Peter Molyneux’s Latest Game Is A Broken Sandwich-Making Sim

It would be a foolhardy soul who was optimistic that the latest game from Peter Molyneux’s 22cans studio would break the pattern of its last few dreadful and swiftly abandoned releases, given the company’s decade of broken games and promises. But even so, there was a hype surrounding Masters of Albion that was absent from earlier releases The Trail and Legacy, the two games released since the utter disaster that was Godus, both quickly forgotten (by players and the developer). Masters of Albion looked like so many of those Bullfrog classics on which Molyneux had made his name, all-time greats like Populous and Dungeon Keeper, and the never-great but somehow remembered-as-such Black & White. This was to be his swansong, a final game that combined his masterpieces into one ultimate god-game. Yeah, no, it’s a shitty mobile-like game about making sandwiches.

At first glance, Masters of Albion suggests the possibility of goodness. A clumsy and bizarrely dull opening finally makes way for a delightful-looking little village, interacted with by a god-like floating hand. It’s charming, and the way the hand appears to change its postures depending on context conjures memories of the mythical folkloric version of Black & White that somehow exists as a shared delusion in the minds of modern players. Oh, I thought as I discovered I could strip the ivy and moss from abandoned ruins and then pick them up and restack them into buildings—could this actually be…quite good? No, that illusion lasted about as long as it took me to write the sentence describing it, as I was very quickly slammed back to earth. I was being told to make sandwiches, but in the most ambiguous way imaginable, and I had no idea why.

There was even a last gasp for my hope. It turns out I cleaned and fixed up those buildings before the tutorial intended me to, but rather than causing issues with scripted progression, instead the voice talking to me noticed this and commented on it. Whoa! The fact this voice worked the word “fuck” into her first comment to me, twice(!), was incredibly weird and embarrassing, but at least this responsiveness to what I’d done suggested something far more coherent and less thrown-together than the never-finished Kickstarter rip-off Godus (now, astonishingly, delisted from Steam), or the crypto-scammy NFT shitfest Legacy. (22cans no longer even admits the existence of Legacy on its own site, despite allegedly selling over $50 million in NFTs for the rapidly abandoned project.) Yet this moment was somewhat undermined by my softlocking myself out of the game by then buying something from the skill tree before the tutorial intended (though after the skill tree threw up a notification to say it was available), which forced me to reload and lose a bunch of progress. And when you learn that “progress” in this case involved making more fucking sandwiches, you might begin to understand my current mood.

(Fun bonus fact: there’s no way to return to the main menu in Albion. You have to quit and reload. Loading takes forever. Top quality stuff.)

This speaks to the very obvious lack of testing that’s taken place ahead of this release, and it’s a common enough issue that 22cans has called it out and said it’ll be patched in the first update. Meanwhile, the current “fix” is to reload a previous day of the game, which isn’t a fix at all.

Perfidious Albion

Let’s describe what you actually do in Masters of Albion. The game appears to be a mix between a Settlers-like village-building sim, a tower defense zombie-hitting game, and a god game in which you directly interact with your villagers. The zombie aspect happens at night, when a few stragglers will stumble toward your town and you need to respond by throwing rocks at them (deeply buggy), zapping them with electricity from your hand (surprisingly cool-looking but practically extremely boring), and launching attacks from defensive structures you build in the daytime (they do very little). On top of this, you have heroes who will try to defend the town (I say “try” because like everything else, they’re useless), and who you can possess for direct control to explore the surrounding area.

As for the Settlers comparison, it’s as if instead of having a team of cheerful souls who, say, chop wood, feed timber mills, and produce products, you instead have to do it all for them because they’re impossibly slow, no matter how many you hire, and you do that by just sitting on your ass and holding down a mouse button. You get “orders” to make food, weapons and so on for various characters, which involves a mind-numbing minigame in which you must construct a sandwich or a bowl of soup or, for especially exciting moments, a pie, and then feed it to some taster dude who lets you know if it meets the requirements. If so, it goes into production, which involves a farmer harvesting wheat, then you holding your finger down on the farm to speed up time such that it does anything useful at all. That done, you have to laboriously drag each bag of wheat from the farm to the mill by hand, because if you wait for the villagers to do it you’ll turn to dust and blow away. Then hold you finger on the mill, then drag the flour to the factory. Then hold your finger on the factory to make the food. Then do this again and again and again because this game hates you.

