A sinking Ship: Skull & Bones Review

Ubisoft’s newest IP, Skull and Bones, comes crashing ashore as you embrace your inner Jack Sparrow taking what's yours across the waters. With the sea-faring title stemming from the roots of Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, there was a lot of excitement and expectation knowing they had an established blueprint in place. Or so we thought…

With the sole focus of the game revolving around being a pirate with a crew and your ship. It's important that the handling and combat feel good. For Skull and Bones, it's a double-edged sword. What's there is solid, but what was omitted sucks a lot of life out of the ship mechanics. Let's start with ship handling and customization. Navigating your massive boat has a very arcadey feel when compared to other pirate games like Sea of Thieves. I don’t think it's a bad thing to be able to maneuver better than a normal ship would, but if the tighter, arcade feel isn’t for you, it will stick out like a sore thumb. Driving your ship is so straightforward that it's reduced to 2 buttons and a joystick. A or X lets you go fast, faster, and fastest, while B or circle slows you down at the same rate. The steering is all done with your left stick. Steering and controlling the boat feels very accessible, but i would have loved to see a touch more nuance with more control over the sails like having half mast options. With such a focus on the relationship between you and your ship, the dumbed-down feel of the controls leaves a bit of a disconnect with that partnership that I wish was there.

Then we have the combat, which feels like the biggest head-scratcher of all. All of the high seas fighting you partake in within Skull and Bones is exclusively done from your own boat. That means no hand-to-hand combat or the ability to physically board other ships. The reason why these feel like such glaring omissions is because it was combat mechanics that were included within Black Flag, a game from ten years ago. They feel like pinnacle combat mechanics that make you feel like a pirate, and you’re reminded of the missing combat features every time you take on an enemy. For the combat systems that do exist, they feel solid but nothing that takes your breath away. Early on in the game, you can equip cannons and specialty weapons on the Port, Starboard, and Bow of the ship. As you progress to bigger ships you can also equip weapons on the stern and topside as well. The cannons range from short to long range, and elemental properties like fire, or mortars to take out defense towers. The variety does keep things fresh when you head out to sea, and it feels good to have ship-on-ship combat for about the first 75% of the fight. The tighter controls and decently fast reloads create good pacing for the action while allowing you to take on more than one ship at a time. It's a decent combat loop that feels good until your enemy dwindles below a quarter of health. Once you have them weak, you're prompted with the option of boarding the enemy ship to harvest additional resources from them. All you have to do is get close enough to grapple the enemy, and you begin to salivate knowing you're about to board the ship. SYKE. once you sink your teeth into the enemy, you're gifted a quick cutscene followed by a list of all the available loot, and then poof! It's all over. That same cutscene happens every. Single time. One of the biggest excitements of being a pirate is overtaking an enemy ship and having that adrenaline mixed with a sense of accomplishment that will never be achieved in Skull and Bones. Add to the fact that you get those bonus resources when boarding, and you’re left doing that same mindless mechanic over and over and over. It's a constant reminder multiple times per fight that there was so much left on the table with the combat aspect of the game.

As for the customization of your beloved beauty. There is a TON of customization options to make your ship look and feel like yours. But even the customization comes with a catch. A lot of the desired customization options are locked behind blueprints and/or a large amount of unique currency that is a nightmare to grind. In regards to the weapons, there's 3 requirements to craft anything. You have to be a high enough level, then you have to unlock the blueprint, then you have to gather the proper amount of materials. I have no issue with the leveling and material gathering, but some of the blueprint logic doesn’t make sense to me. Having to hunt down blueprints with vague messaging isn’t the issue, but rather the drastic lengths you have to sail to in order to find them. It's enjoyable to sail the seven seas and get lost in the waves, but having to sail 6,000+ meters to find it, then have to turn right back around to harvest the materials somewhere across the map can get mundane quickly. Add to the fact that all potential blueprints show up in the crafting menu, it can feel overwhelming knowing how much searching you have to do to truly unlock anything. That same daunting feeling rings true with the black market customization items. Some of the coolest cosmetics in my opinion stem from the black market where you acquire pieces of 8 to purchase them. To earn the specific currency, you take on contracts to smuggle goods while avoiding pirates on the way. It's repetitive, but still decent fun, until you realize how little you get rewarded for it. Some of the black market items go for 1k to 5k pieces of 8, and one smuggler run will net you about 24 pieces. With each smuggling run taking about 10 minutes, that becomes an unbearable amount of grinding for one ship colorway.

