I first took notice of Samson: A Tyndalston Story when its team of former Just Cause and Mad Max developers posted a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it teaser of Tyndalston itself. The fictional city reminded me of GTA 3’s Liberty City or Max Payne’s New York. My first look at proper gameplay in a demo with the creative director only upped my interest, and now that I’ve had the chance to actually play Samson – albeit only for an all-too-brief hour – I’m officially amped for this gritty, grimy, run-down brawler with pseudo-open world freedom where your heavy punch can drop bad guys in one bloody shot and you pop painkillers to stay in the fight.

The setup for this 1990’s-set crime story sees you as Samson McCray, fresh out of prison after eating a charge as a result of a robbery in St. Louis gone bad. Your sister, Oonagh, pulled some strings to help keep you safe while you were inside, and she cut a deal upon your release: you’ve got to repay the money lost from the failed heist to people that will absolutely kill you both if you come even one cent short.

What’s important to make clear up front is that Samson is not a AAA game. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was at first glance, because its Unreal Engine 5-powered visuals are quite impressive, both in terms of Samson’s character model and the city of Tyndalston. Lighting has a very fluorescent-tinged yellow tint to it that you really had to live through the ‘90s to understand, vehicles look great, and the city itself looks very, very lived-in. But Samson doesn’t have the scope of a AAA game, and that’s not a complaint – it’s just important to properly calibrate your expectations. The opening cutscene is not a full-blown cinematic but a voiced-over motion-comic, voice acting is so-so at best, and this isn’t a 40+ hour open-world sandbox. You do plenty of driving around a neighborhood – perhaps more of Tyndalston unlocks the further into the story you progress – but this is not a massive playground full of chatty NPCs and side activities.

Again, this isn’t a complaint, but it’s important to emphasize because when you first fire up Samson, it seems like it’s following a very GTA-esque playbook. But I really like the choices that Samson makes within its more limited scope. For instance, there are numerous little things around the world to take note of and interact with, from notes and photos in your apartment to sandwich-board signs you can knock over with your car in order to gain small bursts of nitro boost.

It gets better: there is a progression system. The more bad guys you beat up and the more missions you complete, the more XP you earn that gets redeemed for a point in one of four skills: Instinct (boosts your adrenaline), Tactics (health), Aggression (power), and Cunning (finesse). This allows you to tailor your Samson to your preferred playstyle, whether you’d rather absorb and dish out maximum punishment in each fight or strike quickly and frequently in order to speed up the maxing out of your adrenaline meter, at which point you can click in both thumbsticks and enjoy a brief period of dealing extra damage.

Gameplay segments are split into days, and within each day are afternoon, evening, and night. Every time the sun rises, you have to pay back a certain amount of your debt. In order to do that, you’ll need to take various small jobs around Tyndalston. Fortunately, you’ve got choices each day; it’s not a linear mission structure. My first job involved finding the manager of a club called Chubb’s and, well, beating the crap out of him. Naturally, it wasn’t quite so simple. I had to worm my way through the bowels of the club first, fighting my way through his goons in the process. This mission functioned as a bit of a tutorial, allowing me to practice parries, dodges, light punches, heavy punches, and triggering my adrenaline meter after I’d built up enough adrenaline during fights.

It didn’t hurt Samson’s chances of me loving this game when the very first dude I threw a heavy punch at dropped immediately, his face covered in his own blood. Most of the time in a game like this, guys can take an unrealistic number of hits. But not in Samson. Not everyone will hit the floor after a single punch, but the fact that it can happen not only made me feel like a badass, but it added to the underworld grittiness that is clearly oozing out of every square inch of Tyndalston.

Anyway, back to the missions: as I was saying, you’ve got choices at each segment of the day, but each choice takes a certain amount of time. Meaning, you can’t just do a dozen jobs in a single day in order to quickly pay down your debt and break the game. Every job, realistically, takes time, so when I was, for example, shadowing Dave the Bookie, that took all afternoon of in-game time. First I had to drive to where Dave had last been seen. Then, once I’d clocked him, I had to follow him from a safe distance (lest he recognize the tail and get spooked, triggering a mission failure) so that he’d lead me to evidence of what he was suspected of by the people that I took the job from: that Dave was playing both sides. Sure enough, I caught Dave red-handed, and then I had to square up against Dave and his associates. By the time it was done and I got paid, the day moved to evening.

