By As a dedicated Steam Deck enthusiast, there is nothing quite like the thrill of firing up a brand-new, highly anticipated release on our favorite handheld. We all know the magic of taking a massive, sprawling game and playing it comfortably from the couch. However, not every launch is a fairy tale, and today, we need to have a very honest, slightly painful conversation about the latest release from Liquid Swords, Samson.
First and foremost, a huge thank you to the team at Liquid Swords for providing me with a review key to test Samson out on the Steam Deck. I was incredibly eager to dive in and see what the game had to offer. But right out of the gate, the game was officially updated to an ‘Unsupported’ status for the Steam Deck. After spending a considerable amount of time tweaking, testing, and troubleshooting, I can entirely see why Valve slapped it with that label. I can also see why the publisher decided to hold off the review embargo until a few hours after the game’s official release. In the gaming industry, a late embargo is usually a glaring red flag that hints at underlying performance troubles, and unfortunately, that rings true here.
The Uphill Battle: Settings and Optimization
Let’s get right into the technical nitty-gritty. Whenever I encounter a heavy game on the Deck, my first instinct is to dive straight into the graphics menu to find that sweet spot between visual fidelity and battery-draining performance. To get anything remotely playable with this title, I had to drop AMD’s FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) all the way down to the ‘Performance’ preset. I paired this by dropping almost every other in-game graphical setting to their respective lowest or performance-focused options.
The truly frustrating part? Tinkering with these settings didn’t seem to make a meaningful difference. Usually, sacrificing shadow quality or texture resolution buys you a few precious frames, but here, the performance remained stubbornly underwhelming. It is worth noting that this isn’t strictly a Steam Deck issue; from what I’m seeing across the community, even players on high-end desktop PCs are struggling to maintain stable framerates right now. At this point, I’m genuinely crossing my fingers that we see this title added to cloud gaming services like GeForce Now soon, so we can actually experience the game with the graphical fidelity it deserves without melting our hardware.
Bugs, Glitches, and The White Screen of Frustration
Beyond the raw framerate woes, the game is currently riddled with technical bugs that pull you right out of the experience. One of the most annoying issues happens when you try to do something as simple as closing the game. Instead of a clean exit to your Steam library, the game outright crashes, leaving you staring at a blinding, frozen white screen. You have to manually force-quit the game through the SteamOS overlay every single time. It’s a small friction point, sure, but it adds up quickly when you’re already frustrated by poor optimization.
Gameplay: Tough Characters and Clunky Cameras
Moving on to the actual gameplay loop, the combat takes quite a bit of getting used to. The mechanics feel a little clunky initially, lacking that buttery-smooth responsiveness you want in an action title. Fortunately, there is a silver lining: your character is built like an absolute tank. The game is surprisingly forgiving when you’re just trying to survive and beat enemies up, which acts as a much-needed saving grace given the technical hiccups you have to fight through.
The camera, however, is a completely different story. It feels like it has a mind of its own, darting all over the place and fighting your analog stick inputs almost as much as the in-game enemies do. When you combine a chaotic camera with low framerates, it can make intense combat encounters feel more disorienting than fun.
Visual Artifacts: Welcome to the Digital Snowstorm
Visually, the heavy reliance on the FSR Performance mode introduces some major graphical artifacts. There’s no Intel XeSS support here at launch, which is a genuinely tough pill to swallow. In my experience, XeSS often handles upscaling a bit more gracefully, providing a cleaner image. If you try to push the envelope and turn on advanced features like hair detail, the visual noise just gets exponentially worse.
The most jarring example of this visual degradation happens when you hop into a vehicle. Driving around literally looks like you’re navigating through a digital snowstorm due to the aggressive shimmering, ghosting, and pixelation. While driving seemed somewhat feasible in the early, slower phases of the game, the framerate quickly turns it into a chore. We’re talking about dropping into the low 20s most of the time, and frequently dipping even below that 20 FPS mark. Whenever you transition between different areas of the map, speed up, or slam on the brakes, you are hit with major lag spikes and severe stuttering that completely break the immersion.
Decky Loader and Frame Gen: A Failed Rescue Mission
As a last-ditch effort to salvage the experience, I decided to fire up Decky Loader and toggle on its Frame Generation feature. If you aren’t familiar, this is a fantastic community tool that attempts to interpolate frames to magically double your perceived framerate. Spoiler alert: it didn’t save the day this time.
While Frame Gen can sometimes be a miracle worker on the Steam Deck, here, it simply doesn’t make a huge amount of difference. It certainly doesn’t make the image quality look any better. While it thankfully doesn’t introduce any noticeable input latency—a common side effect of frame generation—it completely fails to provide a smoother gameplay experience. Even with Frame Gen running, the performance overlay was only showing around 40 to 50 frames per second. Worse yet, the generated frames actually exacerbated the load spikes. The frame pacing felt incredibly erratic, making the game feel heavier and less responsive than it did at a native, albeit lower, framerate.
The Final Verdict
So, what’s the bottom line for my fellow handheld gamers? If you are absolutely dead set on playing this release right now and refuse to wait, managing it on its own native settings without forcing Frame Generation is going to be your best bet.
But honestly, I cannot recommend playing this title on the Steam Deck in its current state. It needs serious, fundamental optimization from the developers before it can be considered a viable handheld experience. If it does eventually get added to a cloud service like GeForce Now, or if the development team pushes out some miraculous performance patches in the coming weeks, I will absolutely circle back for an update. I’d love to see how it runs locally with a few patches under its belt versus streaming it from the cloud.
Until then, keep your Steam Decks focused on the games that respect your hardware, and let’s hope for some hefty updates in the near future.
