Skull and Bones Review: Not the pirates game you were looking for

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The appeal of Skull and Bones is laser focused. It’s about being on a boat. You have to want the fantasy of sailing big pirate boats and you need to not want much else for your time and money. You may come wanting to live the fantasy of being a ruthless waterborne pilferer, but to live that fantasy you first need to love sailing a boat in the direction of crafting materials. skull and bones review

In Skull and Bones you’re allowed to get off your boat, but only to interact with vendors, mission-givers, mayhaps a buried treasure chest. In the vast island-dotted expanse of the Indian Ocean there are two major pirate settlements where blacksmiths, carpenters, refiners, and most “contracts” (missions) are doled out, both for the main quest and its endgame component. 

The focus on naval fights works a lot better than I thought it would.

While it’s a bit odd at first that you only ever explore the world by controlling your ship (aside from brief intermissions at the social hub), it took just a few hours for me to not feel like I was missing out on much. That’s primarily thanks to how good the ship-to-ship combat quickly becomes. After a fairly underwhelming opening meant to help you get your sea legs with the glorified hunk of driftwood you’ll call your starting ship, things really open up. Once you start to upgrade and customize your vessel to fit your playstyle, then tackle some of the more challenging areas and activities that require you to seriously up your game, Ubisoft’s strict focus on navals fights works a lot better than I thought it would.

Disappointingly Weak Story of Skull and Bones

Disappointingly, Skull and Bones only has the faintest whiff of a story, which focuses on two of the very few major NPCs: a vulgar English pirate named Captain John Spurlock, and a violent political dissident named Admiral Rahma, neither of whom are particularly interesting. You have a couple conversations with each of these rogues and run a few missions for them that conclude in a boss fight against a particularly mean boat, then they tell you to buzz off and do your own thing just as fast. That’s not to say there aren’t a few likable rogues and skallywags to meet along the way – like Yanita, who introduces you to the world of black market trading with all the enthusiasm and pomp of a circus ringmaster – but NPCs are little more than vendors and quest dispensers with no substantial story connecting them. 

It’s especially weird that meatier pieces of the story seem to have been lopped off since I saw them in the closed beta last year, like an early part where you meet a dying pirate named Abel Rassler, who you now just find dead instead. My guess is these changes were made to keep you out on the ocean waves as long as possible rather than lingering in the social spaces, and I certainly found myself spending a lot more time doing just that – which isn’t such a bad thing. Still, I expect my pirate games to have a bit of drama, infighting, and betrayal, and Skull and Bones doesn’t even attempt to tell a story of any substance or consequence, so feel free to make use of that skip button during the few conversations there are.

PvP is often hilarious in a good way

When they work properly, that is, and unfortunately they often don’t. There’s a really common bug where, instead of the Hostile Takeover activity directing you to one area, it points you to six or seven, annoyingly leaving you scrambling to figure out which is the right one (each with their own lengthy travel time). If you pick wrong, showing up late to the right area is basically just wasted time since someone else will have likely gained a commanding lead in your absence. Other times, during Legendary Heists, I’ve had the person who grabs the loot simply never become targetable by other players, completely eliminating the interesting PvP aspect. During one of my “double or nothing” supply runs, Skull and Bones crashed entirely, and my prized coins were nowhere to be found when I logged back on. Issues like these are pretty rampant once you reach the endgame, and they’ll continue to throw a massive wet sail over the whole thing until they get addressed.

Even when these events are working, the endgame is needlessly grindy in its current state, Skull and Bones doesn’t have nearly enough variety in its activities to keep things interesting for very long. Since it costs thousands of gold coins (called Pieces of Eight) to unlock single items, you’re expected to play a whole heck of a lot, long after the campaign has sunk to the bottom of the ocean, and there’s not currently any quests or enemies in the world that require those powerful items to power through them (aside from other players willing to do so for an advantage in PvP). Hopefully the upcoming seasonal content will provide actual reasons to want them, but Ubisoft would also need to add a lot more activities to keep that grind interesting, because right now all you can do is repeat the same handful of tasks, then shuttle your loot from each settlement back to the base ad nauseam.

Although it’s not particularly unique in the live-service space, Skull and Bones is an extremely unstable experience in this early state. I had crashes every couple of hours, pixelated textures that loaded right in front of me, and most irritating of all: constant erroneous notifications popping up every couple of seconds, sometimes repeatedly for hours at a time, clogging up the screen with obnoxious and inaccurate warnings that drove me absolutely up the wall. I still enjoyed most of my time lobbing explosives at unsuspecting merchant vessels, but shiver me timbers, that exasperating layer of jank really made it harder to

Skull and Bones Review: The Verdict 6/10 (good)

Skull and Bones isn’t the successor to Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag that many seem to want, and it isn’t many of things Ubisoft itself said it would be at various points in its storied history, but the seafaring RPG we ultimately got is still surprisingly good. Sailing around the Indian Ocean firing cannons, mortars, and giant ballista at your foes is a fun time, the RPG mechanics and cooperative buildcrafting is as deep as the ocean with plenty of awesome gadgets to grind for, and the economy simulator is impressively in-depth. It doesn’t quite fulfill the promise of a decade-long cruise to port yet either, with a thin endgame, almost no story to speak of, and general instability that sometimes makes the adventure feel like a rough draft. But here’s hoping some of those shortcomings can be washed away by the waves of content already planned to come in an ambitious live-service roadmap that’s fast approaching. For now, its maiden voyage is a good start.