Skull and Bones Review – Serviceable Swashbuckling

Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones has been on a very long and choppy voyage with development reportedly setting sail over a decade ago. Admittedly, the initial pitch was a fairly appealing one – an open-world multiplayer pirate adventure from the same Ubisoft Singapore team that worked on the naval battles from the acclaimed Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Unfortunately, the game’s 2017 reveal was followed by reboots, damning behind-the-scenes reports, and a seemingly endless sequence of delays. Many began to suspect the game would eventually sail over the horizon, never to be seen again, but lo-and-behold, Skull and Bones finally drifted ashore last week.

Now that it’s arrived, will Skull and Bones shiver your timbers, or has its hull gone rotten while it was waiting to be launched? Batten down the hatches; it’s time to find out.

Skull and Bones is set in and around the Indian Ocean during the fabled early-18th-Century “Golden Age of Piracy.” Players take on the role of a nameless scallywag who survives after their ship is smashed by the British Fleet. You manage to make your way back to the pirate sanctuary of Sainte-Anne, quickly hook up with the town’s overlord John Scurlock, and get down to the business of rising through the pirate ranks. Why do you have to start back at the bottom? Why does nobody know you from before? Good question! While players can determine what their buccaneer guy or lady looks like using a basic editor, you never learn anything about your backstory or motivation beyond “Is pirate, wants booty.”

In terms of plot, there are plenty of different factions and names vying for control of the Indian Ocean, giving the world somewhat of a sense of place, but everything’s delivered in the flattest way possible. Scurlock and a small handful of other important NPCs simply deliver exposition while standing in their offices in scene after scene, most of which you can safely skip without missing anything meaningful.

Okay, if Skull and Bones is a bust narratively, what is its hook? What is this game all about? Well, it’s essentially a sailing-heavy survival game. Broadly speaking, your goal is to earn “Infamy” XP and rise through the pirate ranks (from Buccaneer to Brigand, Marauder, and so on) and to do this, you need to improve your ship, which has its own separate level. To get a better base ship and equip it with the most badass weapons and gear, you’ll need a lot of crafting materials. This is the kind of game where you have to keep track of at least a half-dozen different types of wooden planks.

So, how do you get these crafting materials? Except for a few scattered outposts, you can’t actually get out of your ship and explore on foot. Early on, you’re stuck looking for materials along coastlines and harvesting them using a simple timing minigame. Thankfully, before too long, you’ll gain the ability to earn materials through more violent means, like sinking other ships and plundering settlements. While scrounging for materials can be repetitive, it doesn’t feel like too much of a grind, as the game actually has fairly good tools for tracking the components you need to build a specific item. That typical survival game thing where you’re forced to spend an hour wandering in circles to find that one rare drop you need isn’t really a problem here.

Customizing your ship is actually fairly satisfying, as you can install a large array of different weapons (cannons, ballistas, torpedoes, etc.), hulls, and even furniture and improvements that grant various buffs. The various ship archetypes feel genuinely different, and you have the freedom to further customize them to your playstyle. And hey, once you’re done tinkering with the functional stuff, you can also play with the look of your ship and your own personal style.

Of course, all this focus on customization is how Ubisoft hopes to funnel Skull and Bones players into paying extra for microtransactions. While you’ll unlock some cosmetics for your ship and captain by completing missions, the large majority are locked away behind a somewhat baffling array of in-game currencies. For now, Gold (the currency you have to buy with real-world money) isn’t being pushed too hard with most stuff being sold in exchange for various free in-game currencies, but make no mistake, Skull and Bones’ live service elements are woven deeply into its sails. Cosmetics are thrust into your face every time you fiddle with your ship and multiple missions actually force you into the clothing store to try on new duds. Skull and Bones will offer regular seasonal updates, including paid Smuggler Passes, and I suspect the ratio of cosmetics you need to pay real money for will increase.

Designing your dream vessel can be enjoyable, even if it’s a bit grindy and potentially expensive at times, but what’s it like when you take to the high seas? Controls for maneuvering your vessel in Skull and Bones are simple, with only a cursory resemblance to sailing a real-life ship aside from scoring the occasional speed boost by pointing yourself in the same direction the wind is blowing. That said, there’s no question there’s something compelling about exploring this game’s sprawling world.

