SkullThe lifestyle of a pirate, before that term became associated with people who wanted to stick it to the media companies by downloading everything for free. No, this was an era full of adventure and high romanization, if you thought the tales of American Western expansion were romanization then son you haven’t seen nothing yet. The popularity of pirates can be traced back to the early days of both modern literature with the likes of Treasure Island and film with Captain Blood and The Black Swan. This then moved into gaming with the Monkey Island games and Sid Myers Pirates. Until the genre peaked when Disney released Pirates of the Caribbean back in the early 2000s. Then 10 years later, Ubisoft decided to take a shot at the genre with Assassin’s Creed 4 Black Flag, it was a massive success on both on critical and commercial front, so much so that Ubisoft decided to take the pirate aspect from that game and spin it off into a multiplayer experience, that sounded great when it was revealed…back in 2017, it’s been 7 years and here it is, an experience that gave me a mixture of both disappointment and pure anger.
Skull and Bones takes place during the Golden Age of Piracy in the Indian Ocean, you are the survivor of a naval attack by the British Navy, you then wake up on a plank of wood choose your character and are picked up by a group of pirates, you then do a tutorial, and end up in the main social hub of the game. The first hour or so was an interesting experience, mainly for how fast my enjoyment could leave my body. The first red flag is you cannot board enemy ships, that’s because the game is more focused on you playing as a boat then a character. With that said there is no character-on-character combat whatsoever in this game, all encounters are only on the high seas. Which I understand they wanted to focus on making the ship combat fun at least, but they couldn’t even do that right. Most of the time it feels like I’m holding down the trigger moving the angle and releasing, I know that sounds like most games, but it just felt annoying that you are putting these limits on your own big game.
Then you have your ship, which you can customize with a few options, most of them are locked behind a paywall and I’m not shocked at this point. But I feel like now this where the game goes into historical fantasy fiction, because for most of the time that you are sailing the wind will be fighting against you, but you also have to keep an eye on your stamina bar. This was the point that all goodwill that was still me flushed out in an instant because this is not a gameplay decision in service to the world, this was made to pad things out so you wouldn’t be finishing the whole “campaign” in the span of a lazy afternoon. Because that is what you are doing for most of the game, sailing to island collecting things without getting out of your ship, and bringing them back to the social hub for some rewards. It’s similar to how Sea of Thieves was at launch, except there is even less here than that game, which over the last few years has taken the crown from Assassin Creed 4 as the best pirate game around, so they had a template and still found a way to mess this up. But the game does have some moments of joy, the graphics at times are really good, when you just want a quiet moment sailing around the seas and hearing your crew sing shanties, it was fun with friends, but I think that can be said about game of this nature.
But in the end, I had zero expectations for this as it kept getting delayed year after year, and I would only hear news about it not about new gameplay features, but mainly how mis-managed this game was. Along with the fact that Ubisoft could not cancel this mainly due to a contract they signed for funding from the Singapore government. After remembering that story a lot of the half-baked choices here make sense, this is a game they wanted to quickly release and bury it, so they can move on. This more of a case study about game development than a game itself, which I am going to be fascinated when stories about development start to come out when Ubisoft pulls the plug on this game. But the point I reached the end and got a message for the endgame, and I thought to myself, between the two major live service game launches in the past month I would rather be playing Suicide Squad, and that was when I realize my opinion on this game would not change.
Score: 4 out of 10
Reviewed on PlayStation 5