Skull and Bones Review | Rough Seas

This Skull and Bones review is coming from someone who absolutely adored Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, a game I consider to be the pinnacle of the AC franchise. The core idea of Skull and Bones came about because AC4 was so well-received by players. The strength of Black Flag came in the form of its riveting pirate fantasy with fantastic characters, smooth gameplay, and a well-realized world. You’d think that when Ubisoft decided to make a dedicated pirate game, a lot of these fundamentals would be carried over and improved upon? After years stuck in development hell, Skull and Bones is finally here. A live-service pirate game that lacks nearly all of what made the idea of it so intriguing in the first place.

The major issue of Skull and Bones is brought about by the very nature of the game itself. This is a live-service title through and through and with that comes with all the pushback the public has had with the genre. What could’ve been a swash buckling adventure that gave players the ultimate video game pirate experience is now just another corporate product meant to squeeze every ounce of time and money out of you. It’s especially heartbreaking knowing how passionate and talented the developers are who worked on this. It’s clear that their hands were forced to steer into unknown waters which resulted in a game that desperately should’ve been something else. A very unfortunate reality that’s far too common in the industry today.

Yo Ho! A pirate’s life is not for me

Skull and Bones’ narrative suffers from the fact that it doesn’t really have any. After creating your mute character, you are almost quite literally thrown into the ocean to fend for yourself. You will then find yourself in the main pirate town where you are introduced to the main gameplay loop. There are countless quests to be found through vendors, notice boards, and even one of the main pirate kingpins named John Scurlock. He’s where you’ll get most of the “story” from. I use that term lightly because to be frank, the game doesn’t do a good job at telling me why I should do what I do and why should it matter.

There are no stakes, no emotional weight, and definitely no practical sense to anything you’re being asked to do. You talk to one dull NPC after the other and are sent to accomplish chores such as collecting resources by killing enemy ships, negotiating trade relationships by killing enemy ships, craft a certain item, but first you have to kill enemy sh-, you get the point. There is no clear vision as to where the narrative is going, or what the point of all of it is. It’s just an endless loop of killing ships and collecting resources. That’s really about it.

It’s an absolute shame really because a number of the locations that you can visit on foot, few and as small as they may be, do look great. They’re filled with environmental detail and pirate aesthetics that do paint a good picture of the potential the game has. The same can be said for the rest of the game when viewed at a distance. The fluidity of the oceans and the movement of your ship as you sail across. Seeing your crew work the sails, man the cannons, and try to stay balanced while the water splashes onto the deck. For very brief moments, I do see some brilliance in Skull and Bones. The kinds that made me fall in love with Black Flag in the first place. But unfortunately, it never really sustains it to a consistent rate.

Ubisoft’s Anvil engine is great at producing environments when viewed at a mass scale, but it stumbles when zooming in to smell the roses. Character models suffer a lot, especially the facial animations. Everyone just has a ghostly stair in their eyes with awkward lip-synching, completely devoid of any life or personality. When sailing near islands, there are very noticeable terrain popups.

Underneath all the bad and the ugly, is a pirate game begging to be kept as a singleplayer experience, filled with interesting characters. Skull and Bones tosses all of that away in favor of gameplay systems driven by algorithms and profit. It’s a tragic thing to realize. Quality was definitely set aside in favor of quantity here. A live-service is meant to be played endlessly, right? If they put too much focus on designing well-made missions, writing engaging storylines, and tightening up core progression and gameplay feedback, then the developers wouldn’t be able to do that all the time at a faster pace with seasonal content and battlepasses.

Shipwrecked

In Skull and Bones, you play as a pirate that can’t swim, shoot a gun, and use a sword. Yup. I’m about as shocked as you are when I discovered it for myself. So that just leaves us with the ship. The ONE THING that the game HAS to get right. So, they definitely did, RIGHT?

You first start off with a tiny boat, you sail to the main pirate settlement, people laugh at you for being worthless, then you do a few missions and suddenly someone is able to craft you a full-sized boat that is filled with a complete crew that is willing to go through hell and back for you. If you thought my explanation was rushed and confusing, that’s exactly how the game presents it.

If you’ve played Black Flag, you know how the ship controls here in Skull and Bones. They’re virtually the same. There’s a button that drops the sales for speed, press it again for even more speed (which is now limited by your crew’s stamina), and a button that raises the sails up to slow down, and press it again to stop completely. There’s a decent amount of weight to it.

Although, the limited stamina for the maximum speed is pretty annoying and it only got worse the more I played it. There are some ways to “fix” it. You can either feed your crew cooked food which can quickly replenish lost energy instead of slowly waiting for it to reset or ignite bonfires in some of the islands you visit which will increase the rate of regeneration. Ultimately, it just feels unnecessary. The only reason I can see why it’s even there is to try to make the PvP naval battles a little bit more balanced.

Speaking of which, how’s the naval combat? Think of a more arcade-y version of Black Flag’s. The general concept is still there. Shoot at the enemy ships till the health bar goes down. You can equip different cannons for each side of your ship and even craft some armor for it depending on the blueprints that you find/purchase. Combat feels nice and crunchy. You have to make sure you’re on top of your game balancing aiming and steering because one slight mistake with positioning can mean a barrage of cannonballs coming straight at you. Visual feedback could be better. you don’t really see the damage you deal to other ships. The best chance you have is the big health bar floating above them. Afterwards, you are given the option to either completely sink the ship and just loot the booty from the sea or shoot some anchors on them to try and initiate a boarding. This is where it gets all messed up.

One of my favorite parts of Black Flag is how dynamic and involved the boarding is. You connect the 2 ships together and are given multiple options to go about it. Do you swing by and face the enemy crew head on? Climb up the flags and parkour over to get the surprise jump on them? Or just let your crew have at it while you take it easy from a distance. No matter how small or big the enemy ship is, there’s always these options that made it something that never got tiring to do. When all was said and done, you can choose to either get just the loot, recruit extra crew, or repair your ship. None of that is in Skull and Bones.

Boarding a ship in this game is just playing the same cutscene while being presented with a screen that lists down your acquired loot. That’s it.

You do eventually get to acquire different types of ships which have their own pros and cons, depending on how you want to build it up. It only requires you to find the right resources, own the blueprints, and reach higher levels. The more you progress through the game, the harder the enemies get. This became my main motivator to go out there and get better cannons, fortify my ship further, and find the right build that suits my playstyle.

Skull and Bones Review Final Verdict – 5/10

Any sense of player engagement, satisfying feedback, and commitment to the pirate fantasy is tossed to walk on the plank. Skull and Bones was meant to be an expansion of the great ideas its inspiration has. But in all honesty, it feels more like an alpha build of Black Flag itself.

Performance wise, I played this on both the PS5 and PC with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and a 4070 GPU. Both versions had noticeable frame drops when roaming around the main town. Oddly enough, it’s when I’m sailing the massive sea environment where it becomes most stable. There were no game-breaking bugs to speak of.

Skull and Bones should’ve been an easy loot for me. As someone who’s been a fan of the stuff Ubisoft has been putting out recently such as Avatar, AC Mirage, and Prince of Persia, a pirate game that was meant to be a spiritual successor to my favorite AC game of all time should’ve been an easy game of the year contender. This was an underdeveloped mess that had way too many years drifting mindlessly from one idea to another.

Skull and Bones should’ve just been a dedicated singleplayer pirate RPG. Instead, it’s a live-service product that I don’t see surviving past a handful of seasonal updates. Unless a massive tidal wave is coming that gives everything a proper shakeup, it’s lost at sea for me with this one.

This review was made using a game code for the PS5 and PC provided by the publisher.