Summary

• Ubisoft's Skull and Bones falters in delivering an immersive pirate experience, bogged down by fetch quests and a lack of true adventure.
• The game focuses heavily on ship combat, with impressive visuals and mechanics, but lacks depth with a clunky capture mechanic.
• Despite strong combat gameplay, Skull and Bones falls short with shallow customization, tedious quests, and limited ship models.

The next seafaring video game adventure pilots its craft into the wild blue yonder, but there are stormy skies ahead. Ubisoft’s infamously delayed Skull and Bones has finally released, with its own unsteady abstractions on playable piracy, and much of it boils down to boats and boat accessories. It's often an ittedly unique multiplayer-oriented experience with some idiosyncratic combat, but frequently falters in of immersion, awash in fetch quest loops and routines which struggle to fulfill the pirate power fantasy.

It's certainly not the first game to experiment with gameplay and perspective in the pirate mold. PC classic Sid Meier’s: Pirates! famously compartmentalized these tropes into an addictive, cohesive blend of simulation and economic strategy on an explorable map. There’s also the contemporary sleeper-hit-that-could Sea of Thieves – whose broader games-as-a-service qualities Ubisoft most seeks to emulate here – and, of course, the lovely open-world sandbox of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, a development jumping-off point to whom Skull and Bones owes its very existence, and definitely a high-water mark in contemporary pirate gaming.

Piracy proved such a strong hook that Assassin’s Creed games couldn’t get away from them for a spell, inserting maritime modules in regular entries regardless of any era-specific themes. In these titles, players recruited shipmates and equipped upgrades, steering their vessel towards gold and danger, or just indulging in extended exploration of the map's borders. Skull and Bones takes this accessible base, but forms it around a persistently-online ship combat game. The end result can be entertaining at times, but it’s never fully elegant, and there’s rarely the feeling of true adventure. Much of it boils down to busywork, chasing down dozens of items and crafting materials, coast to bloody coast.

I'm (On) A Boat, I'm (On) A Boat

Initiating a new Skull and Bones campaign activates a short story introduction, triggering a crash course in naval combat before the player is shipwrecked and left for dead. Remnant sailors rescue them, beseeching them to captain their future crew, a campaign which starts off on a rickety dhow and quickly stages up to larger and more capable seafaring designs from there.

Skull and Bones positions the player as the conceptual captain but, outside of minor exploration jags at ports and pirate dens with quest-givers and merchants, most of the game’s perspective lies fixed behind the wheel of their chosen vessel. Over extended play sessions and using the more intelligible third-person sailing perspective, it’s not unusual to feel more like the actual ship itself than its human navigator.

This means that the tactile qualities of scampering aboard a player’s ship are noticeably absent, or the easy thrill of running aground on an archipelago to get some untouched wilderness underfoot. There are no crew battles, swordplay, or even individual crew mate selection, for that matter. There is mainly the ship, the ship’s weapons, and the stats. And the microtransactions, of course.

Gold is Purchased, Not Plundered

By now, players have come to understand one thing about live-service games: whether one chooses to engage its cash market or not, those aspects will infect the periphery. It may be somewhat evocative of the heavy costs of pirate life, but it's bothersome as ever to see -priced cosmetics casually shuffled into a merchant's regular fare.

At least there are only two main currencies to keep track of: silver coins - which are rewarded regularly through gameplay - and cash-locked gold. A third currency is reserved for endgame content and progress, but will remain functionally unknown through the many hours of mainline quests, only manifesting in full for Skull and Bones diehards who can’t tear themselves away.

What’s more troubling is seeing the a price tag tacked to an experience which still smugly nickels-and-dimes players with upsell options. The $70 live service trend does not extend into pay-to-win territory with Skull and Bones, but the multiplayer nonsense is constant and dispels immersion at every step. These are just commonplace irritations - like instanced strangers sprinting around the same pirate den, spamming emotes between missions at sea, or clumping together at quest delivery stations - but it's distracting all the same.

Thrilling Ship-to-Ship Combat

Beyond these moments and microtransactions, Skull and Bones stakes its real claim in oceanic combat. Ships quickly elevate into weighty aquatic behemoths, direct impacts look rightfully impressive, and the wave and weather effects are convincing, even after activating PlayStation 5’s performance mode. Getting a feel for cannons and selecting smart placement takes time to learn, but this will eventually become second nature, and using a spyglass to single out enemy ships works wonderfully.

Still, it’s disappointing that there are no genuine boarding mechanics, with Skull and Bones fixated on destroying or “capturing” enemy boats. For the latter, players can weaken a ship’s health bar down to initiate a trivial capture process, aim grappling hooks at the vessel, then instantly bash the ship for a loot bonus after a clunky fadeout. It almost seems like a bug or a technical placeholder at first, but that’s truly all there is to the capture mechanic, and it’s so poorly done as to have been better left out entirely.

There's no doubt that many of Skull and Bones’ simulation aspects are brazenly ridiculous at the best of times.

When the player’s ship is wrecked, they have the option to spend a small amount of silver to respawn nearby, which allows an attempt to claim lost cargo at the site of failure before reengaging or escaping to safety. Keep in mind, though, that previously wrecked player ships also suffer a temporary penalty to max HP; presumably, this was added to prevent anyone from just throwing respawned boat after respawned boat against an impossible threat, but it makes combat failure seem very artificial and odd, almost like an arbitrary match condition applied to naval warfare.

