Samson launched on Steam to a rocky reception despite the studio’s ambitions. Then people actually played it.

Samson: A Tyndalston Story, the debut from Liquid Swords — the studio founded by former Avalanche Studios co-founder Christofer Sundberg — The action-adventure title launched today on Steam. The front door couldn’t look better.

The back room tells a different story. The game sits at “Mixed” with 51% positive from 646 user reviews. And the top-voted reviews are eviscerating the performance.

User reviews on Steam cite severe performance problems even on low settings, along with complaints about unbalanced gameplay and clunky mechanics.

Sundberg acknowledged the mess directly on the game’s Steam page. “Early impressions are mixed and many of you are experiencing game-breaking bugs and performance issues,” he wrote. “That’s unacceptable and we are listening to everyone’s feedback and are hard at work to deliver the game we spent years of our lives developing.” A patch is scheduled for Friday, April 10, targeting PSO-related hitches, crash fixes across audio, animation, and GPU, progression blockers, and — notably — adding support for up to eight save files. A feature that should have shipped at launch.

According to GamingBolt, the game also carries a 53 Metascore.

Sundberg says Liquid Swords is “committed to the future of both Samson and Tyndalston,” framing the city as a recurring setting — their “Gotham City and Montana” — for future games. That’s a long game for a studio whose first at-bat is already bleeding players.

Sources