Some jobs can only be taken at certain times of day. And some jobs will cost you money. Like when I had to take out the cars of two guys who were avoiding my temporary employer. First I drove to where they’d last been seen, and then both cars came flying around the corner in front of me and the chase was on. The problem was, my car was already pretty beat up from the erratic driving I’d been doing in previous jobs. So the first time I tried the mission, my pursuit led us to a freeway onramp, where I was able to get behind the closest of the two target cars, and then nitro-boost directly into his rear bumper, slamming his car into the curving wall of the onramp and taking it out. Problem was, the bumper boost also took my pre-battered car out, and by the time I’d grabbed another car, the second of the two cars I was pursuing – who was already in front of me – had gotten away.

On the retry, I stopped at a gas station repair shop first, spent some of my hard-earned cash (which, I remind you, I needed every cent of to try and make my daily debt payment), and was then able to keep my car intact while taking out both of my four-wheeled targets. I got paid, and headed home for the evening. But who was waiting for me? Two debt collectors, and so before I could crash on my own couch for the night, I had to bloody my knuckles one more time.

Both combat and driving were a lot of fun in my one-hour hands-on. I have no idea if Samson will ever introduce guns into the mix, but I kinda hope it doesn’t. The melee combat system feels heavy in a really good way, meaning that Samson takes shots just as hard as he dishes them out. I like the mix of punches, parries, and dodging. Sure, the Batman: Arkham combat arguably remains the brawler standard, but Samson’s fisticuffs are slower and more deliberate in a way I quite enjoy.

Driving, meanwhile, also has a welcome weight to it. All of the (fictional) cars in Samson are ‘90s era at the newest, given the ‘90s setting. Samson’s own car is a ‘70s Chevelle-like two-door muscle car, and as such it’s no light Lotus. Are these simulation-style driving physics? Absolutely not. You have the aforementioned nitro boosts and there’s a side-slam button – and of course, the B button lets you pull off sick handbrake turns once you’ve got some practice under your belt. By the end of my hour I had really started to get the hang of the driving and was eager to zip my way around Tyndalston some more.

As you can probably tell by now, I had a fantastic time in Tyndalston. If Samson can keep its mission variety fresh – which is no small thing, I recognize – it’ll go a long way towards making its campaign enjoyable over the long haul, versus the extremely fun hour I had with it. I’m curious to see if the city opens up more as the story unfolds, and I hope the story itself is engaging enough to keep me motivated to continue playing and isn’t just “keep doing jobs to pay down your debt until a big climactic mission happens at the end.” Samson is due out on April 8 for PC, so it won’t be too long before we find out if it can keep up the good stuff it’s got going for it.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our semi-retired interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

Highguard studio Wildlight Entertainment reportedly has less than 20 people remaining to work on the game following a round of devastating layoffs just weeks after the game’s launch.

This comes from a new Bloomberg report, which tells the story of Wildlight’s rise and fall since its founders first assembled the team back in 2021. Made up of Respawn veterans, the group hoped to recreate the successes of Apex Legends and Titanfall, initially with a survival-focused shooter.

When that design didn’t quite work as well as they’d hoped, they scrapped it and pivoted to Highguard, leaving remnants of the original survival game in the final draft of what was now a hero shooter. As the game progressed, testers had positive feedback that had the developers hopeful, though notably they also said it was more fun on microphone with voice chat, and the experience was too complicated and less fun without them.

Sources speaking to Bloomberg say the studio largely had a positive culture and the team felt good about what they were making up until the game’s announcement at The Game Awards last December, which apparently came about at Geoff Keighley’s urging after he enjoyed what he played of it. The team originally intended to announce and launch Highguard simultaneously, but with The Game Awards announcement that left a month-and-a-half-long silence between announcement and launch during which the internet had a field day.

The game launched to a celebration-worthy number of Steam concurrents, but unfortunately was unable to retain players for very long at all, meaning it made very little money from microtransactions. Reviews were also poor. Though the developers at Wildlight believed they had financial runway to improve, financial backer Tencent suddenly pulled its funding, and most of the 100-person team was laid off as a result. Fewer than 20 individuals remain to try and save Highguard. Those developers have recently reassured that a new patch is on the way, after a website issue led players to believe the whole game was being taken down.

The full story is at Bloomberg.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

As our exclusive, all-February-long IGN First “cover story” on the upcoming black-and-white, hand-animated first-person shooter MOUSE: P.I. for Hire continues, we wanted to learn more about the origins of its unique 1930’s rubberhose-animated style. And so we sat down with Fumi Studios CEO and Founder Mateusz Michalak as well as Art Director and Lead Animator Michal Rostek to go behind the scenes of this unique game. Read on for a lightly edited transcript of our conversation, or watch the video version below. And you can wishlist MOUSE on Steam if you’re interested.

