Samson looks like it’ll offer the sort of dumb action fun I can’t resist, and it’s now locked in a full release date. Liquid Swords, the Swedish studio founded by former Just Cause and Mad Max developer Christofer Sundberg, are set to let their game about a bloke attempting to brawl and car chase his way out of crippling debt loose in early April.
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April 8th, to be exact, as revealed with a fresh trailer at today’s Ian Games Network Fan Fest. Said trailer showed off more of 90s action flick-inspired goon-drubbing sessions and road-based ramming that the studio have established as the stuff leather-jacketed protagonist Samson has to do in order to keep his ever-present debt in check. You owe people more money by the day and therefore you’ve got bust balls throughout the grey metropolis of Tyndalston like a working class Batman.
Sundberg suggests the studio have aimed for a highly focused romp that keeps the pace up and feeds Samson baddies to bash as quickly as he can dispatch them with his mitts or smash them into the scenery using his black V8 beast. Liquid Swords offered a bit more info on those two key elements in a recent dev diary.
In terms of brawls, they’ve opted against giving you a gun or overpowered attacks in an effort to have every fight be a dirty slug-fest that encourages using everything at your disposal to win. “You can walk into a nice clean room and totally wreck the place,” principal programmer Strati Zerbinis explained. “The world is not just an arena in which you have a fight, the world is part of the fight. You can use everything you break. You can take broken things and make them into weapons. You can knock stuff over onto people. Debris can get in enemies’ ways. Heavy stuff can fall and kill people.” That’s pressing some nice Sleeping Dogs or Yakuza-ish buttons in my brain, provided all of the destruction feels weighty enough to be satisfying.
Meanwhile, on the car combat side, senior designer Alex Williams explained that the momentum, speed, and mass of vehicles dictates the level of damage done by a crash, then got a bit philosophical. “I don’t want to feel a car just die. Cars don’t die. They’re made up of lots of different parts. We have a part system – there’s tires, wheels, the engine – these can all degrade [and] the player will feel [in] that car the consequences of how those parts are damaged.”
Sounds like to could be cool. Samson’s wishlistable on Steam or the Epic Store, if you’re so inclined ahead of its April debut.
