| Masters of Albion | |||
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| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | Pre-Order & DLC | Early Access Review |
Masters of Albion is Peter Molyneux’s latest god game. Read on to learn everything we know, our review of its early access build, and more.
Everything We Know About Masters of Albion
Masters of Albion Plot
In Masters of Albion, players will take on the god-granted role of the Chosen One. Through their hand, the world is theirs to be shaped with only one burden: to defeat an ancient and deadly foe. The Chosen One is destined to defend the inhabitants of Albion and to wield the Mask’s power as only one of pure blood can.
Masters of Albion Gameplay
In Masters of Albion, players are tasked with the development and safety of their abode, as decaying creatures will rise at night to bring it to ruin. They must raise defensive structures, throw exploding barrels, and possess heroes to fight the battles themselves.
Masters of Albion gives players a wide array of paintable modular parts to create their own structures. They can also possess a variety of life, from villagers, heroes, to even the wildlife. While playing as them, they can explore, go on quests, and interact with others.
Masters of Albion Release Date
Masters of Albion entered Steam Early Access on April 22, 2026, at 10:00 A.M. PT / 1:00 P.M. ET. Even though the game is now available to play, a specific date for its full release has yet to be announced.
| Digital Storefronts | |||||
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 Steam |
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| $24.99 Early Access |
Masters of Albion Review (Early Access)
Jack of All Trades, Master of None
Peter Molyneux has spent a career promising us the moon, only to consistently fall short of the astronomical expectations he sets for himself. This evokes the spirit of Black & White and Fable (particularly their sequels) for those who grew up playing them; we want to believe his grand vision of worlds far beyond and better than our own, but there's almost always something holding them back. Alas, c'est la vie.
Masters of Albion acts as a culmination of his life’s work, gathering all the god-game mechanics he once pioneered into this final project. You can see the ambition in every corner of the map. He is chasing the same dragon he fought back in the ‘90s with Populous and Dungeon Keeper, and watching him return to that pursuit is a fascinating experience. With this title, he is effectively synthesizing his legacy, distilling three decades of design philosophy into a definitive statement on what his games were always meant to be.
The experience is undeniably rough around the edges, with some systems feeling like they are straining to hold themselves together. Yet, I found myself completely drawn in by the very quirks that make it feel disjointed. It’s strange and compelling how these mismatched mechanics collide in harmony. Managing the economy by day while scrambling to defend against the horrors of the night, then expanding your settlement come morning, is a rhythm that feels entirely its own. I will say that, for however messy the game is, it’s fun to play god.
During The Day, You Build and Manage Your Town
Masters of Albion defies the neat little boxes that we usually put games into. It is a town-builder, sure, but it is also a third-person action game and a god simulator all rolled into one. To put it mildly, it’s a lot. Peter Molyneux has tried to stitch together the disparate limbs of his past creations into a Frankensteinian creature. If you have ever played Black & White or Fable, you will get a sense of déjà vu here; it plays like those games, and even sometimes looks like them, too.
You essentially play as a literal dismembered hand of a hooded guy that was somehow given the power and task of protecting the region after sitting on a throne. The hand functions as a cursor, and you use it to manipulate almost every aspect of the world below. Aside from clicking menus, you are also physically reaching into the map to move villagers or fling rocks at enemies or drag buildings across the landscape, all while the people you rule over just try to get through the day.
During the morning, you build farms to harvest the grain, then you construct mills to grind that grain into flour, and finally, you build factories to bake that flour into specific food items being demanded from you. That last bit comes in the form of a short minigame, where you have to meet the orders’ specific demands, even if that means turning rats into soup. This is how you earn money, which you’ll be needing a lot of if you want to grow your town.
Save for assembling orders, many of the tasks are automated as long as villagers are present to man the workstations. However, these take quite a bit of time. If your, say, factory is far from the mining deposit, then you’re going to have to wait as your villagers galavant their way to and fro.
You can save time by reaching down with your magic fingers to speed up the manufacturing process, but this part can still be hellish. Rome wasn’t built in a day, yes; things take time, but it’s frustrating to have to intervene because your villagers are working too slowly when you need the extra cash to progress through the campaign.
As fun as managing your little town is, its jankiness gets in its way. It’s an early-access game, so some form of jank is to be expected. Villagers are already slow, but performance dropped so often that I had to lower the graphics settings to their minimum, yet even that didn’t solve the issue.
The worst offender was when a villager working at the Water Purifier wasn’t doing their job of watering the farm to automate wheat production. It turned out the villager was stuck underneath the building and couldn't move.
