Just Cause Creator's Samson Arrives April 8, but Its Latest Trailer Leaves Doubts

Liquid Swords, the studio founded by Just Cause creator Cristofer Sundberg, has released a gameplay trailer for Samson ahead of its April 8 launch. The game puts players in the role of a character named Samson returning to his home city of Tyndalston carrying a large debt, which he pursues settling through criminal activity. The studio describes its scope as deliberately narrow — "trying to pursue fewer things" than Rockstar — with a tighter loop built around daily cash quotas and a limited action points system that caps how many missions players can take on per in-game day.

That structure is designed to push players into fast decisions and accept the consequences. Miss the daily quota and the interest on Samson's debt increases. The action point ceiling forces prioritization. Together, the systems are intended to generate the kind of pressure that produces chaotic car chases and brawls rather than letting players optimize their way through a session.

The city of Tyndalston blends a dilapidated industrial aesthetic with heavy muscle cars, and the game carries a more grounded visual identity than MindsEye, a comparable title that launched in May last year and failed to deliver on its premise. Samson's creative lead also directed the 2015 Mad Max game — a spinoff that critics largely underrated at the time — which gives the driving sequences some credibility going in.

The trailer has a single standout moment: Samson throws a wrench directly into a man's head, paired with the voiceover line

"That's the sound a face makes when it meets regret."

It lands exactly as intended.

The rest of the trailer is harder to defend. The brawling combat shows enemies repeating identical attack animations in sequence, and the sequences lack depth or visual variety. PC Gamer flagged the same issue, noting the combat looks ropey given the April release window. The environments carry visible detail, but the city reads as sparsely populated throughout the footage, raising questions about how much the world will feel alive during play.

I think the gameplay looks too uniform to sustain itself — there are cars, there are fistfights, and the visual setting is genuinely appealing, but little in the trailer suggests the game has much to surprise players with beyond its aesthetic. My concern is that Samson will hold attention for three or four hours, right up until the novelty of the visuals wears off and the clunkiness underneath becomes the main experience. I want to be wrong about that.

The mission variety question is the more structural problem. A daily quota system with an action point cap could generate interesting tradeoffs on paper, but the trailer is composed almost entirely of driving and brawling, which tells you little about whether mission design will introduce enough variation to carry the game past its opening hours.

I see April 8 as a genuinely risky launch window — a trailer that would read as a reasonable work-in-progress build if the game were twelve months out is instead arriving with less than four weeks before release. That gap between what the footage shows and what the game needs to be is the core of the problem.

Samson is not positioning itself as a GTA competitor. The city is mostly freely drivable but compact by design, and the studio has been clear that the project aims at a narrower, more arcadey experience. Whether the systems underneath the aesthetic are strong enough to make that loop feel rewarding past the first few sessions is the question the trailer does not answer.

Read also, Liquid Swords has published the official system requirements for Samson ahead of the April 8 launch, with the studio's team drawn largely from former Just Cause and Mad Max developers under the leadership of Just Cause co-creator Christopher Sundberg.