The empty feeling doesn't keep its allegiances to the combat as the story and mission structure feel lackluster for a full-priced AAA title. When you think of AAA Ubisoft games, there's almost always a dedicated story, a variety of mission structures, and characters you care about. Whether or not you think Ubisoft’s stories are well done, is up to your own critique, but with Skull and Bones, there is hardly anything to even judge. The story is wrapped up in the simple premise where you’re captaining a ship that gets decimated by the British fleet. You wash up onto shore with nothing but the clothes on your back. You meet a kingpin and do all his errand work to level up your character and ship. I don’t mind the fetch quests early on to get the sense of starting from nothing but doing other Kingpins’ dirty work is where the story starts and ends. Each mission is set up where you hear the kingpin talk about an enemy that you’ll never meet or see, and the goal is to sail to the destination and destroy ships to steal their desired loot. When you pair the repetitive mission structure with a shallow combat system, you’re left wondering what you're doing all this for. The boss set pieces was a noticeable challenge, but without context as to who the enemy captain was or their motives, it made those big moments fall flat. The kingpins mention betrayal, inside jobs, heartbreaking losses, and moments of triumph to get you excited for the next mission. But knowing the objective would entail a fetch quest every single time, it resulted in me skipping some of the dialogue later on.

There is a sense of discovery as you traverse the seas and find new ports, cultures, and resources, but that sense of piratey whim falls short as well. Depending on the size of the port, you can disembark from your boat and hit the land on foot. I don’t mind that there's no combat within the island traversal, but there's no sense of discovery since the town layout is fully shown on your map. Each town has some merchants you can purchase materials and potential blueprints from and that's it. I would have loved to see undiscovered caves, or objectives to go exploring off a beaten path, but its not available in Skull and Bones

Outside of the main missions, you can pillage small port cities to gather resources, which sounds awesome but is once again limited by the combat. Instead of being able to hop out and help your crew on land, you're left manning the ship with the task of taking out towers and defending brigades. It's fun the first couple of times you pillage a town, but it quickly becomes repetitive as you sit by the shore going pew pew at other boats while hearing your crewmates having fun on land. You can also go hunt for fish and other sea creatures for crafting materials and cosmetics but that's about it. The map is a decent size that lends a sense of exploration, but rewards at the end of your journey make the voyage feel like you arrived at the theme park but forgot your wallet.

When thinking of a AAA title, graphic fidelity, and solid presentation certainly play a factor. Skull and Bones does a few aspects well, while other areas feel the age of a 10-year development cycle. Since 95% of your time is spent on your boat, it's important the water and ships look good. And they do! I highly recommend setting the video settings to quality instead of performance. You won’t notice the lower framerate and the addition of better assets and ray tracing really make the ocean stand out. Sailing at night time was by far my favorite moment as the moon glistens off the water with torch light leaking out over the waves as you arrive at a port. There is also great detail in the ships themselves that allow you to showcase all the customization you’ve done. The ships and sea shine bright like a freshly opened treasure chest, but the on-land portions feel a bit dated. The cities themselves feel a bit too copy and paste with a crew greeting you at the dock and little pockets of trade merchants scattered accordingly. The character models themselves feel more last-gen when compared to the ship and ocean detail with the facial animations being the most noticeable.

In regards to the mission cutscenes, you hardly ever see your own character when interacting with fellow kingpins to the point that you can feel more connected to your ship than your playable character. I would have loved to see not only my playable pirate but also some of the antagonists within the story to make the story more engaging and contextual.

As for the performance side of things, two issues came up at a decent rate. The first was the game freezing or flat-out crashing me back to the home screen. I don’t really mind crashes that occur before the game officially comes out because pre-order players are glorified beta testers, but it was more noticeable than other games I’ve pre-ordered for early access. The other issue was getting spammed with contract notifications that would build up during dialogue with merchants. It resulted in having to manually dismiss each message before leaving the conversation, so i found myself on multiple occasions sitting there for minutes on end hearing the same notification over and over and over. These two issues are things that should and likely will get patched much sooner than later, but it created moments of frustration each time I sat down to play it.

Final Verdict

Skull and Bones had the Black Flag blueprint that on paper was a very exciting prospect. However, the pirate faring game feels like it takes 1 step forward and 3 steps back. There are certainly elements within the game that are enjoyable, but there are too many glaring moments where depth is left on the table. Asking full price for the minimal story and an unengaging competitive loop makes long-term enjoyment tough to achieve. Skull and Boners promised booty fit for a king, but delivered an empty chest with a 5.5 out of 10.