IGN: What came first here, the idea for the game itself or the desire and idea to use this 1930s Rubber Hose animation style?

Mateusz: Yeah, I think this is the question more for Michal right now because he was one of the original creators and the guy who created the first art for the MOUSE.

Michal: I came from the animation industry and I’m really passionate of the animation and especially of history of animation. The MOUSE is like my little passion project that I started inside of my regular animation work. When we started to make video games, I came into the matter with the idea of the boomer shooter with the style of the 1930s Rubber Hose animations, and he loved that idea and give this idea opportunity to make it happen. We started with five people on the small team of this project. Our programmer put a video of making the game on TikTok then it goes viral and resonates all around the world. I remember that day when I was going to work and met my friend in the subway and he told me, “Hey, I read the article, the gaming website, that some guys make a game that looks like the game that you want to make.” And I said, “Really?” “Yeah.” Then he showed me the article and that was MOUSE.

Mateusz: Yeah, I can add that from the beginning. It was passion project. We’ve done most of the work after hours. We started prototyping the game. The first prototype that Michal showed to me was really, really basic. Then we hired a coder/programmer, David, who joined the team and we started the first full small production and the game came out of this small teaser that he showed on TikTok.

IGN: That’s cool. So my next question, was it always going to be black and white or was color in this animation? Was that a debate at all amongst the team?

Mateusz: It was never a debate among the team. It was debate in the community because when people first saw the art or the trailer, they thought, “Okay, it’s quite original, but you need color.” Because no one ever made an FPS cartoonish game in fully black and white. It was something unusual back then, but we sticked with our roots in our original design and we never wanted to add any color. It’s challenging. It’s really challenging, especially in player guidance, in patch finding because you can always add a yellow color if you have a color in game or any other color, and I think that we’ve done a pretty good job. It was really, really challenging. We learned a lot of new skills, managing only basically two basic colors, black and white.

IGN: Help me understand how much of this, of the animation of the art, was done by hand?

Mateusz: I think all the animations that you can see in the game are done by hand. It’s not easy process, but having computers right now, we can speed up some elements in the whole pipeline. Of course, we used techniques from the 1930s, 1940s Rubber Hose techniques. But having computers, we could speed up the whole process. It was much, much nicer and we could basically see our effects not instantly, but quite fast in the game. So if you would use the old techniques, so using paper, pens, scanners, and so on, the whole process would take not months, but years. And in the game development, they don’t tend to wait for games, they want games right now. That’s why the whole development process of games is shortening every year and we couldn’t tell people that, “Okay, you saw teaser, then you need to wait at least 7, 8 years to see the final product.” That’s why we used computers. And I think Michal can say something more about the whole pipeline of the animation.

Michal: Yeah, so the animation pipeline is really similar to the pipeline that we use in the animation industry because game is based on animation. So it’s really similar but not 100% the same. So for example, we started with the concept that we took from the design department. They’re giving us a idea and we made our first concept arts for the character, for the NPC, for the weapons of the game. And then we came to the process that, in the film industry is like a storyboard process when we made a limited animation to put in the game and look how this work.

And if it’s good, it comes to the animation process when we put the life on the animations, on the characters, on the weapons and all of the interactive elements in the game. Then to clean up process, when we clean all the outline to not look rough, but to look good, put the colors on it, and the last final step on making animation for the game that is different than making animation for the film is to render all of these things, put it in the engine and pack it and make the magic go on.

IGN: Michal, were the weapons the most fun thing to animate in the game because for me, what I’ve seen and experienced of the game so far, I mean it’s all gorgeous, I just love the entire look, but the weapons, I just love how alive the weapons are.

Michal: Definitely, it was a very fun thing to do, but for me, one of the most challenging things. And we couldn’t make such a great design, such a great animations without our two animators and with our two artists, Abraham, who made the great concepts for the weapons on the game and Igor who animated all of the things. So it was also credits for our game design who put all the mechanics, all the specific timing for the weapons to look good because this is one of the things that we need to focus when we making animation for the video game is that it should fit the mechanic, it should fit the interactive aspect of the game and do it in the… right tempo because when you have a game hardly based on the animation, they should look good, but also be useful for the player and not be player shouldn’t feel frustration when he uses an animated gun.

IGN: How did the animation influence the tone of the game? It seems to lean a little more playful and I’m just sort of curious how you guys balance that of matching the animation to the tone of the game?

