Skull & Bones - Review

Like spotting the first sign of shore after years adrift, Skull and Bones has finally, actually found its way to launch. Six separate delays and several different concepts that were forced to walk the plank might make you understandably apprehensive about Ubisoft’s long-brewing pirate game, but after spending over 60 hours hoisting sails and swabbing decks, I’ve had a yo-ho-whole lot of co-op fun with friends and strangers alike. The 17th-century Indian Ocean works well as avast open world to be explored and plundered, the RPG mechanics are (briny) deep with opportunities for buildcrafting alongside your fellow scurvy dogs, and the naval combat you’ll spend bucca-nearly all your time on the high seas engaging with is tactical and consistently entertaining. Predictably, there are still some major concerns common with always-online games nowadays, including performance issues and bugs aplenty, as well as a very small list of endgame activities that become monotonous and grindy in short oar-der. Skull and Bones might not be the AAAA Man-of-War Ubisoft was hoping for just yet, but with a strong start to a live-service that’s got a year of upcoming content mapped out, it’s already quite seaworthy.

Skull and Bones is fairly unique in the grand scheme of open-world RPGs in that it gives you direct control of a ship and lets you sail the ocean as you pillage ports and send enemy vessels to Davy Jones’ locker in search of loot and infamy. Alone or alongside the ships of up to two friends as a fleet, you’ll gather resources and complete action-packed heists to feed your greed and climb Jacob’s progression ladder as you power up your vessel, which is usually a blast. Though it might be tempting to compare this online ocean to Sea of Thieves, Skull and Bones actually has more in common with the Forza Horizon series. They’re both over-the-top, arcadey open-world RPGs where you play as a vehicle, except instead of racing cars with friends, you’re committing piracy in boats – a SeaRPG to Forza Horizon’s CarPG, if the court will allow it. And that laser focus on wonderfully intricate maritime gameplay and commodities/economy simulation is extremely enjoyable most of the time, even if you never get to swing a sword or fire a flintlock like in Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag.

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, 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.

Disappointingly, Skull and Bones only has the faintest whiff of a story.

Instead, your attention is directed toward the compelling treadmill of blasting through increasingly lethal enemy ships and then using your loot to craft better instruments of piracy. Ship-to-ship PvE combat is the star of the show, and it requires strategy, cooperation with other player-controlled vessels, and good aim to pull off at higher levels. For example, when taking on powerful fleets found in later areas, you might want to reconfigure your ship to a tank build optimized for withstanding hits and dealing close-range damage, while your friends focus on DPS or even support options capable of healing allies by peppering them with nonsensically medicinal cannonballs. (How would that even work?) It’s also awesome how great naval combat and sailing the open ocean look, as a lot of effort clearly went into giving elements like waves and cannonfire an extra layer of visual polish – although, on the flip side, NPCs often look animatronic, with dead eyes and robotic mouths.

Crafting new ships and trying out different builds is extremely compelling. Just when I thought I’d built my ideal vessel, I’d see a special cannon or a unique piece of ship armor I just couldn’t live without, then gleefully jump through surprisingly rewarding hoops by attacking certain factions and seeking out rare resources to buy a schematic and craft it. Taking those new toys out to lay the beatdown on any blaggards foolish enough to oppose me is especially thrilling. For example, I spent many hours and tons of resources to craft my first mortar, which unlocked the ability to rain fire from the sky on my enemies like I was calling in an airstrike. Sure, doing so forced me to spend every last scrap of my ill-gotten riches, but can you really put a price on turning your foes into pulled pork? As you dive into the endgame, the builds that open up get downright wild, and you can unlock a ship-mounted flamethrower that spews ghostly blue flames, or rocket launchers that fire dozens of burning projectiles to devastating effect.

Once you’ve established yourself on the high seas a bit, you’ll also begin to understand both trade routes and the supply and demand they influence in different parts of the world, which adds an interesting economy management minigame to the mix. You’ll even gain access to the black market via The Helm, a clever endgame mechanic that allows you to build and manage underworld businesses by creating and delivering embargoed goods, like opium. This opens up a whole new way to line your pockets, as you can ferry legitimate and illegitimate goods to and fro, buying low in one place and selling high in another, like a pirate with a bachelor’s degree in business. Later on you can even conquer coastal settlements to convert them into manufactories that generate passive income and help you obtain the most powerful equipment. Before you know it, you suddenly find yourself playing Pirate SimCity – or as I like to call it: SimSea-ty – as you manage lumber yards and farming settlements, and it’s a truly awesome playground for the endgame grind.

That’s because, in order to add settlements to your collection, you’ll need to participate in Skull and Bones’ PvP activities, which don’t appear until later on, adding a neat new wrinkle to things right as they start feeling stale with the overwhelmingly PvE foundation. Hostile Takeover is a delightfully sweaty slugfest where participants sail to a settlement and fight for control over it by seeing who can down the most enemy ships (including other players), while Legendary Heists send everyone to attack the same convoy carrying treasure, then let them turn on one another to claim it as their own. There are also cool moments where you’ll sometimes be offered an opportunity to double your dividends when picking up the resources generated by one of your bases, but only if you agree to become hunted by all the other players on the server, who then come zooming across the waves to rip you off. These isolated PvP events are a nice compromise from having griefers constantly attack everyone all the time, since you’ve gotta opt in to each of them, but the reward is usually worth the trouble.

PvP events are fun... when they manage to work properly.

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 love.