And yes, you make soups, pies and rat-sandwiches exclusively using a single ingredient: flour. Why? Because this game hates you. This game thinks you’re an idiot. Soon you get to do all the same things but for swords or timber items, and it’s exactly the same as making the sandwiches. It’s just a big sandwich factory of a game.

So we should underline that this game is in Early Access, and according to its Steam page that’s intended to last at least another 12 months. The game is not finished at all and one should bear that in mind, although it does claim to already include all its intended features, intending to now balance and improve things based on player feedback. Evaluating such a game usually requires a hefty level of grace, given that there are no claims of a polished release and people are willingly buying into what they know is an incomplete project. It’s just, in this specific case, 22cans doesn’t exactly have a great reputation when it comes to completing anything. Godus, funded by the public and released into Early Access in 2014, never received any of its many promised upgrades, despite a long string of promises that this would change in 2015. Instead another very quickly abandoned game called Godus Wars appeared to everyone’s bemusement, itself awful, and as mentioned both games have now been entirely erased to hide the fact that they never came close to a functioning form. 2016’s The Trail: Frontier Challenge was last updated within the month of release on PC, and its ad-riddled, IAP-filled mobile version remains buggy and poorly supported. And Legacy just disappeared after selling its $50m of NFTs.

Based on this, I would venture that it would perhaps be verging on the side of naive to have faith that Masters of Albion will ever become the imagined god game to end all god games, or indeed ever be finished at all. But I do imagine we will at least see some balance tweaks in the coming days that will hopefully recognize just how miserable every single aspect of the current game is to play. Production is so woefully slow, heroes are so painfully underpowered, zombies are such ridiculous hit-sponges, combat is so indistinct and uninvolved, and the day and night aspects of the game are so utterly disconnected that you can set a day to last literally forever until you press the “make it night now” button. The game has to start flashing up icons to remind you to press the button at all, so unnaturally does it all fit in.

But no tweaks and balances can change the ultimate purpose of the game: making sandwiches. Over the few hours I’ve played, I’ve realized what this really is: It’s a mobile clicker game with really pretty graphics. This is the same as any number of those “build a village, fight the enemy” games you see endlessly advertised for phones, except instead of dragging with your finger you’re having to combat the far more fiddly and tiresome system of moving things around with a phantom hand within a 3D world. It’s as dull as those throwaway free-to-play banalities, but it doesn’t even offer the ability to make it all just fucking hurry up by watching an ad.

Unpopulous

To be scrupulously fair, it does certain things much better than expected. The voice acting is great, even if the dialogue is arduous (when you buy your hand’s first gesture, you have to listen to a character talk uninterrupted about literally nothing to do with the game for a solid two minutes). The art is really impressive, and I love the way buildings click together as you add new bedrooms or worker facilities. And the lightning effects at night look fantastic! Clearly a lot of art talent has been poured into this. I’m also really impressed with the way the game lets you scroll out seamlessly from a close-up detail to the entire world map, and it looks really cute doing it.

But what this isn’t, in any sense at all, is something that will remind you of playing the seminal Populous, or the sublime Dungeon Keeper, nor does it even gesture toward the imaginary version of Black & White. (That game’s selling point was the giant animals and their purported AI which never actually worked at the time, but there’s nothing even hinting at an idea as lovely as that here.) But you can kick chickens. I don’t know why you can, but Masters of Albion is a game where approaching a chicken offers a “kick” button, and there’s a terrible, buggy quest in which you have to kick them to get them back in a pen. It is very unpleasant to simulate kicking a wild animal that squawks in horror as you do so, but those hankering for the days of slapping a massive cow will perhaps find solace in this.