Masters of Albion Preview

In my younger days, there was a game called Black & White, which had you take on the role of a god with a magical hand. While there was a sequel, the series slowly fell into obscurity with the closure of Lionhead Studios. However, developer 22Cans has seemingly sought to take over those long-abandoned reins with its latest release: Masters of Albion. I had a chance to try out the Early Access release to test out the project.

Now, in the interest of fairness, the plot for Masters of Albion does not have you take on the role of a god, at least not literally. Instead, you are a hero who has taken up a magical throne that grants you power over the land and people. This power takes the form of a disembodied hand that allows you to interact with your environment. It is up to you, alongside your village, to find a solution to an undead crisis that’s affecting the world. While it might not be the most original plot, it serves the purpose of giving you a clear goal to aim for while helping to control the rush of new abilities and village elements. 

Speaking of abilities, as a giant floating hand, you have a wealth of skills that allow you to interact with the world. On a basic level, you can use your powers to speed up the production of resources and construct new buildings, as well as defences. However, as you gain more power, you’ll unlock skills that allow you to directly damage anything that comes too close to your people, or even possess a hero for a bit more face-to-face action. 

How this works is that Masters of Albion’s gameplay is split into a day and night cycle. The daytime is focused on completing orders and collecting resources, while the night has you holding off the undead. When the orders come in for you to complete, you’ll need to play a small mini-game to find the ideal combination of ingredients to meet the customer’s request. The answer isn’t always obvious, which isn’t helped by the hints sometimes being less informative than they really should be. 

Once you have a recipe, your villagers will start to gather ingredients and store them. You can speed up any part of the process, while also helping to move produce, but for some reason, your hand can be a bit finicky about what it wants to pick up. However, this could be easily solved with a simple patch. 

Meanwhile, construction is mostly based around selecting blocks and placing them in the relevant place, while making sure to keep an eye on your funds. It’s not the most customisable I’ve ever seen, but it at least works. One such building you’ll need is the Hero’s Guild, which (you guessed it) allows you to unlock heroes. 

Now, these brawny lads do more than just help you fight off the undead; you can also possess them to help you explore the parts of the map you now have power over, which in turn helps to expand your sphere of influence. The combat isn’t all that interesting when you’re controlling a hero, as you just spam the attack button, but it helps to add a change of pace to the gameplay. Ideally, we see a bit more exploration on this element. I would especially like a bit of customisation regarding armour and clothing. 

During the nighttime, you’ll need to use a mix of magic and defence to hold off the undead hordes. This can be anything from throwing rocks to casting fireballs, although I would recommend more of the latter. Interestingly, the nights really only happen when you choose, so there’s rarely a rush to put anything in place. The problem is that the actual gameplay is just kind of… dull. You cast spells by cycling through the options, then hitting the cast button. That’s it. It can get a bit tense when there’s a lot of zombies coming, but it’s rarely what I would call a challenge to complete.

Graphically, Masters of Albion is a very pretty game, with distinct character models alongside some solid voice acting. I want to make special mention to the advisors, who add a bit of needed comedy while also being informative enough to keep you up to date on what you should be doing. The UI is also easy to navigate and understand.

So, is Masters of Albion the spiritual return of Black & White, as I hoped? Kind of, and there are certainly some interesting ideas here, but there are also some rough edges that need to be ironed out. For one, while you can build, there’s not a lot of freedom in how you build, and the actual combat is lacking a certain wow factor. The problem is that, in the current iteration, it’s all just a bit bare bones (excuse the pun), but with a bit of work, it could be something great.