The creative director of Samson has promised the team is “committed to the future” of the game despite launching to a ‘Mixed’ reception on Steam amid complaints about performance, gameplay, optimization, and more.
Samson released just yesterday, April 8, and is currently the third-lowest-rated game of 2026 according to Metacritic, with a score a full 15 points lower than the beleaguered Highguard, which was taken offline just six weeks after launch.
Steam reviews complain of broken car chases, input delays, issues with animation, and poor optimization, with one writing: “The combat is 9/10, but the optimization is a 4/10. Samson has amazing bones and the dynamic mechanics are a blast, but it’s currently crying out for patches. Once the devs fix the graphical issues and stability, this will be an easy recommendation. Wait for an update before jumping in.” Another reported: “Samson had the potential of being a pretty good noir action-adventure, but it’s currently a broken, repetitive grind.”
“It’s just not good,” added someone else. “The game feels heavily unfinished and extremely repetitive. The map is the size of a basketball court. The missions are the same things recycled over and over and over. The dialogue is very cringe and predictable. The driving is abysmal. Evading the police is just a chore because the game scans and plants cars in your routes that wouldn’t be there without magical power. The combat can be cheesed simply by hitting the evade button over and over making it impossible for NPC to hit you. You can’t car jack people in their vehicles, which makes no sense. Just wait for this game to be five bucks. Anything else is a personal evasion of your wallet.”
Now, in a letter posted to Steam, the founder of developer Liquid Swords and creative director, Christofer Sundberg — who also founded Just Cause studio, Avalanche — said the team had been “having a lot of fun watching folks have fun with the game,” adding: “We released a game with flaws for a number of reasons.”
“Early impressions are mixed and many of you are experiencing game-breaking bugs and performance issues,” Sundberg continued. “That’s unacceptable, and we are listening to everyone’s feedback and are hard at work to deliver the game we spent years of our lives developing. Launching a game is a ton of work and I’m proud of the effort our team has put into seeing Samson from its initial concept, through release.
“We are committed to the future of both Samson and Tyndalston and this game will grow over time on all fronts; quality, gameplay and content. Thank you all for supporting us and sticking with us this super exciting launch day. We will continue to keep our ears to the ground and improve the game with your support.”
A patch, expected to release tomorrow, April 10, will address a number of key issues, including several performance and crash fixes, as well as several fixes for “mission and progression related issues.” Here’s the full patch notes:
Samson Update 1 patch notes:
Performance
- Several performance fixes focusing on PSO related hitches (fixes stuttering related issues)
- Fixed some misses with Slate
- Fixed landscape RayTracingDynamicGeometry misses
- bIgnoreMaskMateria & bRequireRTDynamicGeometryUpdate was not set correctly from landscape PSO precache dispatch since 5.7
- NaniteLumenCard & NaniteShading misses
- Fixed PSO misses due to FStaticMeshComponentHelper::CollectPSOPrecacheDataImpl fetching materials from LOD levels depending on MinLOD even for Nanite-enabled meshes which will render with LOD 0 materials
Crash fixes
- Several crash fixes related to audio, animation and GPU
- Crash fix for clearing UseDestructionHelp for vehicles with a timer
- Fix for potential case where attempting to update a failed dispatch when losing warp governance could clear the callback lambda as it was being executed, causing a dangling this pointer and crash
- Fixed various audio-related crashes, including one when closing the game
- Avoid race conditions caused by writes to bIsCachedRayTracingInstanceValid and bDynamicRayTracingInstanceCachedDataDirty from parallel tasks
- Force separate storage unit between ray tracing and non-ray tracing bits
- Force separate storage unit between bIsCachedRayTracingInstanceValid and bDynamicRayTracingInstanceCachedDataDirty
Mission
- Several fixes for mission and progression related issues
- Ice Fish – NPCs spawned in the Beatdown are no longer only Level 1
- Thrill of the Fight and Running on Fumes – now functional after save/continue
- Suzy Red no longer gets multiplied during “Stitches for Snitches” mission completion
- Hit 16 (No Return Fare) – passenger now gets into the cab at the pickup location
- Dave Shultz Tailing Job – Dave now spawns close to player, avoiding near-instant fails for being too far away
- Story Chapter – No Whisper Dealers – no beatdown triggers when eliminating enemies, preventing mission failure
- Hot Iron – fixed issue where the fail radius for the reach dealer objective was too small
- Day 3: Oonagh Welcome Home – call now comes after story mission Blood on Tap rather than Dirty Scripts
General Gameplay
- Several fixes for gameplay related issues
- NPC fall damage added as a failsafe for dropped NPCs
- Day 3 Pickups – raised interact range to allow easier pickup if an item is dropped under a body
- Let outsiders check if the driver can be pulled out of the vehicle
- Fixed issues where enemies were not advancing towards you in group encounters
- Fixed issues with AI running onto roads to inspect dead bodies
- Fixed issue where police siren sometimes did not work
Polish
- Several updates for general polish across various parts of the game
- Fixed smoker alignment in Double Tap and Suzy’s
- Fixed vehicle voices
- Added a dedicated “remote dialogue” bucket for voice lines without a visible speaker (e.g. phone calls or police radio chatter)
- Added separate dialogue buckets for police vehicles and remote dialogue
- Fixed door kick spam
- [Audio] New day stinger now plays before dialogue
- Increased volume for NPC vehicles
- Prevented corpses from popping back up or being launched into the air after takedowns, hazards, or railing interactions
- Improved lean-on-wall alignment
- Blocked bark gestures or one-offs during ranged combat
- Fixed Vivian holding a folder in the doctor’s office instead of nothing
- [Audio] Added “outside vehicle” dialogue lines to NPC non-combat efforts
- Fixed several grammatical errors
- Fixed missing translations
Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
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