Samson’s launch is a mess – here’s what the April 10 patch actually fixes (and what it won’t)

Samson was pitched as a scrappy GTA-style crime sandbox from the guy who helped give us Just Cause. Instead, its PC launch landed with a Metacritic in the high 40s, “Mixed” on Steam, and a creative director openly calling the bugs “unacceptable” two days after release. A big patch is coming April 10 – but that won’t magically erase the way this launch went down.

Key takeaways

• Samson’s PC launch on April 8 is rough: crashes, stutter, and progression-breaking bugs have dragged it down to a sub-50 Metacritic and a Mixed Steam rating.
• Director Christofer Sundberg admits, “We released a game with flaws for a number of reasons” and calls the issues “unacceptable,” with a first patch landing April 10.
• The update targets crashes, performance, mission and NPC bugs, and finally adds multiple manual save slots (up to eight) instead of the single, fragile save setup.
• Core complaints about janky combat, driving, and repetitive mission design are unlikely to be fixed overnight, so this is damage control, not a full redemption arc.

A debut that face-plants out of the gate

On paper, Samson is exactly the kind of AA chaos sandbox people have been asking for. It’s the first game from Liquid Swords, led by Just Cause co-creator Christofer Sundberg, built as an open-world crime story about a washed-up getaway driver trying to claw his way out of debt. Think gritty getaway jobs, reactive cops, improvised violence – the sort of thing trailers are made for.

What players actually got on PC this week is a prototype with a price tag. Samson launched on Steam and the Epic Games Store on April 8 and immediately ran into a wall of player complaints: hard crashes, severe stutter, physics bugs, missions refusing to progress, and AI or NPCs literally falling out of the world. When your game leans on tailing, heists, and set-piece missions, “doesn’t complete” is not a small problem.

The numbers back it up. Critics have it hovering around a 48 on Metacritic, and Steam’s user reviews are basically split down the middle, sitting in the low-50% “Mixed” range. That’s the danger zone where curiosity dries up fast and wishlists quietly disappear.

To his credit, Sundberg didn’t pretend this was some mysterious edge-case issue only affecting “a small number of users.” In a post on the game’s Steam page, he straight up called the launch state “unacceptable” and admitted, “We released a game with flaws for a number of reasons,” without spelling out what those reasons were. That’s the line that should give you pause: this wasn’t an unexpected failure – they knew.

The April 10 patch is triage, not a miracle cure

Liquid Swords is moving fast, and the first big patch drops April 10. The focus is clear: stop the bleeding.

• Stability and crashes: Multiple crash fixes, including mid-mission and open-world roaming, plus a failsafe for NPCs or enemies falling through the map instead of taking the entire mission down with them.
• Performance and stutter: Optimizations aimed at smoothing out frame rate and reducing micro-stutters that currently make driving and firefights feel worse than they already are.
• Mission and progression bugs: Tighter scripting so objectives actually trigger, fixes for broken enemy spawns, and tweaks to tailing missions (wider follow radius, fewer instant-fail scenarios) so they’re less brittle.
• Animation, audio, and localization: Clean-up passes on janky animations, missing or mistimed audio, and some translation issues, which should at least make the story less distracting to follow.
• Multiple manual saves: Up to eight manual save slots, instead of essentially trusting a single save and a buggy game not to brick your progress.

That last point is a big one. Launching a bug-riddled open world with only one meaningful save slot is a design sin we shouldn’t still be seeing in 2026. Players have already reported softlocks and broken quests they couldn’t roll back from. Adding multiple slots won’t fix the underlying bugs, but it gives you some agency to protect yourself from them.

What this patch won’t do is magically transform Samson into the slick crime epic its trailers implied. A lot of early criticism has nothing to do with technical issues: clumsy melee combat, clunky driving feel, repetitive mission structure, and an overall layer of jank that feels more early access than launch-ready. No amount of crash fixes on April 10 will rewrite the game’s fundamentals.

Why ship a broken crime epic at all?

Sundberg’s line — “We released a game with flaws for a number of reasons” — is doing a lot of work. It’s also carefully vague. We’re not going to get the full story right now, but you don’t need to be inside Liquid Swords to recognize the pattern.

Mid-sized studios building ambitious open worlds are in a brutal spot. Tech stacks like Unreal get more complex every year, expectations are shaped by the biggest-budget sandboxes on the planet, and the runway for recouping costs is shorter than ever. Marketing beats and platform deals are scheduled months out. Missing a launch window can tank a studio’s finances; hitting it with a broken build can tank the game’s reputation. Samson clearly chose the latter.

The uncomfortable question — the one PR never wants to talk about — is whether this kind of launch is now just baked into the business model. Ship something that runs “well enough” on a subset of rigs, patch aggressively in the first month, hope that word of mouth flips once performance is acceptable. The problem is that Steam reviews, Metacritic scores, and those day-one YouTube impressions don’t get a do-over.

When a debut game from a new studio walks out the door like this, it doesn’t just hurt Samson; it hurts Liquid Swords’ credibility for whatever they pitch next. Saying “Samson is here to stay,” as Sundberg has, is the right attitude. But how many players will stick around long enough to see if that’s true?

Should you play Samson now or wait?

If you’re PC-only and wondering whether to pull the trigger, here’s the blunt answer: unless you love being a crash-test dummy for open-world systems, wait.

• After the April 10 patch, Samson should at least be less likely to nuke your progress or lock you out of missions, especially with multiple manual saves in place.
• But structural issues — messy combat, iffy driving, uneven mission design — are likely to be medium- to long-term problems. Those get improved over months, not days, and sometimes never fully land.
• Steam’s user rating over the next couple of weeks will tell you a lot. If it crawls from “Mixed” toward “Mostly Positive,” that means the technical floor is rising. If it stays stuck, the problems go deeper than bugs.

For now, Samson is a classic “wishlist and watch” game. If you’re curious about its hard-boiled tone or you’re just desperate for a new crime sandbox, check back after a few patches or once console versions arrive and we can see if Liquid Swords managed to turn this from a cautionary tale into a comeback story.

What to watch next

• April 10 patch notes: How detailed are they, and do they match the issues players are actually reporting?
• Steam rating trend (next 1-2 weeks): Does Samson climb out of Mixed, or do new players keep bouncing off?
• Post-launch roadmap: Does Liquid Swords commit publicly to bigger combat and driving overhauls, or just ongoing bug-fixing?
• Console launches: If and when Samson hits PS5/Xbox, does it ship in a better state — or repeat the PC playbook?

TL;DR

Samson’s PC launch is a mess, with crashes, performance problems, and mission-breaking bugs dragging it to a sub-50 Metacritic and Mixed Steam reviews. The director has called the situation “unacceptable” and is pushing out a major April 10 patch that focuses on stability, performance, mission fixes, and long-overdue multiple save slots. Unless you’re very tolerant of jank and risk, this is one to watch from the sidelines until we see how much those first few patches really move the needle.