Game Review - Skull and Bones

Game Review: Skull and Bones by Ubisoft

Score: +6/-9

"Play Skull and Bones for free! Set sail into the vibrant open world of Skull and Bones, a naval online action RPG where you rise to become the most fearsome pirate kingpin. Customize your fleet, craft unique ships, and forge formidable weapons to dominate in exhilarating sea battles. Join a dynamic world with fresh challenges, features, and stories each season."

Like Marvel's Avengers, I feel Skull and Bones got an unreasonable amount of bad publicity and (especially at the occasional deep discount) is actually quite good, depending on what you are looking for. As a time sink for solo players it's actually pretty good, but you need to like the core game activities (mostly the ship combat) because there's next to no engaging story.

The endgame is "the Helm" where you collect territories (through a variety of activities that are mostly combat but sometimes just handing over goods or silver), farm Pieces of Eight with quests, and use those Pieces of Eight to upgrade your facilities.

For those who want to focus on combat, the other endgame is ascending to another World Tier where everything is harder to defeat.

• -1 Weak to no story.
• There are two main story arcs related to the Kingpins on the west and the east sides of the map and the home ports there.
• These are very short and not particularly interesting. If you are looking for good stories in the base game and from season to season, don't bother.
• There is a third story arc (Investigations) which is basically just reading a lot of lore pages but which tells you various stories of the world.
• There are seasonal "stories" which are barely anything at all, just a bit of flavor text to introduce new bosses and a quest chain that doesn't even have dialog (even unvoiced) with the quest giver.
• There might have been a good core idea to the seasonal stories, but not really developed in how they were told.
• +1 Setting is great - geography, trading routes, etcetera.
• The world is beautifully detailed.
• -1 Worst character movement I've ever seen with frequent skidding past your intended target location when you "stop" and occasionally weirdly walking backwards.
• +1 Pirate activities are satisfying - Attacking ships of course but also plundering settlements.
• +1 Lots of miscellaneous activities: Sailing, harvesting, checking out shipwrecks. Even spear-hunting crocodiles and sharks.
• +1 No shortage of side quests and repeatable quests.
• -1 All quests reward the same amount of battle pass points regardless of how tedious or easy they are.
• -1 However once you unlock the Helm smuggling operations, all of those become basically pointless because you need Pieces of Eight and assorted Helm goods to buy or do anything endgame (purple gear or gold materials).
• -0 A few seemingly simple quests (e.g., defeat three Gatherer ships with Bombards) are notoriously bugged even after all this time.
• Ship combat is good, mostly.
• +1 Ship combat can actually be fun and engaging.
• +1 Solo encounters are mostly well done.
• -1 Boss fights and bigger forts are irritating. NPCs can shoot and move easily but you have to basically focus on one arc at a time, and some actions like Muskets and Boarding involve a short scene that takes away your control entirely for several seconds.
• Some boss fights are so punishing that it's barely possible to do them or extremely tedious. The sea monster ones are astonishingly hard compared to their level, even the ones not marked as "dangerous", indicating extreme threat.
• Some boss fights are in the open ocean and it's an even bigger mess when you have to deal with the waves which not just impede your intended movement but block your shots.
• -1 Groups are a mess when trying to fight a boss with all the clumsy ship-based movement plus occasional huge area of effect attacks that make everyone move.
• -1 Ship roles are not great
• Tank ships hold Brace to taunt but you can't attack while you do it. You could be in a Tank ship at an open world co-op event but with no healer to back you up, it's pointless and you might as well try to do damage.
• There are healing weapons (presumably intended for Healer ships) but you can't heal yourself with them. And the chaos of moving ships around and chasing intended healing targets or having them sit in your area of effect healing shots is also unreasonable. If a Tank did sit still and just Brace that would be doable, but realistically no one is going around with healing weapons.
• This is because you cannot change your loadout except at a port. So when someone "calls for help" or if you run into a co-op boss, everyone is basically Damage-Dealer because no one is going to run to port, change their loadout, and then come back. And no one carries healing weapons because you can't use them to heal yourself so they are a liability for players outside of groups.
• -1 Iffy but well-meaning mechanics
• When you run into a "world event", instead of giving you an additional compass waypoint, they overwrite your current quest waypoint -- even if you do not intend to engage the world event. You have to find your way out of it, let the "leaving event" timer expire, and then you get your waypoint back.
• "XYZ calls for help" -- When this happens it splashes across your screen and makes a loud noise. But realistically, only people who don't have anything better to do will drop what they are doing to respond.
• And then what role is needed? Never mind, no one is going to run to a port, change their loadout and adjust their cargo, then head out. And to where? Oops did you forget which even they asked for?
• -1 Crafting is terrible and unsatisfying
• Often for grey, green, and blue grade weapons you can buy the item somewhere for just Silver (which is the basic currency and you can make gobs of it especially during 150% Silver weekends). You just have to wander around until you find it or realize no one is selling the tier III blue armor or weapon you are looking for.
• Even when you can't get the current highest tier, someone often sells it and there's no point using the blueprint unless you want more than you can fit on a ship.
• Hard-to-farm purple and gold tier crafting materials that are only sometimes sold in time-gated quantities. So they are easier and cheaper to get from quest drops or the battle pass.