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Samson Hands-On Preview – Taking It Day-By-Day

Samson Hands-On Preview – Taking It Day-By-Day

Platform: PC Publisher: Liquid Swords Developer: Liquid Swords Have you ever walked through a run-down part of town and imagined the potential that exists? For Samson, who grew up in the roughest part of his hometown of Tyndalston called The Ditch, that is his day-to-day life. However, as someone who got his hands on Liquid Swords' Samson, it ended up being my experience for more than an hour as I fell completely into the enthralling gameplay loop, but was left to imagine how great the experience could be if it were a bit more polished. As Samson, you return home to The Ditch with a mountain of debt to repay. To keep the debt collectors off his back, he hooks up with an old friend who happens to be a major player in the streets of Tyndalston, Carter, to take on some jobs around the city. These range from beating down the door of a local business and roughing up the owner who owes him money to chasing down some rival gang members who just robbed a gas station that Carter oversees. The gameplay is varied and kept me on my toes; one sequence had me brawling through a warehouse, while another had me engaging in vehicular combat, while another, still, tasked me with helping an ally escape the cops after robbing a pharmacy. It's safe to say you're not playing a hero in Samson, but each mission I played delivered excitement in spades. The gameplay typically felt great as I tested out the various mission types on offer. My favorite missions involved heavy hand-to-hand combat; Samson squares up against various enemies with light and heavy attacks at his disposal, as well as the ability to parry and smash enemies with environmental objects. Though this is very much a brawler, you can't just swing for the fences. Instead, I approached each encounter with caution and intentionality. Light punches, heavy punches, parries, and grabs often sufficed in my early-game encounters, but using the Adrenaline Rush meter, I could wail on rivals with slowed-down time and increased damage. I got myself out of more than a couple of sticky situations thanks to effective managing of Samson's Adrenaline meter. It's a brawler at heart, but it's far from the only style of gameplay players can expect. Several of the missions also involve Samson getting into the driver seat, whether to help an ally flee the scene of a crime or to take down rivals who just robbed your friends. Escaping from the police involves leaving their patrol circumference and laying low until they call off the search, while taking down enemies on the mean streets of Tyndalston requires you to ram them using some rudimentary vehicular combat mechanics. I was less sold on this part of the game, as Samson's vehicle is also highly susceptible to damage, and when I smashed my rivals into the rails or even oncoming traffic, the enemies often drove away after sustaining less damage than I expected, while Samson's car took on more than I thought he would. I assume this will be fine-tuned for the final release, but it led to some frustrating restarts. Perhaps the most novel part of my hands-on session presented itself in the game's structure. Rather than having unlimited time in The Ditch, Samson must effectively watch his calendar. Each day is split into three portions: morning, evening, and night. Each of these three times of day has a set number of Action Points (AP), and each job requires AP to attempt; if you fail a job, you can retry it, but if you end up abandoning it, you lose those Action Points and your day moves on without profit or experience. Each day, you need to earn and pay a set amount of money towards your overall debt, or else debt collectors will wait for you by your car or apartment to try and beat the money out of you. Because of this structure, I needed to be judicious about which jobs I selected and when. Some jobs, like one where I stole a stash from a rival gang, can be completed any time, while others, like a story mission that takes place at a bar, can only happen at certain times of day. As someone who loves calendar-based RPGs like Persona and Metaphor, as well as action-crime games like GTA and Saints Row, this feels like a beautiful melding of the genres' conventions. But it's also important to note that, despite my positive thoughts on the gameplay loop, this is not a triple-A game, despite the triple-A inspiration. Liquid Swords is a smaller team with a smaller budget, and while Samson will draw inevitable comparisons to Grand Theft Auto, it is not the multi-billion dollar franchise that Rockstar has under its belt. Samson is a much more focused experience by design, a way to navigate the seedy underbelly of an East Coast-inspired fictional city, set in the '90s, with intentionally designed areas that are meant to push you forward not only in the level, but the story as well. And though much of your spare time in Samson is spent doing side-missions to raise money to pay off the main character's debts, this is not some massive game full of padding and activities to take part in. Each GTA feels like an action-packed season of prestige television, while Samson – though I only played the first segment of the campaign – feels more like a movie with far less padding that you can sit down and enjoy in a much quicker fashion. Sadly, much of my experience was hindered by glitches. While this is common in pre-release builds, when Liquid Swords told me that Samson is set to release in just over a month from this publication, it made me a bit more nervous. Games come together at the last minute all the time, but nearly every mission I played had a different type of noticeable bug, ranging from the annoying audio and visual bugs to glitches that required me to exit and re-launch the game. Hopefully, this is just a symptom of playing an outdated build, and that a more recent version of Samson is a lot more stable, but I can only preview what was put in front of me. There is absolutely still time for developer Liquid Swords to shore up the core experience of Samson, but we're coming up on launch in just over a month, so we are coming down to the wire soon. But ignoring the lack of polish, my time with Samson was a ton of fun, with a compelling loop that I could see myself engaging with for hours. My greatest hope for Samson is that, when it launches on PC on April 8, we won't be talking about the game's potential, but rather that the hooks that grabbed me during my gameplay session do the same to the wider player base, uninhibited.

