Just Cause creator open-city game could be great, but the trailer worries me

I've been craving a good open-city game like the ones that arrived so often in the Xbox 360 era. Grand Theft Auto 6 is due later this year, but I'm after something more arcadey and knockabout—think Watch Dogs or Sleeping Dogs. I hoped MindsEye would fill that gap, and clung to that hope until its release; scepticism around it proved justified, and MindsEye was nowhere near ready when it released in May last year.

Samson immediately caught my eye with its aesthetic, blending a dilapidated industrial cityscape with grunting muscle cars and a much stronger, more grounded identity than MindsEye. It sounds great on paper, but the new gameplay trailer left me unconvinced. The cars look fun to drive, as you might expect from the director of 2015's underrated Mad Max spinoff, but the brawling combat looks ropey as hell—several scenes show enemies using the exact same attack in sequence, and it doesn’t seem to have much style or depth.

There are a couple of other concerns.

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