Liquid Swords, the team behind Samson, is ‘hard at work’ fixing some of the issues players have faced with the game since it launched earlier in the week. Samson, a third-person ‘semi-open-world’ adventure with a focus on hand-to-hand combat, arrived with a decent amount of expectation, given that some of the team at Liquid Swords had worked on the brilliant 2015 Mad Max game.

Sadly, those lofty expectations were short-lived, with the game taking a battering from players, citing “buggy, janky” performance and a storyline that isn’t all that interesting. It soon became one of the year’s worst rated games on Metacritic (a bit harsh, if you ask me) and refunds are starting to come in on Steam. Thankfully, though, help it is at hand. The team is actively working to squash all the bugs and boost performance in a number of patches – the first one being available right now.

“This patch is not replacing the one coming tomorrow, on the 10th of April,” the team wrote. “We still plan to bring even more updates on issues reported by you then.

“The team has been hard at work with the continued support for Samson. This update fixes some immediate issues some of you are having. Improving combat, stability, performance and missing loc among other.” Below are the main changes bundled with the patch.

Physics:

• Fixed issue with Physics destructables behaving like solid objects and not getting destroyed when playing on high framerates.

Combat

• Fix for unreliable combat barge. If you tried to do a combat barge during the 4-second cooldown, it would just drop you out of combat stance instead.
• Fixed issue with Enemies failing to pull the player out of a vehicle if misaligned even slightly.
• Balanced Police escalation detection ranges to make it fair to the player.
• Fixed issue with player falling through the floor, dying.

Stability:

• Fixed a random shutdown crash related to audio devices

Mission:

• Fixed issue with the “Hot Iron” not being replayable after failing and retrying the next day.
• Improved traversal and removed collision traps by White Whisper stash close to the priest’s house in Park Avenue.
• Fixed the Cumberland barge wall 

Localization:

• Improved French localization, adding a whole lot of strings that were missed in translation.

Usability:

• New “Controls” screen for showing game input from the pause menu
• Correct text for Carpe Diem: First Job costs 0 AP.
• Added Heal to combat hints
• Fixed so we toggle Grab / Throw when you pick up an item in the combat hints
• Fixed issues with changing the Deadzone setting not changing the way sticks respond
• Fixed issues with turning off vibration in the settings.

Polish:

• Removed the facility marked on the map for no reason.

The good news is that despite the game’s poor reception, it is starting to find an audience. Should Liquid Swords address these issues quickly, there’s every chance that Samson could bounce back and have a good run. Remember, this isn’t a full priced game. This doesn’t excuse it from launching in the state its in, but it does mean that the barrier to entry is significantly lower than a AAA, and as such, may be worth a punt when the issues are resolved.