I’ve been struggling with what game I wanted to review first. Should it be a game I love, that I hate? Something I recently played, or something I can put my nostalgia glasses on for? Well, I decided to go right down the middle with all of it.
Who thought crafting was a good idea?
So, to start, this is a game I remember being announced back in 2017, and recall all the rumors of its existence following Black Flag. I have always thought the pirate genre of games was shockingly lacking in entries. I mean, how can we not have more pirate fantasy games?!
Well in comes Skull and Bones, a game that wanted to be the first AAAA game, saying it wants to be THE pirate game. So, is it? No. In no way.
Between the awful ship design, microtransactions, season pass, and every other live service woe you can think of, there is a shell of a game. So, let’s dive into the good, and the bad.
My time investment
I ended up grabbing the platinum trophy for the game on my PS5, which took me about 58 hours of active playing.
The Good
This game does do some things right. It’s clear that someone at Ubisoft did some kind of research at some point in development. While many of the historical aspects of the game are extremely shallow, and have zero affect on gameplay, they are there. It’s obvious this game wasn’t intended to be 100% historically accurate, however it’s nice to see the game represent some small aspects of history.
The game can also be visually stunning. There where moments during my playtime that had me just sitting back and enjoying the views of the Indian Ocean.
The combat feels good as well, though I am not surprised by this. The team that worked on Black Flag, also worked on Skull and Bones, so they knew their stuff going into it.
Sadly, that’s about all I have for the good, so we have to get through the bad now.
The Bad
This game is not a pirate game. It is a live service, MMORPG, where your character is a ship. Now, not everyone will consider this a bad thing, but I personally do.
This game is mostly just whittling down the health bar of bosses with fantasy weapons that deal certain types of damage. It has world events, a storyline that wasn’t interesting, and everything else that many modern MMOs have. While it can be fun at times, it gets very boring and repetitive quickly.
Moving onto the ship design itself. It is awful. Many of the ships have their rudder above the water line, which would be terrible on a real ship. It feels like they didn’t want to copy real ship design, and come up with something new, but it just misses the mark. The Sloop looks more like a block of wood rather than a ship, while the Bedar looks far too nose heavy, and needs its ballast adjusted. The only ship that looks good is the Snow.
Ships also have classes, but most people are playing solo, so I only ever saw 2 being used, either Tank or DPS.
The gameplay loop itself is also very dry. You’re either harvesting some material, or attacking a ship/settlment/fort for the materials you need. At first it’s exciting, but then you realize it’s mostly just small cutscenes of your crew doing the thing, while you sit and wait.
Ubisoft forcing this game out, and forcing it to be this strange, always online MMO really hurt this game. I could see it working far better as a PvE Sea of Theives, where you invite some friends into a private server, everyone has their own ship, and you can adventure, and plunder together. Taking over larger vessels by hiding in a cove and attacking when the NPC least expects it. Or you can take the ship head on, but at a much higher difficulty and risk. So many ideas could’ve made this game amazing, but sadly, it seems Ubisoft higher ups just wanted a quick buck, or for the game to fizzle out quickly.
There are many more issues with the game, many of which have already been covered a million times, and I only want to share the things I haven’t seen discussed as much.
The Rating
Overall, I would give the game a 2/5. It wasnt buggy during my playtime, but it doesn’t feel like there’s any love in the game, just greed. I bought the game for around $20 (for a brand new Steelbook copy) , so I don’t feel scammed out of my money, but I don’t think it was 100% worth it either. Hopefully Majima will give me the pirate experience I am looking for.
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