Masters of Albion Looks Promising, But Early Access Still Hurts It

Masters of Albion is Peter Molyneux's latest early access game from 22cans, and it’s out on PC with no release date beyond that early access status. PC Gamer’s Shaun Prescott says the game finally feels like a real game again rather than a monetization experiment, which is exactly why this matters: if you’ve been burned by Molyneux’s past promises, this one at least looks like it wants to be played first and sold second.

The piece frames Masters of Albion as a god game, management sim, production line sim, tower defense game, and light action RPG all at once. That mix sounds messy, and in practice it is, but it also gives players more to do than the usual early access skeleton. If you care about Molyneux’s work, or you just want a strange PC game with real systems underneath the jokes, this is the one to watch while 22cans keeps building it out.

About Masters of Albion

Masters of Albion takes place in Albion, and the article says its art style and arch British humor channel Fable. Prescott also compares its gentle look to an Enid Blyton or Jill Barklem picture book, which sets up the game’s tonal trick nicely. Then the mentor blows that mood apart with a zombie panic line, and that contrast is part of the point: the game wants cosy village life and ugly danger in the same breath.

Prescott says the game feels like “the explicit, unadulterated version of previous Molyneux games mashed together,” and that’s a fair read. You play as a godly hand and mouse pointer, which makes every decision feel direct rather than abstract. That setup matters because it turns the whole town into a toybox you can prod, rearrange, and occasionally save from disaster.

God Hand and Rat Sandwich

The first job in Oakbridge is to rebuild the hamlet with pre-fabbed blocks, then connect a farm, mill, and factory into a working production chain. That chain starts with wheat and ends with flour, but the game also makes you handcraft sandwiches as a mini-economy lesson, using stale sourdough, moldy white, lettuce, tomato, and rat. It sounds absurd because it is absurd, but it also teaches the player how money and materials move through the town before the bigger systems start biting.

That economy gets stranger once nightly zombie attacks begin. You can repair fences, place catapult sentries, and open a heroes guild so your hired heroes sleep there and automatically fight zombies by night. From the firmament, you can help with lightning rods and later fire, which gives the player a real sense of divine intervention instead of just watching the town get chewed apart.

Prescott also says you can inhabit heroes and workers, and that changes the game from a top-down management sim into a third-person action RPG for stretches at a time. Heroes level up independently, and once you build an armory and weaponsmith, you can give them better gear. That gives the player a reason to care about individual characters, even if the traversal currently feels awkward and the map hides weird invisible walls.

One of the review’s best lines comes when the in-game mentor reacts to a midnight zombie attack with

Manufacturing sandwiches is pretty lucrative, but so is bashing hornet nests from trees, and kicking chooks back into their run

, followed by the article’s own joke that “Imagine if Maru in Stardew Valley called you a cockhead every time you proffered a snow yam.” The source also includes another line that sums up the game’s odd economy perfectly:

Manufacturing sandwiches is pretty lucrative, but so is bashing hornet nests from trees, and kicking chooks back into their run

. Those details matter because they show how sharply Masters of Albion swings between pastoral charm and rude, slapstick chaos.

What Works, What Doesn’t

Prescott is clear that the management side can get tedious, especially when the game asks for awkward building work and slow manufacturing. He had to produce 28 “balanced” sandwiches, then later 15 pies, while juggling debt, a depleted wheat field, and only 37 pounds on hand. That kind of pressure should create interesting choices, but here it mostly exposes how slow the production loop can feel when the game gives you no clock to race against.

Performance is the other big problem. Even on minimum settings, Prescott says the game lurches on a laptop that sits on the recommended specs, and 22cans’ Steam Deck-ready claim still comes with frame rates hovering around 22 fps on the lowest settings. That’s not a small issue for a game that asks players to manage towns, fight at night, and jump into hero bodies on the fly; when the frame rate stutters, so does the whole fantasy of being an all-seeing god.

Still, Prescott says the game has huge potential, and that comes through in the details that already work: the writing, the look on high settings, the ability to pick subjects up and drop them into the ocean, and the way sidequesting as a hero can make money once the town economy stalls. He also notes that manufacturing sandwiches is pretty lucrative, hornet nests can be smashed from trees, and chooks can be kicked back into their run, which is exactly the sort of rude little nonsense that makes Molyneux projects feel alive when they’re firing on all cylinders. Even so, this is still early access, and the rough edges show.

Prescott’s verdict is measured but hopeful: he enjoyed Masters of Albion despite its problems, and he says players who aren’t especially invested in Molyneux or god games should wait for more updates. That feels like the right call. The game already looks like Molyneux and 22cans are making something meant for broad play rather than another experimental commercial gambit, but whether they finish it remains the real question.

For now, Masters of Albion looks like a promising early access project with too many rough edges to recommend unreservedly. If 22cans keeps iterating over the next 12 months, the game could become something special; if not, it’ll join the long list of Molyneux ideas that arrived with a spark and left with a shrug. Either way, players who follow the project should keep an eye on future updates, because the bones are already there.