Skull and Bones review-in-progress: "Does well to hide a lot of its more interesting content"
My first real frustration with Skull and Bones came on what should have been a quick-win voyage. I was tasked with taking out three Compagnie merchant ships in a specific area of the map, but as I sailed there another player with a larger, faster, and far more powerful ship was patrolling the same waters. Clearly on the same mission as I was, they took out the tiny merchant vessels in a single blast of cannon fire, leaving me to just sail around the debris still with three ships to take out on the counter.
Skull and Bones doesn't really like sharing, which is odd for a game that's pitched as a pirate MMO. Unless you're actively partnered with another player, you're essentially just competing against each other for spoils. Thankfully, aside from rallying your pals, you can also call for help from other players or partner up on the fly. It's particularly handy for plunders, which is where you take on a base from the water, attacking not only the structure along the shoreline but also attacking ships, which come for you in increasingly difficult waves.
What is odd though is that you can't call for help on anything bar a plunder. You can hover your cursor over any plunder site and call for backup right then and there, with the plea going out to anyone currently on the same map as you. You can't do that for any other missions marked on your map, which feels like a misstep for higher-level activities or ones that actively suggest cooperative play. You can party up via the social menu, but in my experience matchmaking has been slow and often unfruitful – even during the open beta. However, it's worth noting that Skull and Bones is currently in the early access window for those who put down a pre-order, so I'll circle back on my matchmaking concerns in our final, scored Skull and Bones review.
Yo ho, yo ho
What is always satisfying though is just being on your ship. Sailing is a constant pleasure, even if you're not able to get involved with manning the sails yourself, you have to adjust the steer, deal with the wind, and navigate difficulties like storms or huge ship-breaking waves. The same goes for the naval combat itself. But that shouldn't really come as a surprise. It builds on the foundations laid by Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag – a game that did ship combat so well Ubisoft decided to make Skull and Bones in the first place. Combat is fluid and responsive, with you able to choose which weapons you're using just by adjusting the angle of your ship. There are handy guidelines to map that too, meaning you know exactly what you're doing in the heat of the moment. Weapons can also have specific effects like flooding or fire damage later on too, although you'll need to either be given these weapons as part of a quest or go and find the necessary blueprints to craft them yourself.
Even solo it's not too daunting a project to take on multiple enemies at once, but foes will always be flagged if they're a much higher level than you or a particularly tough challenge. Epic Captains, for example, will often be marked on the map as a timed challenge, and because they usually pose such a challenge and offer plenty of juicy rewards for sinking, usually means you're partnering up with other pirates to take them on. This is where the MMO trappings actually work, along with the Lethal Threats that pop up as challenges you can join in an instant.
Everything you do throughout Skull and Bones becomes an incentive to keep upgrading and tweaking your ship too, whether that's finding blueprints for new weapons or ships, or figuring out the best combo of furniture to place to ensure your ship is ready for action. I've got one that gives slow health regen and a buff to long-range damage for example, but there are others for boosting attack damage after pulling off a crew boarding for maximum spoils.
The way of water
It's an interesting way to customize your ship, but also just highlights how odd it is that you can't walk about on deck. Stretching your legs is solely limited to specific areas of the world, and there's no apparent reason as to why some are explorable and others aren't. Smaller locations only contain a handful of NPCs and spots to find buried treasure once you've found the relevant maps, but that's essentially it. There's no off-boat combat or ways to really interact with other players beyond emoting at each other or starting chats. There are large hubs like Saint Anne, which are much more fleshed out, but so far I've only found two of these.
These act as your first home base of sorts, containing NPCs and boards for mission giving and buying upgrades or resources, ways to customize your character, and later access to the hidden Black Market. You'll probably want to wait until you get here to really personalize your character too. When you're initially asked to make your pirate, you're looking into a puddle at a reflection of your own face. That initially seems like a neat way of doing things, but when you realise you can pick body types and tattoo styles that you can't actually see, it just becomes another of Skull and Bones' odd little quirks. However, once you get into it, there are so many options for making badass pirates you won't really care about that initial puddle faux pas.
Speaking of the Black Market, this is for me, the most exciting part of Skull and Bones so far. It not only allows you to start making your own contraband like Skull Rum and opium to start smuggling across the seas, but also opens up different, more complex contract types, including those that mean you're hunted down by Rogue ships looking to steal your wares.
But that's very indicative of Skull and Bones. It does well to hide a lot of its more interesting content and quests later into the game. It takes a while to get going, and the on-land stuff – at least from what I've seen so far – never evolves beyond what you see in those opening hours. The story gets more interesting, as do the associated quests, I'm just wary that some may get turned off by the slowness of the opening hours. So far, I'm enjoying Skull and Bones as a pirate ship fantasy builder, it's just missing a lot of the off-ship pirate fun that makes games like Sea of Thieves so alluring.
Skull and Bones is being reviewed on PS5 with a code provided by the publisher. This is a review-in-progress based on circa 20 hours with the game, and we'll circle back once we've been able to, ahem, sink some more time into Ubisoft's pirate sim.