Really, it’s faster to do the job myself, but as the god of this lowly village, I often wonder why I have to constantly perform tasks that should be automated in the first place.
Thankfully, the game’s various quirks do little to diminish the satisfaction of watching a factory line hum to life, especially knowing you were the one who laid every brick and assigned every worker.
It’s a city builder by day, but don't be fooled; every daytime task is really just a race to fortify your town’s defenses before the sun goes down.
During the Night, You Try to Survive
Come nightfall, the peace of your village disintegrates entirely. The game suddenly forces you into a tower-defense scenario. Waves of monsters begin rising from the earth, and they are not interested in your economy or your perfectly baked rat pie.
First, you have your structures, your primary line of defense. You cannot simply build these and walk away, though. You have to place towers, ballistae, and walls at specific spots where the monsters spawn or pathfind their way to your base.
I’ve found that placing these structures is more tedious than it should be. The system requires positioning, which is manageable during the day but really difficult under the pressure of night, since you’ll be facing hordes of the undead across the map. In the heat of the moment, navigating menus to place a tower requires a level of composure that is difficult to maintain while your base is being overrun AND the game is suffering from erratic frame rates.
Aside from structures, though, you also have your heroes you can drop directly into the fray. If a monster breaks through your perimeter wall, where your ballistae possibly can’t get them, you grab your best hero, toss them into the cluster of enemies, and watch them go to work (or immediately die if they’re too low-leveled).
Heroes, however, have a certain range to their patrol. Unless the monster is directly near them, they do not always know how to prioritize targets. So more often than not, you’ll be dragging them by the ear to a horde of monsters just so they would go after that pesky zombie just a few inches beside them. Much like the sluggishness of your villagers during the day, you face a similar level of micromanagement at night.
You can do the deed yourself and possess the heroes to experience some clunky third-person action combat, but I found this to be too ineffective, especially since you have to babysit the entire village and move stuff around during the defense.
Moreover, it feels disconnected from the rest of the game. When you are down at the ground fighting monsters, you lose your eagle’s eye view of the town. You cannot see the rest of your defenses, and you cannot easily switch back to god mode to toss a stray boulder at a nearby group of enemies without fumbling through some menus. Really, unless the situation demands it, it feels better to just let the AI do its own thing, and you micromanage everything from up above.
You are an all-powerful deity, still, so beyond babysitting the villagers, you have the tools in your fingertips to battle with invading forces. You can summon lightning bolts to zap enemies or grab something from the environment to hurl at the horde.
Throwing a massive rock into a crowd of ghouls and watching them scatter is fun. But, like the daytime segments, the jank is ever-present. Sometimes, your lightning simply refuses to strike where you point. Other times, the physics of throwing objects feels floaty and imprecise.
It doesn’t help that the environment fails to adjust to your camera angle; there will be times when trees, rock formations, and even the buildings you’ve constructed get in the way of your view.
When you aren't busy building or defending your town, you can possess almost anyone you encounter and head out to explore beyond your territory. You can take on side quests, such as escorting a bothersome character across the map or even participating in the classic pastime of chicken-kicking, just like the good ol’ days on the Xbox. You’ll also encounter bizarre puzzles, like arranging stone pillars in a specific musical sequence. These eccentricities are simply part of Peter Molyneux’s charm.
However, the actual content of these quests currently feels thin at the moment. They offer some extra cash or resources to help your settlement grow, but they don’t evolve beyond errands: deliver this, craft that, fetch this for that. The objectives function like checklists to keep you busy, yet they rarely feel essential to the overall experience.
There’s Promise Buried Under All This Jank
Of course, Masters of Albion is still in its infancy. For now, the game can easily get away with being janky; those rough edges are expected, and I hope they get ironed out once this project finds its footing. 22cans have been open about this being "Chapter One" of a larger game. They are aware of the game’s faults and seem passionate about improving it based on player feedback. As it grows, we can expect more regions to open up and the game get a level of polish that hopefully matches the ambition behind it.
Despite my gripes and the moments of frustration during my playthrough, I still find the game fun to play. I want to see how this map expands and how my settlements might look once these systems are finally humming in sync.
Zooming out, I can see the potential for what this project will become. I will keep playing, watching the fog of war lift from the edges of the map, waiting to see if this world can truly become the masterpiece Peter Molyneux hints at it being. For now, though, the sun is rising on Albion, and I have a town to rebuild.
Game8 Reviews
