Peter Molyneux's Masters of Albion looks like three games in one, but it also looks like none of them is any good

Masters of Albion, the upcoming god-slash-action-slash-management game from Peter Molyneux's 22Cans, has a new six minute "epic deep dive" trailer showcasing what you'll be getting up to. And the perhaps unsurprising news is that none of it looks like much fun.

The selling point for Masters of Albion is that it's basically all the Peter Molyneux games you love in one: it's a bit like Fable, a bit like Populous, chuck a dash of Black & White in there, and we're good to go. The player switches between management elements, upgrading buildings and the like, can intervene in events on the ground with magic powers, and finally can take direct control of a character and run about in third-person.

The new trailer showcases each of these and is contiguous, so at least we know this is the game we'll actually be playing. Thing is, it's a Jack of all trades, master of none. The base management is as basic as it gets, at least in this preview, with the player upgrading shacks and shuttling resources about, with the occasional stop-off in a crafting menu. It's all… well, fine.

But wait! The secret sauce is that, once you've crafted something like a basic sword, you can then take control of the villager you hand it to, and go on some cave adventuring! Neat idea. In reality, this is PS2-era third-person combat, with a block/parry and special moves, no particular weight to it, and again you're just left thinking… fine.

Thirdly, the trailer shows how you can switch between this and a more hands-on god mode. A mission asks you to escort worshippers somewhere and protect them: this is done through a mix of third-person melee combat and swooshing into the top-down view to toss projectiles at foes. Again, it looks… fine, I guess.

I want to be clear here: I love Bullfrog games, I love Lionhead games, and Fable 2 in particular is an all-timer for me. Masters of Albion is attempting to pick-and-mix all these disparate elements from across Molyneux's career and somehow come up with a coherent experience that delivers the best of them all. That is an insanely ambitious ask, not least because Molyneux probably deserves 1% of the credit for most of the games that bear his name, and it's no surprise that this underwhelms.

"This is where the game truly comes alive," says Molyneux in a press release. "Seeing all of these systems working together—building, crafting, exploration, and conflict—finally delivers the feeling of power, creativity, and responsibility that defines a true God game."

It looks dead on arrival. The PR fluff makes much of voice actor Marc Silk returning, who also starred in Black & White and Fable, but Rowan Atkinson couldn't do anything with this script. The game tries to crack a joke with every other line, but it's just not working.

Molyneux has had many verbs attached to his name, but not one of them is "funny." For all his po-faced promises and daft ideas may be amusing, Molyneux is not a funny guy. Fable was funny. Accepting that it's made by a wider team and may barely have seen his hand, Masters of Albion is that creaky kind of dad humour that never really works: every joke is telegraphed, every single bit that you're supposed to find funny is signposted, and where it should feel light, it just comes across as weary.

Oh, I can take command of a chicken? Great. Let me just put these other three hundred games on the backlog to rush over. The narrator calls me "big hand" when I'm in god mode, controlling a big hand? Be still, my aching sides.

For all their faults, the first two Fable games were funny. Not always in the main narrative thrust, and maybe not always in the way they were meant to be, but those games made me laugh. One of my fondest gaming memories will always be my then-housemate discovering that if you held the fart button in Fable 2 long enough, your character crapped their pants. He just did it over and over, cackling away as villagers swarmed around him and then walked off with disgust.

Masters of Albion, you feel, would just have a "crap your pants" button and two or three narrator lines you'd soon get sick of. This is a game where surely the appeal is in the charm rather than industry beating mechanics. But it has no charm. Molyneux's grand return looks like what the cynics would expect, and I'm sorry to join their ranks. Just an old hand going through the motions, telling the same jokes. Except they're not funny anymore.

Masters of Albion releases April 22, 2026, on Steam Early Access.