After seven long years of waiting, Skull And Bones has finally arrived on modern consoles, and like any game that managed to escape development hell it is hard to know where to begin. The game was described as the first “AAAA” game by Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot so let’s start there, it is not. Skull And Bones as a base experience is a generic live service game that struggles to do even that, but going even further it’s also not a very fun game.
Since the number of A’s attached to a project is a designation of budget and not quality, it’s not the consumer’s fault the game was delayed this long, and all that money isn’t evident in the final project. One particular delay, while developer Ubisoft Singapore was found to be one of the companies mismanaged and abused by Ubisoft leadership, had nothing to do with the game. Yet, Ubisoft seems to want a medal for not canceling the project through that. This might not seem like I entered the game with an open mind, but I did, and the high seas lost their charm even long before my best estimates said they might.
A Pirates Life
The game begins by, showing you all its cards and promising that if you play for 40 hours you might get there. It is a big battle where you sink a Spanish galleon. There are a large number of ships in this massive battle, but since they had yet to introduce your health gauge I had no idea no fight past this would feel the same. After you win your ship sinks as well so you can begin the long grinding road of earning your ship back starting from a row boat.
The tutorial area you end up in manages to highlight many of the issues that are going to plague the journey long after you leave. You sail your rowboat to an area, look for material, and return to Quest Giver in an area where you can get off the boat but there is nothing to do. At one point when I had to break into the Galleon to grab loot I thought, maybe this would be like a foot dungeon. But nope, just a few empty rooms. In one, funny enough, where cannons I could fire at explosive barrels. There was no value to it beyond that, a ghost of the game we could have had.
The game does have a story, though I’m hard-pressed to call it that over a series of obligations that allow you to find better gear and build a reputation. Still, the latter mostly acts as an unlock for gear. Reputation has around over 500 levels, which might sound cool, until you learn there are only 20 levels with names that are pretty easy to get through, while the rest are just Kingpin, with a number at the end. It would have been much more fun to only have 20 tiers that are a slow and methodical grind, instead of this lazy system, lord knows the amount of grinding you have to do anyway.
Story missions, similar to the later unlocked contracts involve sailing out to an area and trying to farm materials. Occasionally you have to just sail out to locations and interact with them like towns, or sink other ships, but the lack of variety is apparent early on. Further diluting this are those contracts and other side missions, which tend to almost verbatim ask you to do the same.
When trying to find material or hunt down trade ships with stuff you need it can be time-consuming, going to a location promises nothing and you still need to find the ships, make sure they have what you want, and combat them to take it. In some cases, like rum, ships along a route should almost always have them, but there are rare drops that will have you sailing around a location for a time trying to find specific ships with them. My longest time was an hour, meaning i was stuck in this location sailing in circles looking for one ship carrying something I needed. It was an unenjoyable time completing an unenjoyable task.
Lots of Fish In The Sea
this being a Live-Service title it means there is no PvE, and you are always in a world with other players that can kill you if they want you to. On the one hand, the game is barely enjoyable with that threat but on the other hand, Ubisoft manages to bungle the entire affair being an obnoxious gear-based system. To level up your ship you need to farm and grind for material out in the world, beyond the safe shores, and bring that gear home to the shops to buy cannons or ships, as well as additional ship tools. However, anything on your ship can be lost meaning if you are out for an hour and get sunk you lose all that progress. A fast travel to port costs money which can be a bizarrely bad trade-off early on meaning even with the threats you are probably going to risk it.
That proved to be less annoying than other instances in which players just aimed to annoy you. In one game I went to leave in my level 3 ship only to be sunk as soon as I left the safe area by a level 11 ship in one cannon shot. He didn’t want the material on my ship, he just sat there. I tried to leave through the other side only for him to adjust and kill me again. A third time an I learned my lesson and left the game, entered another, and, another player was doing it again! The third time was the charm but it wasn’t like this didn’t happen again later.
This isn’t even an issue of get good, in order to get good I needed to leave and get material to upgrade my ship which he was physically preventing me from doing. At that level of disparity, he only took one shot to sink me while the one shot I got off and hit the third time did nothing to him. And this is… Just a thing… Something that the luck of the draw can throw your way just because a player feels like it. Of course, I can’t blame Ubisoft for what players do, however, I can blame them for not thinking this was a very real possibility and developing something to counter that.
This is further compounded by the fact that the game feels like a live-service justification. Now, I don’t hate a game for choosing to go that route, it can be done well, it just isn’t done well here. In one mission I got taught about character cosmetics so I headed over to the store. I was then treated to about four or five options for my character that I could get with in-store currency but the rest, required real money, and there was a lot. In fairness, I had not encountered anything that was pay-to-win, but for a 70-dollar game, the degree to which they thought I should give them more money within hours of starting was a lot. My rule tends to be to separate paid cosmetics into a separate storefront an not bombard me with them, something the game doesn’t feel the same
Verdict
I’ll admit, I didn’t expect to love Skull And Bones but most Ubisoft live service games have a layer of fun to them. Rider Republic was a fun extreme sports game, Rainbow Six Seige was a tactical shooter in a sea of run-and-gun games, And The Division was imperfect but at least had the tools to build upon. Skull & Bones has none of that, failing to even reach the heights of competition that launched during its development, looking at you Sea of Thieves.
Skull And Bones is a pirate game that cuts out almost every aspect of being a pirate. This isn’t horrible if you like ships but if you were looking for the complete experience you will need to look elsewhere. It features a bland repetitive gameplay loop, all dependant on a run where a player 10 levels above you doesn’t feel the need to shoot you just because they can. This means you can either spend way more time than is enjoyable completing a task because you can’t find the drops, or because you dropped them in death.
Thats before you even get to the microtransactions that are shoved in your face every time you are in the hub area. While they don’t mark you more powerful, games really should let me get farther and closer to the endgame before making clear they want 5 dollars here and another 5 there. this might be less annoying in better games, but Skull And Bones doesn’t even earn the price of admission.
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Reviewed For PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X, Amazon Luna, And PC
Developer: Ubisoft Singapore
Publisher: Ubisoft
Release Date: February 16th, 2024
Inspired by the success of Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag, Ubisoft returns to the pirate life for a live-services sailing game.
Pros:
+ Sea Shanties
Cons:
-Bland Story
-Repetitive missions
-PVP
-Grinding
-Microtransactions
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Skull & Bones
