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Skull And Bones review: an exceptionally boring live service shipping simSunk cost
Sunk cost
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot recently saidSkull And Bonesis a “quadruple-A game”, which I think is very accurate, actually. “AAAA” is the sound that escapes my lips as I embark on yet another hour-long sail to retrieve some logs, or when I’m doing my little deliveries and a brigantine starts on me. After 11 years in development, Ubisoft’spirate gameisn’t necessarily a disaster, I just think its live service model has transformed piracy from a roguish lark on the waves into atremendouslydull series of shipping tasks.
Skull And Bones gets off to a good start. Your ship is attacked from all sides, in what’s a rip-roaring final stand that sees you wash up in astarting area filled with promise. A small area where levels don’t matter and an introduction to a universe and a crew that seem, at first, to hum with rum and roguishness. Unfortunately, the live service scaffolds go up once you’ve left this opening area.
You’re plopped into starter’s hub area a bit likeDestiny 2’s Tower, but more wooden in every sense. Various vendors dot the place, all of them with fetch quests to accept and nothing interesting to say. In the big hut is where you’ll meet Captain Scurlock, a primary quest giver who’ll steer you through a main storyline that’s marginally less tedious than the rest.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
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Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
Is there any joy on any of the surrounding rocks? Not a great deal. Islands owe all of their excitement to being fast travel points, otherwise acting as mini-hubs home to listless traders who’ll offer you more fetch quests, materials, and blueprints. Run about and you might bump into some buried treasure, which will net you some rarerstuffandthings.
You can only track one blueprint at a time, with some blueprints only trackable if you go back to the vendor and explicitly press the track button while in their vendor menus. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
The main way to power up, outside of the endgame at least, is to visit the blacksmith or the shipwright. It’s here where you’re able to craft new weapons and new ships, so long as you’ve got the materials and, crucially, the pissing blueprints. To obtain these blueprints, the game forces you to buy them from vendors scattered all over the seas, as well as up your Infamy rank to unlock better versions.
Now, bounties, quests, whatever it is you’ve done, often reward you with Infamy that’ll barely raise the bar,zeromaterials, and about as much silver (money you use to buy things including blueprints) as you’d get if you melted down a Tesco trolley. Not only does the act of endless sailing compound the agony, but the ‘better’ stuff rarely ever results in a jump in your overall ship level (or, indeed a yelp of excitement). The best live service efforts at least reward you frequently, giving you guns with unique names, their borders radiating with power. New boots with sockets for gems. A mount to speed up traversal. But Skull And Bones rarely ever puts its hands in its coffers and gifts you treasure befitting a pirate fantasy. Rather, it expects you to put in the grind and crafteverything. It’s a deeply ungenerous game.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
And there’s some happiness to be found in combat, which is simplistic, approachable fun for folks who enjoy sidling up alongside other boats and slamming metal into their sides. Watching wood splinter as big red numbers spring off a big red zone you’ve hit, is admittedly, a brain receptor tickler - much as it was, and is, in Assassin’s Creed. Really, though, levels are all that matter, not positioning. The only real strategy lies in hitting button prompts that let you fire muskets to secure extra damage, or ‘board’ ships - though here you don’t even get the thrill of doing the actual boarding as you would in Ubisoft’s time-hopping murder’thon. You are a boat, after all, not an Assassin captain, and all you get is a mere cutscene instead, the end result being some more netted bonus materials.
Performance was fine and the game does look quite nice. I’d say I encountered some annoying bugs, though. The game has a habit of not closing properly, and one time I couldn’t open menus or interact with anyone or anything. There’s a fun one where your ship disappears from your map, alongside enemy ship health bars and levels, too. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
But the combat simply isn’t deep or engaging enough to keep you coming back for more, especially when Skull And Bones begins to lean into its end-game, which centres around more deliveries. To get ‘Pieces Of Eight’, a new currency that lets you purchase some of the best gear, the game wants you to get sugar cane, refine it into rum (later, berries into opium) and deliver it to people. The challenge stems from fast travel being disabled and AI-controlled boats chasing you down.
Truthfully, I couldn’t bring myself to reach the farthest corners of the end-game, where seemingly, there is a sea monster and tougher ships to battle. Life is too short and my mental wellbeing too important to put myself through an experience that genuinely drained every drop of life out of me. I may have managed the slog with pals, but to me,multiplayerseemed largely non-existent anyway. I rarely ever saw anyone else, and if I did, we’d bob together while plundering zones then drift away the moment they ended. Sometimes the game would prompt people to get together to tackle a big baddie or engage in some optional PVP, but no-one ever showed up.
I think Skull And Bones might be one of the most boring games I’ve ever played. There might be value in it for those looking for a leisurely sail, or folks who enjoy the time management side of making deliveries optimally. For everyone else, boat-lovers, live service fiends, and people who like fun, the game will be nothing more than a tedious slog through unrewarding waters.
