Sail The Boring Seas
HIGH Killing a dinosaur with a perfectly-aimed salvo as it leapt from the water.
LOW Respawning directly between two defense towers that were already shooting at me.
WTF That cat has a peg leg? This is the best thing I’ve ever seen.
I’m sailing across the Indian Ocean on a mission to sink the ship of a pirate who’s betrayed my organization to the French spice trading corporation that rules the these islands with an iron fist.
As I approach his last known position, I’m startled to discover that another captain has already taken up arms against my target. He’s in a bad state, as the traitor is supported by four French warships led by the flagship of the corporation’s fleet.
I quickly join the battle, scuttling the enemy ship equipped with a “repair cannon”, the mechanics of which elude me. It’s a tough battle, but working in concert we manage to overcome the enemy — I even manage to fire the killing shot to both the traitor and the French flagship.
As I circle the battlefield, picking up bits of floating wreckage to resell later, my ally sails away, and I’m left to marvel at the design of Skull and Bones. I went out to complete a singleplayer mission, and it dynamically became a multiplayer encounter when I happened across another person coincidentally attempting it at the same time. The interconnected world transformed two strangers into partners for a single mission, allowing them to take down a dangerous foe together.
…At least, that’s what I thought had happened.
I was considerably less impressed thirty seconds later when, as I attempted to sail back to base for repairs, my instance of the mission I had just finished started again, and I was faced with a suddenly-resurrected traitor and his four partners. At that moment, as dozens of cannonballs arced towards my ship, it occurred to me that whatever Ubisoft was attempting with Skull and Bones, they hadn’t accomplished it.
A long-in-coming third-person multiplayer-focused pirate simulator based loosely on the mechanics of Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag (but with 90% of the gameplay stripped out) Skull and Bones takes the player on a journey from shipwrecked survivor to pirate Kingpin without ever offering a reason for them to care about anything that’s going on around them.
I can say this without hesitation — the ship-to-ship combat is delightful, which is good, because it’s the only real gameplay that Skull and Bones has to offer. It’s incredibly arcadey, of course, with the player using health packs to keep going as they’re damaged by enemies, and using a ‘brace’ button to put up a virtual shield that makes their ship immune to damage until it breaks. This is even more streamlined and player-friendly than the combat in Black Flag, and the result is largely satisfying. As long as the player’s ship is close enough in level to a foe, battles are a thrilling affair full of exciting maneuvers like weaving between torpedoes and mortars while carefully aiming at weak points that will cripple opponents.
Besieging forts and settlements is another high point. Should the player decide that they don’t want to pay for a specific resource — or if they want a faction-exclusive crafting item that can’t be found anywhere else — they can plunder to their heart’s content.
In these encounters, the player waits for their crew to disembark and steal everything that isn’t nailed down while fighting off any reinforcements that get within a certain radius of the base they’re raiding. In a nice touch, players can call for help as they start a plunder, putting out a call for assistance to any other live captains in the area. Show up and help fight, and there’s a full share of the rewards on offer. Of course, Skull and Bones manages to botch this a little as well, as there’s no way to ‘accept’ the call for help and let the player know that help is coming. More than once I saw a plunder in progress and raced over to lend a hand, only to discover that in the 90 seconds it took me to arrive, the other captain had given up and fled.
Given how long it was in production — more than a decade! — it’s remarkable how many little details like that that Skull and Bones botches.
In another instance, I saw a French warship attacking a merchant base and I figured I’d help fend off the ship. The game decided that anyone firing near the base was hostile, so immediately the towers turned their cannons on me.
Pirate Hunters — deadly ships that take forever to kill — respawn the moment they die, making the important locations they’re placed near weirdly inaccessible.
There’s also no friendly fire, either between players or game-controlled foes. I tried luring ships that were chasing me into the predicted impact zone of a mortar tower, but as fire rained from the sky, the enemy ships weren’t even scratched.
The most baffling thing of all, though, has to be the mission select screen of quest-givers. When the player hovers over it, they can see the name of the mission, the rewards offered, and a one-sentence description of it — but no details. The actual things that need to be accomplished, such as what kind and how many items to recover, what ships to destroy, and which location to reach, are all kept secret until the mission has been accepted. It’s an inexplicable oversight.
Perhaps the biggest mistake of Skull and Bones, however, is the failure to engage the player in its world.
Other than the four main quest-givers, there are no characters to speak of. Every location has a random person who’ll ask the player to do something, but there’s never any impact to accomplishing these tasks. Players earn some resources and a few experience points, and then ten minutes later they can start the same mission again if they feel like it. The world can’t meaningfully change, because that might impact the experience of other players, which equates to a world that feels empty and hollow.
There’s not even a faction system. I can spend half an hour absolutely wrecking every French settlement I come across and sink dozens of their ships, but once I’ve spent 30 seconds out of their sight, my wanted level resets and I’m free to resume trading at the very ports I’d burned to the ground earlier that day.
Once I’d maxed out my level and completed the storyline quests, I turned to the ‘forever’ mode which has the player taking over settlements to generate a currency that they can use to buy the best ships and weapons. However, I’d already completed every mission Skull and Bones had to offer, so I didn’t see what could be gained by further improving the ship that had already conquered the Indian Ocean. Some may find carting rum and opium around the map entertaining in and of itself, but by that point I was ready to be done.
After completing Skull and Bones, I loaded up Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag just to see if I’d allowed time and distance from it to improve it in my memory. Floating around the Carribbean and getting into a few fights proved two things to me.
First, it’s kind of surprising just how good it still looks — Skull and Bones‘ visual improvements are marginal at best. More importantly, though, Black Flag understands what Skull and Bones doesn’t — that this is all supposed to be awe-inspiring.
When I finish off an enemy ship in Black Flag, time slows and the camera zooms in, allowing me to witness the magnificent brutality of powder stores exploding as masts snap like matchsticks. Skull and Bones can’t offer spectacle, because playing with time and camerawork might risk affecting another player’s experience. The result is something that’s dulled down to the point that everyone sharesthe same mediocrity, and I have to wonder what happened to this poor little project during the many years it was stuck on the seas of development hell.
Rating: 5 out of 10
Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Ubisoft. It is currently available on PC, PS5 and XBS/X. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 40 hours of play was devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed.
Parents: This game was rated M by the ESRB, and contains Blood, Strong Language, Use of Drugs and Violence. I feel like ‘use of drugs’ isn’t a strong enough descriptor here? The post-game content is entirely about refining and dealing opium and rum. This is a drug-running simulator, which feels like it needs its own mention. Also, while the combat isn’t particularly bloody, severed heads are a quest item in numerous missions, and one port had a corpse that was being burned at the stake, so it’s actually a little more gruesome than the warning suggests.
Colorblind Modes: There are colorblind modes available.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All dialogue is subtitled, as are all incidental sounds, such as cannons firing nearby — there’s even an onscreen indicator letting players know which direction the sound is coming from. Subtitles can be resized. The game is fully accessible.
Remappable Controls: Yes, the game’s controls are remappable.
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