In the grander scheme of things, these are mostly nitpicks, and it’s clear that Skull and Bones angled extra development resources where it counted. For those who get along with the combat, there’s plenty more where that came from, as the game’s many quests involve moving trade items, poaching them from ing vessels, and smartly escaping stronger threats.

Cruising Along and Chopping Trees

There's no doubt that many of Skull and Bones’ simulation aspects are brazenly ridiculous at the best of times. Picking up waterlogged cargo and junk never feels right, with nearby bits floating in the ocean acquirable with a press of the button that instantly stores them in the hold. Certain resources can be farmed or mined by the coastline, which prompts a chintzy timing-based minigame that’s a better fit for Gears of War’s active reload system, and there's no explanation as to how pirate ships are able to magically chop lumber from 100 feet away. It’s so unexpectedly strange that most players will probably discover these resource-gathering mechanics entirely by accident.

Anyone sticking around for the story will be left wanting, as it's doomed early on by extended grindy plot contrivances. Boneheaded NPCs blather endlessly, initially insulting the character in the early hours before methodically becoming more impressed as successful quests are turned in. Players are periodically prompted to choose one of two responses to certain dialogue prompts which is, of course, a sad attempt at implying a greater sense of narrative control, and will convince absolutely no one to this effect.

Any real autonomy here lies within the predictable framework of an instanced action-MMO. Clothing pieces can be purchased and outfits arranged, ship cosmetics are amassed by the literal boatload, and random new weapons and game-buffing furniture can be occasionally won through completed quests, but are more often steadily crafted after each successive blueprint is unlocked and obtained.

There are some treasure maps to theoretically spice things up, but the lack of refined avatar traversal hampers these hunts, to the point where they seem included as a Skull and Bones checkbox that satisfies the theme. It’s simply a matter of matching the drawn map to the in-game map screen, docking the ship, and digging out a shimmering spotlit beacon.

Fellow Pirates Make It All Better

Any opportunity for the game’s success lies with Skull and Bones' combat and, while it doesn’t exactly feel true-to-life, it’s comparable to a fun sci-fi 4x spaceship game on a single plane with a pirate wrapper. When out at sea, there are ample opportunities to “plunder” an outpost, which typically results in wave after wave of enemy ships entering the action zone, with increasing treasure rewards the longer anyone stays in the battle. Seeing other live players enter plunder events and keeping the wolves at bay alongside them in an incidental multiplayer horde mode is a peak use of the game's strengths.

But then, the event ends. If playing solo, this probably means trudging back to a nearby outpost alone, selling relevant wares, turning in quests, repairing the ship with a click, then heading out again. It’s a rhythm which is tried and true but grows weary in the absence of other gameplay hooks, and the grind to get on stable footing with a decent ship and loadout can feel like an extended live-service slog to reach the juicier endgame content.

Having a friend or two on hand to co-op through everything is predictably more fun, though it would be nicer if the host didn’t control quest delivery and allowed teammates to span out and pursue their own ends. Regardless, it’s questionable whether Skull and Bones will have the legs to last in this congested multiplayer age, and the pricetag isn’t helping matters.

Final Thoughts & Review Score

The first time the screen transitions from dock to ship with a simple fade to black, players will keenly feel what was sacrificed to make this game happen. Even the weirder fantasy elements feel shoehorned in, like healing cannonballs (which help fulfill some semblance of a class), massive sea monster hunts, or magical party boosts which can be triggered at certain outposts. All of it amounts to more shorthand scrawled into the template, making Skull and Bones feel, at the worst of times, like a heavily camouflaged version of any instanced looter-shooter.

A few conventional mod cons are also notably absent, like being unable to access storage items for crafting or offloading at a vendor, and the inventory UI is a pain to manage on controller. These stack onto a pile of design decisions which leaves Skull and Bones’ pirate open-world fantasy mostly un-plundered.

Approaching the game as a ship combat adventure, though, and Skull and Bones remains ittedly unique and apart from others, regardless of its origins or how it apes conventions. Vessels can be tweaked into menacing DPS juggernauts, smashing into AI and human combatants alike, blasting fire and muskets off the bow with enemies obliterated in their wake. Larger battles can manifest suddenly at sea, framed by thunderous black clouds and chaos, making for surprisingly epic moments that have little comparison to other games.

It's everything surrounding those battles and skirmishes that makes Skull and Bones a harder sell. The simulation aspects are limited and under-baked, the questing is almost always tedious, and there are only a few main ship models to work with. Lacking the ability to dock and explore, ocean exploration feels perfunctory and artificially hampered. Better ship customization options open up eventually, and it’s initially interesting to tinker with armaments, but it’s hard not to want even more of the best boat blueprints, more gear, more detailed inclusions that would make these vessels feel authored and unique, something to elevate the vacant core routines. Skull and Bones could have been a welcoming and rare new beacon for pirate game fans but, even with seasons of promised content yet to come, this boat is visibly sinking.

A digital PlayStation 5 code was provided to Screen Rant for the purpose of this review.