Skull and Bones Review - Dead and Buried Already

As I set sail in Skull and Bones I am reminded of many experiences. There is a vague glimmer of the remnants of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag here occasionally, but most of the time I recall a lot of the drudgery and dreariness that comes from survival games (and not very good ones).

A lack of any kind of interesting golden path, a cumbersome stamina meter, and a cargo storage full of bland quests has left me questioning just how one of the best action games ten years ago spawned one of the worst open-world live-service games I have seen in a long time. 

Skull and Bones Review - Finding Your Sea Legs

Initially, in Skull and Bones, you are given a brief introduction to how the game works through an enjoyable enough tutorial, allowed to choose how your character looks, although there are very few customization options, and taught how to harvest a few resources.

Shortly after you find yourself arriving in Saint Anne, talking to a bunch of fairly dull vendors who introduce you to upgrading your ship, and send you on more fetch quests to unlock blueprints and upgrade your gear than you can count. 

And, for the vast majority of everything that comes after this initial hour or two, you are doing the exact same thing over and over again. See, there isn’t really any story here or main questline to follow that gives the game a sense that you are creating your own pirate adventure. Instead, you feel more like a seafaring lackey, told to sail between locations by a blacksmith or shipwright to collect interesting items like wood, nails, and coconuts, with the occasional shiny treasure in between. 

But, when arriving back with your cargo hull full you hand them over, get a new blueprint for a slightly better weapon for your ship (which you then need to find more crafting materials on the sea for), and then are given another quest asking you to do the same thing.

There isn’t any fascinating reward that fundamentally changes how you sail or fight in ship battles or any kind of carrot on the end of a stick to chase by completing all of these fetch quests. You get a new item for your ship that makes the stat number go up by boosting damage, health, or speed slightly, or a cosmetic to change your clothes, hair color, or ship’s sail. 

With the core flow of questing being so monotonous, I was left hoping that there may be something interesting out on the high seas for me to find, but after a few hours on the seas, I quickly found out I was wrong. Between these resource locations and main bases like Saint Anne, you can find a few ports to trade or buy more items and resources from, a small island with more vendors that give you more fetch quests, an enemy base which you can attack or bargain with, and the occasional deserted spot to find a rare item to sell.

There aren’t any interesting stories or people to find in Skull and Bones’ open world, which is as big as any modern Assassin’s Creed game map, but with less depth than shallow water. So, I often found myself asking why I was even sailing around and completing these quests at all in my few dozen hours or so with the game. 

If I know I am not going to find anything that piques my interest or get some rare weapon for my ship, then why am I bothering to explore the far corners of the map? 

Skull and Bones is just so bewildering because I can’t understand how a “quadruple-A game” (Ubisoft’s own words) feels this vapid in terms of substance, especially after the almost decade-long development it has undergone and the excessive number of Ubisoft studios listed in this game’s credits. The game also doesn’t look particularly impressive either, especially in the on-land sections talking with vendors. 

Skull And Bones Review - Trudging Across Waves

But, beyond being completely devoid of anything substantial Skull and Bones also just makes some baffling gameplay choices here that led to a lot of frustration in my time playing. Chief among these is the intensely restrictive stamina meter that your ship has. Yes, your ship has a stamina meter.

Upon lowering your sails, you can choose to catch the wind and sail a bit faster, but only for a limited time because once the bar at the bottom of the screen depletes, you have to wait for it to refill to speed up again. This completely destroys any pace the game has when sailing on the sea, because you spend about 20-40 seconds coasting along nicely, only to creep down to a crawl for the next 20-40 seconds.

I often found myself almost falling asleep at the wheel while playing because I would spend so long out on the open sea doing nothing that I would get bored. 

Additionally, this makes getting away from ships that are at a higher level than you virtually impossible, as you simply can’t outpace them. So, if a ship happens to cross your path four levels above you, you are dead. Then, you have to sail all the way back to collect your cargo which can sometimes be several thousand meters depending on where you last docked. 

A lot of the dynamic weather, and wave tech that added drama to each second on the high seas in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag feels missing here and the combat is severely downgraded. The strongest part about that game’s ship combat was how much you had to worry about when fighting other ships. You had to check your positioning, aim correctly, properly reload, and brace at the correct time.

Here weapons are mostly trimmed down to just cannons and any depth to combat has been removed in favor of just spamming the fire button and bracing occasionally. This does simplify the game to be more approachable for players, but there isn’t any depth which makes it really unsatisfying as you reach higher ranks and craft bigger ships. 

Mixed in amongst all that is the typical Ubisoft-style live-service formula with tons of bonus packs, cosmetics to buy, and currency handed out so infrequently that pretty much anything cool or interesting you have to buy or grind for hours to unlock. 

Skull and Bones Review - Final Thoughts

So, as I finish writing this review, and wrap up my time I ask myself what was this all for? Almost a decade of development and likely hundreds of millions of dollars of development cost has ended up in an open-world game with absolutely nothing going for it. I cannot see anything here that makes Skull and Bones even slightly enjoyable or worth your time.

There isn’t a sliver of fun to be had with its exploration or combat, and every facet of the experience whether it's sailing, survival, live-service features, or even character customization is done better somewhere else. 

Skull and Bones was reviewed on PlayStation 5 with a code provided by Ubisoft over the course of 20 hours of gameplay. Screenshots were taken during the review process.