Skull and Bones’ map encompasses Madagascar, the East Coast of Africa, and the East Indies, and there always seems to be something – harvestable materials, shipwrecks, settlements and outposts, rival ships – just over the horizon and around every bend in the river. While Skull and Bones’ infrequent on-foot sections look dated and scruffy, the game can be quite visually appealing when out on the water as storms roll in and out and golden rays of light filter down upon realistic and inviting-looking waves.

Exploring the Indian Ocean is a mostly laid-back, agreeable experience. By default, you’ll share your world with 20 other online players, who you’ll bump into on occasion, but they can’t mess with you outside of specific PvP activities. AI ships usually aren’t too aggressive, although you will occasionally encounter a higher-level vessel that provides a much-needed feeling of danger. If your ship goes down, you’ll lose all your cargo on board, but a Soulslike system is in place that lets you retrieve your stuff by returning to where you sunk. This provides a little bit of risk-reward tension – do you, say, get into a fight with that well-guarded convoy of merchant ships you’ve happened across and chance losing what’s already in your hull in an inopportune location?

Speaking of fights, you’ll be getting into them often, which isn’t a bad thing as combat is one Skull and Bones’ stronger aspects. Much like basic movement, naval combat in Skull and Bones has been simplified compared to something like Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, with precise positioning not being as much of a concern and rough seas rarely being a factor. While naval battles in Assassin’s Creed IV felt like monumental struggles to wrangle your vessel into position and deliver that killer blow, Skull and Bones is a faster-paced back-and-forth volley of cannon fire. While you can deploy different weapons depending on whether you’re head-on, alongside, or ahead of an opponent, aiming and firing is done with a very unrestricted reticule, which you can position more-or-less independently of how your cannons would realistically be able to move.

And yes, as you’ve likely read previously, there is no actual playable boarding sequence in Skull and Bones. Instead, you simply wear down an opposing ship’s life bar, get close, and push the boarding button to capture and loot them, kind of like a high-seas version of Pokemon. This may all sound like a step down from Assassin’s Creed IV, and in some respects it is, but I kind of understand the need for the changes. You engage in a lot of ship battles in Skull and Bones, and the more realistic, arduous approach of ACIV may have worn thin after a while. The approach to combat taken here is snappier and, as simple as it is in some ways, I haven’t grown completely tired of it after hundreds of sorties.

While certainly not as varied as Assassin’s Creed IV, there’s a fair number of different activities in Skull and Bones. In addition to standard naval battles, you can also plunder settlements, search for buried treasure, and even unravel mysteries. World events allow you to tackle big challenges like a prehistoric sea monster or ghost ship with other players. Alternatively, you can compete against your fellow players, racing to deliver precious cargo while others chase you down. Multiplayer can be quite fun, at least when you can find enough other players to participate. Again, there are only 20 players per server spread out over a very large 600-plus km² map, so unless you’re playing with friends, it can be hard to round up others to help you or attempt to kick your ass.

A general sense that not all of Skull and Bones’ systems are entirely thought through pervades the game. While straight-up bugs are surprisingly rare, the game’s UI can be messy and irritating popup messages are far too frequent. Perhaps the most frustrating oversight I’ve encountered is while other players can’t directly attack you, they can engage in high-level missions in your world which spawn powerful AI ships that can target you and take you out with a single shot. You can usually fix this by quitting the game and logging back into a new server with (hopefully) no high-level players, but I’ll admit I lost some valuable cargo to this issue.

After you complete the 12-to-15-hour campaign and amass the required Infamy, Skull and Bones’ endgame takes on the form of a sort of business sim, in which you interrupt shipping lanes, deliver goods to outposts, and seize manufactories to grow your criminal empire. It’s an interesting approach, although it involves a fair amount of busywork and I’m not entirely sure if it will keep players hooked long-term. Future seasons promise more Pirate Lords to battle, goodies to collect, and new gameplay features, but it remains to be seen if this will be more than just slapping new paint on a humble hull.

This review was based on a PS5 copy of Skull and Bones provided by publisher Ubisoft.

Skull and Bones

It can be difficult to square the decade-plus Skull and Bones development cycle with its lack of features in some areas, but this isn’t the wreck many expected it to be. The game’s naval combat is simple yet engaging, its world is striking, ship customization is satisfying, and there are plenty of varied things to do, even if most of them don’t involve getting off your ship. Skull and Bones can be repetitive and it doesn’t exactly capture that devil-may-care pirate lifestyle, but keep expectations in check and there’s fun to be had sailing these pleasantly predictable seas.

Buy for $69.99 from Amazon

The links above are affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, Wccftech.com may earn from qualifying purchases.