking value.