Ever since I watched it on opening night back in 2011, I’ve always wanted to play a video game that captured the essence of Nicolas Winding Refn’s masterpiece, Drive. The absolute effortless cool of Ryan Gosling’s unnamed getaway driver has yet to be replicated in any game I’ve played. Well, until now, that is, thanks to a… hoodie-wearing, down-on-his-luck, dad-looking dude in his mid-40s named “Samson McCray”.
Yeah, this is going to take some explaining.
Drive’s prologue is not a classic high-intensity getaway sequence. Instead, Gosling’s calm demeanour sees him drive two masked criminals through the streets of LA in such a casual manner that it pretty much distresses his on-edge passengers. Where most Hollywood drivers would be pedal-to-the-metal in an attempt to flee the scene, Gosling goes smooth to blend in with the traffic. By far his coolest move is to park up, cut the lights, and let the searching LAPD mistake his Chevrolet Impala for average Joe’s sedan. In this high-stakes escape situation, the most thrilling moment is when it comes to a complete standstill. And that’s exactly how I evaded the law during my first major escape in Samson, the GTA-ish debut from new developer Liquid Swords.
With a tap of the right bumper button you can cut your engine, hushing its cylinders and extinguishing the lights. When I first noticed this unusual addition to Samson’s otherwise traditional driving control scheme, my mind immediately replayed that moment from Drive. And so, when the blue and red lights lit up the streets of Tyndalston, a fictional New York analogue trapped in the grimy 1990s, I tried to escape Gosling-style. And it worked. I pulled into a side street, applied the brakes, cut the engine, and watched as the cops drove on by, ignoring my parked car in their search for something with squealing tyres. It was absolute magic. And I’ve never been able to properly replicate it since.
You see, Samson is a deeply flawed game – not so much rough around the edges, but rather rocky to its core. It is glitchy and repetitive and janky… so much so that I don’t know if the engine turn-off trick is a genuine feature that’s a little bit broken or simply a bug in the police’s AI routines. Liquid Swords’ founder and creative director, Christofer Sundberg, has admitted that Samson was released in a “flawed” state, and that the most game-breaking problems are “unacceptable”. And while I’m not here to champion games being released to the paying public in a broken state, I can’t deny that in this specific circumstance, a bug – if indeed it is a bug – created a remarkable moment that made me pleased this awkward urban open world made it to the finish line (which it very nearly didn’t).
Not everything that’s interesting about Samson is rooted in what may or may not be technical difficulties, though. After ditching his Impala in a parking garage, Drive’s protagonist gets back behind the wheel of his own car for the rest of the film: a 1973 Chevrolet Chevelle Malibu so gorgeous that Gosling now keeps it as part of his own personal collection. Its sleek lines and primer grey bodywork are as much a part of Gosling’s character as his scorpion jacket. Liquid Swords has taken a similar approach with Samson, who drives a stocky, roaring ‘70s muscle car that conveys McCray’s blunt criminal persona. Its heavy body, aftermarket roll cage, and nitrous oxide system make it the very best choice for chases, escapes, and high-speed takedowns – crime movie staples that form the vast majority of the work that Samson finds himself caught up in. If you need further convincing of its getaway credentials, the control scheme features a dedicated downshift button, immediately dropping the car into a lower gear to redline the revs and gain that sudden boost of torque that’s mandatory in any cinematic chase sequence.
While Samson is undeniably influenced by GTA and other old-school urban crime hits like Driver, it plays very differently. As my colleague Jim Trinca has already pointed out, Samson uses a modified roguelite approach – each day you’re allocated six action points to spend on unlocking various jobs, and when you’ve spent all six, you head back to bed and wake up to a brand new day and a new batch of action points. Every time you exit your apartment to take on the new day, your car is waiting for you. Such a set-up means you’re naturally driving Samson’s personal vehicle by default. It makes it your car. Just like Gosling had his Chevy in Drive. Like Steve McQueen had his Mustang in Bullitt. Like Mel Gibson had his Falcon GT Coupe in Mad Max.
That last one’s perhaps more important to Samson than you may initially realise. Among Liquid Swords’ team members are several staff who worked on Avalanche’s Mad Max game, including the aforementioned Sundberg, plus designer Alex Williams and programmer Josef Sundberg. In terms of games that truly forge a bond between you and your car, few are better than Mad Max, and so it’s perhaps only natural that Samson is able to give you a genuine sense of ownership over your trusty getaway machine.
But car ownership is about more than just pride. It’s also about responsibility and financial risk. And that’s surprisingly central to your day-to-day existence in the city of Tyndalston. Damaging your car runs up eye-watering repair bills – it’s just over a grand for a complete fix, which is quite the squeeze when you’re being rinsed $3,000 every single day by rival criminals who have taken your sister hostage, and jobs often only net you just enough to cover those daily repayments. Failing a mission can wipe out any profit you were set to earn, and landing in the hospital cleans out your entire wallet. Visiting the garage for repairs, then, is not just a steep investment, but a risky one – is the mechanic’s fee better put towards clearing your debt? It’s a question you’ll find yourself asking over and over, considering your line of work involves almost constant reckless driving and purposely ramming into other cars. There’s always a busted axle or cracked manifold to patch up. And if it’s not that, it’s refilling tyres or refuelling the boost-enabling nitrous oxide. Crime ain’t cheap.
It’s here where any regular GTA clone would say: Why bother? What’s the point in maintaining a personal vehicle when you can just pull any random driver out of their car and steal their wheels? But Samson’s no regular GTA clone. For starters, you can’t hijack moving traffic, only cars that have been parked and are unoccupied – almost certainly an unfortunate outcome of the game’s troubled development. That means having to sprint around the block in search of stationary vehicles, which does put a minor dent in the game’s pacing. And when you do find something to steal, the vehicle variety is miniscule and, quite frankly, boring – an endless fleet of budget sedans occasionally punctuated by the odd minivan and knock-off BMW. Samson’s own ride is the only car in the entire game that has any personality. Furthermore, it’s the only thing that’s truly suited to the job; the majority of the city’s motors are sluggish tin foil boxes that just can’t do crime as well as your tank-like piece of ‘70s metal muscle. And so you simply have to find a way to foot the bill.
This weird approach to open world traffic manufactures an unusual bond between you and the car. After a few in-game days, I began to take corners more carefully. I was more cautious on the accelerator. I judged my ramming attacks with more precision, always aiming for the wheels to maximise my impact and minimise damage taken. I took care of the car, and in exchange, the car took care of me. Its NOS canisters, upgraded thanks to smashing up hundreds of local voting advertisements (yeah, this is definitely a PS3/360-era style video game), would propel me to victory in any chase. Its rollcage would brush off the worst dents. Its colossal, wide front end would shunt rival drivers into oncoming traffic. There was really no other option. This was my 1973 Chevrolet Chevelle Malibu. And while it really had no chance of making me feel as cool as Ryan Gosling in Drive, for a few hours, I got a fraction closer.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Executive Editor of Features.
feedzy_import_tag feedzy_import_tag
About the Author
