Avalanche co-founder says his new studio’s first game Samson has ‘unacceptable’ bugs following rough launch
Samson is the debut from Liquid Swords, set up by Just Cause director Christofer Sundberg
The former co-founder of Avalanche Studios has told players his new studio’s first game has “unacceptable” game-breaking bugs at launch.
Christofer Sundberg – who co-founded Avalanche and was creative director on Just Cause – set up new studio Liquid Swords in 2020 and officially announced it in 2022, saying it was working on “a connected single player action RPG” and “a hard-boiled take on the open-world crime genre”.
The result is Samson, an open-world action game which was released on Steam and the Epic Games Store on Wednesday to a mixed reception.
The game’s Metacritic score currently stands at 48, while Steam reviews are currently at ‘mixed’ with 53% of user reviews considered positive.
Much of the criticism has been levelled at the number of bugs in the game, which have now been addressed by Sundberg in an update on Samson’s Steam page.
” We have been having a lot of fun watching folks have fun with the game and we released a game with flaws for a number of reasons,” Sundberg stated, without explaining what those reasons were.
“Early impressions are mixed and many of you are experiencing game-breaking bugs and performance issues. 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.
“Launching a game is a ton of work and I’m proud of the effort our team has put into seeing Samson from its initial concept, through release.”
Sundberg says Samson will “grow over time on all fronts – quality, gameplay and content” and that Liquid Swords “will continue to keep our ears to the ground and improve the game with your support”.
This will start with a patch on Friday, according to Sundberg, which “addresses some of the immediate issues players are facing”, including:
- Several performance fixes focusing on PSO related hitches
- Several crash fixes related to audio, animation and GPU
- Several fixes for mission and progression related issues
- Several fixes for gameplay related issues
- Several updates for general polish on various parts of the game
- Added the ability for up to 8 save files
In February 2025, Liquid Swords announced that it was making a round of layoffs, with Sundberg saying the company was in “a deeply regrettable position, with no choice but to begin the formal process of parting ways with some of our talented team members”.
In October, however, it posted a brief 10-second clip showing a gritty environment, suggesting the project was still making progress. Two months later, Samson was officially announced in December 2025 with an April 8 release planned for PC and console versions to follow later.
