Samson arrived on Steam yesterday to a tepid reception, with frustrated players reporting broken missions, severe performance problems, and gameplay mechanics that feel half-baked. The game, which launched April 8, now sits as one of the lowest-rated titles of 2026 on Metacritic, trailing only a handful of notorious failures.
Christofer Sundberg, creative director at developer Liquid Swords and founder of Avalanche Studios, acknowledged the stumble in a message posted directly to Steam. "We released a game with flaws for a number of reasons," Sundberg wrote, adding that the team was "hard at work" addressing the issues.
Player complaints paint a picture of a game with interesting ideas buried under serious technical debt. Steam reviewers highlighted broken car chases, input lag, animation glitches, and optimization that tanks performance. The consensus from players: the core mechanics have potential, but the execution fell short of launch readiness.
One reviewer captured the split personality: "The combat is 9/10, but the optimization is a 4/10." Another was harsher, calling Samson "a broken, repetitive grind" with recycled missions, a cramped map, and driving mechanics that don't work properly. Issues extend to basic features like carjacking, which players noted should be possible but isn't.
Sundberg acknowledged the gap between ambition and delivery. "Early impressions are mixed and many of you are experiencing game-breaking bugs and performance issues," he said. "That's unacceptable."
The studio plans a patch dropping April 10 that targets the most critical problems. The update addresses performance stuttering, crash bugs affecting audio and animation systems, and numerous mission progression issues that leave players stuck.
Mission fixes span multiple storylines: NPCs will spawn at the correct level in some encounters, previously broken missions like "Thrill of the Fight" and "Running on Fumes" will function after saving and loading, and several failed objectives caused by overly strict trigger zones have been relaxed. The patch also fixes a problem where story progression got hung up due to unintended mission failure conditions.
Beyond the immediate fixes, Sundberg committed to ongoing support. "This game will grow over time on all fronts: quality, gameplay and content," he wrote. The developer is betting that a series of patches can salvage the launch and build goodwill for a game that consumed years of development.
Samson's rough start puts pressure on the team to execute quickly. With Metacritic scores trailing even games that were taken offline after six weeks, speed and transparency will matter as much as the patches themselves. Player sentiment can shift if updates arrive promptly and meaningfully improve the experience.
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