14 DAY TRIAL // 
Fans still remember fondly the adventures of Edward Kenway wandering around the Caribbean aboard the Jackdaw. Considered by many one of the best Assassin’s Creed games, one of the most memorable parts that conquered the heart of the audience were the naval battles. Ubisoft, realizing that they stumbled on the golden egg tried to reproduce the success and it only took them seven years to ship the game.
Meanwhile, Skull and Bones became a bad meme and the best example of developers hell, along with another game signed by the same publisher. But unlike Beyond Good and Evil 2, the pirate-themed game finally managed to get released and left me wondering why there was so much time needed to put together a game that although is not bad, is not in any way or form outstanding.
Once again, Skull and Bones is a try to milk the Live Service formula delivering limited content at first with the promise to expand upon it following a rigorous update schedule. In the meantime, there are plenty of cosmetic items that can be acquired separately propelling the real cost of owning everything in the game in the stratosphere.
A side result of being a live service game is that the initial narrative is a bit thin, to put it nicely. The ties with the Assassin’s Guild are gone, the game focuses solely on the perils and pleasures of pirate life. You start out maneuvering a respectable sized ship in a conflict that is supposed to offer you a taste of the great naval battles waiting for you.
Being on rail the experience is a letdown with boundaries that force you back in the limited watery arena with the gentleness of a Call of Duty title. After successfully sinking your opponent, your mighty vessel comes face to face with an armada that sends it to the grave under the waves. As one of the few survivors of the ordeal you are found by other pirates, that without a good reason or even a job interview declares you their captain.
Once you manage to get safely to the island of Saint-Anne, your true climb up the corporate latter of pirating begins. You will do various missions in order to gather money, resources and blueprints so you can build bigger and better equipped warships so you can take on more difficult missions so you can stockpile even more resources.
Sure, along the way there is something that resembles a story filled with greed and revenge, but most people you will meet have as much personality as a salty herring. We have the usual suspects in the form of escort, fetch, point defend and assault quests. In the meantime, you will explore various territories increasing your infamy, your main goal being is to grow.
After you leave the safety of land it is a dog-eat-dog world where you can rely only on your crew. In reality though during the review period the 620 square kilometer map wasn’t exactly bursting with life. I managed to meet several other players and take part in some multiplayer activities; it feels that the map of the game is as repetitive as the gameplay mechanics themselves. You will figure out quite quickly the few elements that will repeat in various forms: spots where you can gather wood, metal, hunt for animals and outposts that you can trade with, or you can plunder.
The type of wood and metal, the animals and the level of crowbar needed to pry open the shipwrecks will vary, but what you will be actually doing not so much. You will keep your eyes open for flotsam, you will plunder other ships and outposts to get the resources you need and try not to get too bored with hunting down star charts, escorting hips to the ports they want to get too and get engulfed in the naval battles.
The letter is the highlight of the game, trying to position your ship in order to hit your target with your ship’s cannons. You will have to take into account the time needed to reload and the various instruments you can use from mortars to torpedoes. Next to the countless cosmetic options you also can use ship amor and various furniture pieces to have an advantage in battle.
In order to get better ships and better equipment you need to find their blueprints and gather enough resources to fabricate them. The progression can seem a bit slow, but it all depends on how much time you are willing to spend playing. At first you will feel severely unprepared, but after getting your first more serious ships things become a lot more manageable.
Reaching ship level 4 or 5 considerably improves the gaming experience and you start to feel like a pirate having a fighting chance against your opponents, instead of a swashbuckler tasked with mopping up the deck. Your actions have consequences though that influence your standing with the various factions and can have dire consequences as being hunted by much more powerful enemies.
The system, although simple, has the potential to emerge you in the pirate’s life until you start coming across the various bugs that ruin the illusion of leading a carefree and plunder full life. First and foremost, after a small debacle at the moment of writing this article the global shat system is still disabled and unusable. A more annoying aspect is when you get involved in a conflict between two warring factions, decide to support one, and then have both turn against you.
And the most annoying one is when the quest system decides to go on vacation. This can manifest in various forms the game not recognizing that you talked to the NPC needed to move events forward to deciding that he no longer recognizes the daily missions and their criteria. Unstable server connections, game crashes, ships disappearing without trace, terrible framerates during cutscenes and other anomalies are also heavily plaguing Skull and Bones.
The graphics look pretty decent, and at times it can even make you pause just to look around you. The 10 types of ships are different enough and can be decked out with plenty of small and big details to help individualize them. But when talking about the technical aspect we cannot walk by the big selling point of the game using the abilities of the DualSense controller to make you feel the waves.
In its current state, this is nothing more than a marketing gimmick: you will feel a flicker of vibration in the controller in the least expected moments, but while going up against huge waves you will not feel even a small tremor.
The Good
- Beautiful visuals and detailed vistas
- Simple yet satisfying gameplay
- Plenty of ships and customization options
The Bad
- Grindy gameplay with repetitive missions
- Not enough original content
- The game's formula feels outdated
Conclusion
Just as another live service game recently released based on the DC universe, Skull and Bones feels like a cash grab attempt that maybe fixable in the future with many patches and updates but even in its ideal form is far from an AAA title. At best it could be a relaxing and engaging, albeit repetitive activity, but in its current form is a beta version sold at full price.
Review key provided by the publisher.