Mateusz: Animation, it’s crucial for the whole game, so it’s connecting also with the whole narrative element. It’s like when they think about MOUSE, they think about animation, they think about art and it’s a really great thing because we have a hook, we can hook them, interest them in the game. But beneath that, this art animation elements, there is a deep vibrating story and I believe that we’ll surprise a lot of people when they will play the game.

IGN: So you talked about the engine earlier. You guys are using the Unity engine here underneath the animation system. How much custom work had to go into Unity to get it to cooperate with the uniqueness of what you guys are doing with the animation?

Mateusz: The first prototype, however, the first prototype was done in Godot, but the proper development is we are doing in Unity. The unity is really good in managing the 2D animation sprites, it’s really good. But our game has thousands of thousands of animations and this was the most challenging part because still, you can put as much assets in the game, 2D assets, as you can, but your game can grow having 200 gigabytes, 300 gigabytes. So the most challenging part was the optimization process of the whole animations and we needed to develop a special tools that will compress 2D animations to have a better performance for the whole level because there is tons of animations, different kinds of animations through the whole level.

IGN: Can you talk about, on a similar note about if there were challenges of using 2D animations in a 3D game? We don’t see that very often. I imagine that had to present some sort of challenge either in the animation itself and maybe the level design as well.

Mateusz: I think it would be much easier to make everything in 3D. The most challenging part, managing 2D assets, especially enemies in 3D space is to animate all directions. So we need to animate front, front left, left side, back left, back. All the bosses, all the enemies, every skills, every objects, so not objects, every enemies, bosses and some interactive objects, they are animated in 9 or 8 directions. So it was challenging and really time-consuming. Also, having 3D animations, it’s much easier to add every bit of animation to the game. Having 2D animations, we needed to think really carefully what we want to add because we don’t want to spend weeks animating things and then we will just delete our work. We wanted to have the whole 2D animations into the foreground, not in the background. So we use flat colors as in the old Rubber Hose animation. So there are all flat colors and you can spot really easily every 2D animation, walking around the level. Either this is enemy or 2D animation objects, interactive objects, you can’t really easily spot it.

IGN: I have to imagine that this project has been more difficult than maybe you initially thought. And I only say that because I mean making any video game is clearly not an easy thing, but nobody else does this. You guys are the only studio making a game in this way. So how much more difficult, how have you found the process over time? Have you really, I imagine you’ve learned a lot in the course of development.

Mateusz: We made a lot of mistakes, a lot of mistakes. And going back and forth, back and forth with numbers of things. I think that there are few FPS games that using sprites or using to the animations, but I think our project is unique that we are using a lot of frames, a lot of images in our animations to show that the Rubber Hose animation style is really unique and the whole animation is really unique. And I know that right now there is a debate if hand skills not be useful in the future or they will be replaced with some tools. I believe, and I think that we showed it, that having a great hand skills, having a great artist, it’s only beneficial for your game and the project itself.

IGN: I’m curious as to maybe this might be a good one for Michal, your inspirations for this because Cuphead, I think of very quickly, for obvious reasons, the other really amazingly hand-drawn game, totally different kind of game of course than your boomer shooter, but I also, I get a little bit of Who Framed Roger Rabbit from this too. I’d be curious to hear your inspirations.

Michal: I think the biggest over overall our inspiration, our biggest inspiration is the Rubber Hose art style as a whole. Our biggest inspiration is the animations from the Fleischer Studios, the people who create such a characters as Betty Boop, Popeye, Coco the Clown, or Bimbo the Dog. Fun fact, we probably watched every available Popeye episode during the pre-production, took the best inspirations for the environments for the characters. But also how they inspired by works of Ub Iwerks. He was a lead animator in Disney. He was animating for example, Steamboat Willie but then he became a solo animator and became a solo career and make characters such as Flip The Frog or Willie Whopper, but also other animation studios for that era. Like for example, Paul Terry, Charles Mintz, but also the old cartoons that were quite violent for that era. But it was a good inspiration for the combat and fight for our game. So we took a lot from them.

IGN: Awesome. The last question I have for you guys, maybe for either or both of you, so now you’re almost there. The game is nearly complete, it’s almost out. Moving forward, do you guys want to stick with this animation style for your next project or was this a one-time fun experiment, fun project or is the Rubber Hose animation going to be the Fumi Studio signature moving forward?

Mateusz: I think that the overall hand-drawn style will be our studio signature. I believe in the craftsmen of artists and I think that we will surprise people in the future with our next project.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our semi-retired interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.