I desperately want the Just Cause creator's new open-city game to be great, but I'm not convinced by its latest trailer

For the last couple years, I've been desperately craving a good open-city game, the kind that arrived with such regularity in the Xbox 360 era that we foolishly took them for granted. Yes, I know that Grand Theft Auto 6 is due to launch later this year. But I'm after something more arcadey and knockabout, like Watch Dogs or Sleeping Dogs or something else about car chases with 'Dogs' in the title.

I'd hoped that MindsEye would be that game, and clung to that hope right up until release. Sadly, all the scepticism around it proved justified, and MindsEye was nowhere near ready when it released in May last year.

My eyes then turned to Samson, an open-city game developed by Liquid Swords, founded by Just Cause creator Cristofer Sundberg. It puts you in the role of the titular Samson, who returns to his home city of Tyndalston with a large debt hanging over his head, one he intends to settle by hook or by crook (mostly crook).

Samson is, I should point out, not aiming to be as grand a project as MindsEye, and definitely not as big as a modern Grand Theft Auto. While the city is (mostly) freely driveable, it's designed to have a much tighter loop than GTA, with its creators stating they are "trying to pursue fewer things" than Rockstar.

Said loop works like this: each in-game day, you have to meet a daily quota of cash earned, otherwise the interest on the debt you owe will go up. It couples this with an "action points" system limiting the number of missions you can take on. Combined, these systems are designed to push you into making quick decisions and living with the consequences, a pressure intended to push you into chaotic car chases and fistfights.

I also like Samson's general aesthetic, blending a dilapidated industrial cityscape with grunting muscle cars. It immediately has a much stronger, more grounded identity than MindsEye, which fell flat with its vague blend of Las Vegas and Silicon Valley.

Samson sounds great on paper. But the recently published gameplay trailer left me unconvinced. The cars look fun enough to drive, as you'd 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 just doesn't look like it has a whole lot of style or depth to it.

There are a couple of other points of concern too. The environments look detailed, but the world seems sparsely populated, which makes me wonder how much life the city will have. The trailer is also nearly all driving or brawling, which to be fair forms the backbone of even blockbuster level city games. Nonetheless, something about the way it's presented leads me to question how much variety missions will actually have.

There is one great moment in the trailer, though, namely when Samson wangs a wrench straight into some guy's head, accompanied by the voiceover line "That's the sound a face makes when it meets regret." It's preposterous in all the right ways, and leaves me with some hope for the full game.

All told, I'd consider it a solid work-in-progress trailer if the game was, say, a year out from release. But Samson is scheduled to launch on April 8, less than a month away. To be clear, I am 100% rooting for Samson to succeed. God knows I'd love to play a new game with thrilling car chases and bruising fisticuffs a-la Sleeping Dogs. But I can't pretend that the trailer has filled me with confidence. Either way, we'll find how Samson shapes up next month.