TL;DR: A tiny, repetitive crime sandbox with decent driving, shallow combat, a lifeless story, and enough bugs to make you question your purchase. 3/10 – not worth your time or the $25.

I still remember the exact moment I booted up Samson: A Tyndalson Story on my PC, fresh Steam code in hand, thinking this modest $24.99 indie might be the palate cleanser I desperately needed after years of drowning in endless open-world slop. The premise sounded refreshingly compact: freshly sprung from prison, your sister held for ransom by a rival crew, you grind the streets of a single small city to pay up while running jobs for your old gang. No sprawling map the size of a small country, no filler towers to climb, just tight, focused urban crime vibes. Or so the trailers promised. What I actually got was a game that felt like it was assembled in a weekend by folks who had the ambition but somehow misplaced the soul, leaving me staring at the credits screen wondering why I’d just wasted two evenings on something this hollow.

From the very first hours, Samson: A Tyndalson Story reveals itself as a small repetitive sandbox that mistakes repetition for depth. The core loop is simple on paper. Each in-game day you pick from a handful of jobs scattered across the tiny Tyndalson map – drive here, smash that, punch these guys – until you hit your daily cash quota. It even apes Persona’s time management a little, where bigger payouts eat more hours. Sounds efficient, right? In practice it collapses faster than a house of cards in a wind tunnel. Every single job boils down to the same three recycled activities: street races that all feel identical after the third one, ramming missions where you play demolition derby with AI that barely reacts, and fist-fights that never evolve beyond basic button-mashing. The worst part? The campaign forces you to replay these exact same missions multiple times with zero variation, no new dialogue, no alternate routes, not even a cheeky multiplier for stylish finishes. I caught myself muttering “again?” out loud more times than I care to admit, the kind of soul-crushing déjà vu that makes you question your life choices mid-session.

To be fair, the driving itself isn’t a total loss. The cars have a pleasing weight to them, and the Street Trials – those super-technical time attacks – actually delivered a few genuine dopamine hits when I nailed a perfect run through the narrow back alleys. For about twenty minutes I felt like I was in a scrappy, low-budget Need for Speed underground cousin. But then the illusion shattered because every other car-based gig is just a reskinned version of the last one. Same roads, same bland objectives, same handful of enemy vehicles that drive like they’re on rails. And don’t get me started on the on-foot stuff. The brawling starts off feeling stiff and unresponsive, like your fists are swinging through molasses, but you do eventually settle into a rhythm. Problem is, that rhythm never matures into anything exciting. There are supposed to be different mission flavors – collect items after a beatdown, survive waves, whatever – yet the mechanical differences are so microscopic they might as well not exist. It’s the gaming equivalent of ordering different toppings on the same sad pizza; it still tastes like regret.

What really hurts is how little the world itself gives back. Tyndalson is so compact you’ll memorize every corner after a single afternoon, yet it’s completely barren. No hidden collectibles worth hunting, no meaningful side stories, no quirky NPCs with actual personality, no late-night radio stations cracking wise while you cruise. It’s the kind of sandbox that feels less like a living city and more like a diorama someone forgot to populate. I kept thinking back to how even the most modest indie crime games of the past managed to squeeze charm out of limited scope – remember how Sleeping Dogs made its tiny Hong Kong districts feel alive with radio chatter and random street encounters? Samson offers none of that warmth. It’s as wide as an ocean and as deep as a puddle, except the ocean is actually a kiddie pool and the puddle is… well, still a puddle.

Then there’s the story, which might be the saddest casualty here. Almost everything is delivered through static dialogue boxes or phoned-in conversations with zero cinematic flair. No cutscenes worth mentioning, no evocative animations, just walls of text that read like they were dashed off between coffee breaks. Your sister Oonagh is supposedly in mortal danger, but every call with her feels oddly chill, like she’s more annoyed about missing her favorite show than fearing for her life. The ransom amount barely moves, the crew you run with are walking clichés who talk tough but never do anything interesting, and the fourteen separate story missions feel completely detached from the central ransom plot. It’s like the writers started three different scripts and then just stapled them together at random. In a game already starving for engaging gameplay, a sharp, punchy narrative could have been the saving grace. Instead we get something so generic it makes GTA’s radio commercials look like high literature.

And because the foundation was already cracking, the technical side decided to kick it while it was down. Glitches everywhere – flickering textures, cars clipping through buildings, missions that soft-lock you out of progress. I actually had to skip an entire chapter thanks to a bug that refused to let me finish the previous one, only to have another unrelated glitch magically unlock the finale early. It was almost comedic, except I wasn’t laughing when failing a mission because of an AI brain-fart meant losing all the day’s earnings and starting over. The punishment for failure is brutally unforgiving in a game this janky, turning every minor annoyance into a potential rage-quit moment. There are also bizarre design quirks, like being unable to heal while holding a weapon, that feel less like deliberate choices and more like someone forgot to wire the systems together properly.

Look, I take no pleasure in tearing into a small studio’s first swing at a full release. Liquid Swords clearly had an idea – a bite-sized crime tale for people tired of 100-hour epics – and in a better timeline maybe this could have been a scrappy cult favorite. But as it stands right now, Samson: A Tyndalson Story is a passionless, joyless chore dressed up in urban crime clothing. The few moments where the driving clicks or a needle-drop song hits just right are drowned out by everything else that feels unfinished, uninspired, or outright broken. I wanted to root for it. I really did. Instead I finished it out of stubbornness more than anything else, the same way you finish a disappointing takeout meal because you already paid for it.

Verdict

In the end, Samson: A Tyndalson Story serves as a stark reminder that ambition and a low price tag alone aren’t enough when the execution never rises above serviceable. It’s not actively offensive, but it’s also not memorable in any positive way – just a repetitive, glitchy little sandbox that runs out of steam before it even leaves the garage. If you’re starving for urban crime action, you’re far better off replaying something with actual heart or waiting for the inevitable patches that may or may not ever arrive. This one, sadly, stays in the “skip” pile.