New Low-Cost iPad Coming Next Week: What to Expect

New Low-Cost iPad Coming Next Week: What to Expect

One of the new products that we could see next week is a refreshed version of the low-cost iPad . As with the iPad Air , we're not expecting major changes, but it is expected to get some meaningful internal upgrades. Design The 12th-generation ‌iPad‌ isn't going to get a design update this year, and we're expecting it to have the same 11-inch edge-to-edge display with Touch ID Side Button and thick bezels. Apple last updated the ‌iPad‌'s design with the 10th-generation model, giving the device a more modern look to better match the designs of the iPad Pro and iPad Air models. It's still a relatively new design, and Apple doesn't update the low-cost ‌iPad‌'s chassis often. The low-cost ‌iPad‌ is only available in a single screen size, and it is Apple's thickest tablet at 7mm. It features a Retina LCD display with no ProMotion support, no P3 wide color, and no lamination (display technology that cuts down on glare, provides a more responsive feel, and allows for a thinner size) compared to Apple's other tablets. Apple makes the low-cost ‌iPad‌ in several fun colors, and we could see some new shades in 2026. Current colors include blue, pink, silver, and yellow. No changes are expected for the rear camera, front camera, USB-C port, or compatibility with accessories like the Apple Pencil . A-Series Processor The low-cost ‌iPad‌ will likely be equipped with Apple's A19 chip, which is the chip that Apple used for the iPhone 17 . It is built on a 3-nanometer process and it will offer speed and efficiency improvements over the A16 chip that's in the current model. The A16 chip that Apple used in 2025 does not support Apple Intelligence , but the A19 does, so that will mark a major update for Apple's affordable tablet. The 2026 model should be able to support ‌Apple Intelligence‌ features that are unavailable with the 2025 model. The A19 also offers hardware-accelerated ray tracing for gaming improvements. The 11th-generation ‌iPad‌ has 6GB RAM, but Apple will need to bump that up to 8GB for ‌Apple Intelligence‌. N1 Chip Apple introduced its own Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip, called the N1, in the ‌iPhone 17‌ models. The N1 was added to the ‌iPad Pro‌, and it's possible that Apple plans to add the chip to all future devices coming in 2026 and beyond. The N1 chip supports Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread networking technology for smart home devices. The 11th-generation ‌iPad‌ is limited to Wi-Fi 6, so if the 12th-generation version gets Wi-Fi 7, it will be able to connect to faster 6GHz networks for the first time. Bluetooth 6 would also be an improvement over Bluetooth 5.3. There is a chance that Apple is reserving the N1 chip for its more premium devices , based on leaked internal code. If that's the case, the ‌iPad‌ won't include the N1 chip. Apple Modem Apple has designed C1 and C1X modem chips that it has used in iPhones and iPads in 2025, and the next-generation version of the ‌iPad‌ could also get an Apple-designed modem chip for cellular models. Apple's modem chips are more power efficient than Qualcomm chips while providing similar performance. Pricing The 11th-generation ‌iPad‌ is priced starting at $349 for 128GB of storage, and there are so far no indications that pricing is going to change for the 12th-generation model. Launch Date Apple will likely launch the low-cost ‌iPad‌ sometime next week , just ahead of the Special Experience planned for March 4. Related Roundup: iPad Buyer's Guide: iPad (Don't Buy) Related Forum: iPad This article, " New Low-Cost iPad Coming Next Week: What to Expect " first appeared on MacRumors.com Discuss this article in our forums

Watch the trailer for Louis Theroux's new documentary 'Inside the Manosphere'

Watch the trailer for Louis Theroux's new documentary 'Inside the Manosphere'

Netflix has unveiled a trailer for its upcoming documentary Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere set to arrive on March 11th. It will be the first full-length Netflix documentary for Theroux, and see him interview "manosphere" influencers like Sneako, Justin Waller and HS Tikky Tokky, aka Harrison Sullivan. "I’ve made documentaries for over 30 years now, and in a way, this subject feels like the final boss," the filmmaker told GQ. "From Miami to Marbella, meet the men that are reshaping and radicalising young men’s ideas about masculinity and manhood," Netflix's description reads. In the trailer, we see Theroux interview the influencers and get the tables turned on himself. "I know that they would be streaming or filming me and would put that content out," Theroux told Deadline. "And I hoped we’d get this feedback loop where there was a meta narrative that was then affecting my approach to the story." On top of making documentaries (and being famous for Jiggle Jiggle ), Theroux is known for his Louis Theroux Interviews... podcast in which he interviews stars like Sean Penn and Florence Pugh. Prior to that, he did stories on conspiracy theories, UFOS and the porn industry, topics that he said were once niche but are now driving the internet and culture. "I wouldn’t be the first to point out that a lot of this is down to the influence of social media and the way in which it has given vent to the darkest parts of the human soul. Not just given vent to them, but actively amplified them and pushed them into our feeds. So yeah, this is not a niche subject." This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/watch-the-trailer-for-louis-therouxs-new-documentary-inside-the-manosphere-131726113.html?src=rss