REVIEW: ‘Skull & Bones’ Is Innovative In Water But Empty On Land (PC)

It has been years since Skull and Bones was announced, and then unannounced, and then delayed. With a tenuous development cycle that became more well-known than the game itself, I’d be lying if I said I never questioned if the game was ever going to out. A co-op pirate open-world action RPG, Skull and Bones is developed by Ubisoft Singapore and published by Ubisoft. With complete cross-play and cross-progression, the game is biting off a lot and going head-to-head with Microsoft’s Sea of Thieves. But for better and for worse, this game is nothing like any other pirate game you have played.

A “gritty pirate fantasy,” you play as a pirate you design set in the Golden Age of Piracy in the Indian Ocean. You plunder ships and destroy trade infrastructure for companies run by the British, French, and Dutch as you rise to Kingpin status in the world. In Skull and Bones, you sail, fight, and plunder in four distinct areas. A vast world with unique environments, the quests take you across the Red Isle, the Coast of Africa, the East Indies, and the Open Seas. In these environments, you meet factions specific to their locations. The Ungwana, Clan of Fara, Dominion of Rempah, and the Sea People. While some are friendly and offer help, like the Sea People, others are aggressive, like Rempah.

Despite three different locations and the various clans, the game only has two Regional Kingpins who serve as quest givers in the game’s limited narrative. The first is John Scurlock in Sainte-Anne and Admiral Rahma, the Leader of the Unbound, in Telok Penjarah. Their respective ports serve as Dens. These are hubs of pirate activity and are the main places you will see other people in the world, which is surprising since you’re always in a server with other players. With a vast map with open areas for expansion. It’s easy to conceptualize how Ubisoft will keep this live-service game alive in the future. However, the questlines from the Dens are easy enough to finish extremely quickly.

Outside of the main quests, or “Main Contracts,” as the game calls them, there is a bevy of other activities. You can take part in World Events, pick up bounties from the Bounty Board, contracts from the Job Board, which are simple acquire and deliver quests, Side Contracts connected to different clans or story elements, and, of course, Repeatable Contracts. Additionally, Dynamic Events give the player more to do by adding a mix of Treasure Maps, Rumor investigations, shipwrecks, cargo hunts (a PVP event), sea monsters, ghost ships, and more. There is always something to do. That said, as you level up, the difficulty doesn’t match in some of the first areas like the Coast of Africa, returning to them doesn’t have much value outside of crafting materials.

The contract systems do keep the game interesting. Completing contracts and generally plundering and fighting other ships will grant you Infamy, Skull and Bones’ experience currency. Other contracts grant you black market currency to spend on unique items. The only issue with the contract system is how it works, or rather, it doesn’t always work when in a party with someone else. While the game is focused on co-op play, there are glaring inconsistencies when it comes to resource sharing, contract fulfillment, and rewards. But a co-op deep dive is for another review.

The final way that the game asks you to explore the world is through the Helm. To become a Kingpin, you need to expand your empire, and that requires unlocking the Helm. By doing so, you’re able to distill illicit items to deliver and sell across the outposts.

The Helm offers the most diverse contracts in the game. You have supply deals that task you with buying raw materials, which can also be done through mobile dealers at sea. Then there are Rogue Hunts, where you attack rogue convoys to take their cargo. And finally, the contracts to Plunder Forts, for both raw and refined materials. These contracts yield both Infamy and black market currency to get yourself farther in the game, and by that, I mean unlock new cosmetics.

As you get more Infamy, you level up through the tiers from Outcast to Kingpin. But your status isn’t tied to your level when you’re in combat. While each tier offers specific rewards and unlocks new blueprints, they don’t immediately impact your combat level. Instead, that is based on your boat. Your combat level begins at your boat’s base level which you raise by adding new weapons, armor, and furniture. This makes it important to gather resources and to craft. That said, once you hit the max, continuing that gameloop isn’t necessary. The only left is to grind for cosmetics you can buy with specialty currencies like Monster Teeth collected form the Sea Monster or black market currency.

I have never liked naval battles. The clunkiness of ships’ wide turning radius and inability to just go backward has always been frustrating to me. However, Skull and Bones has made combat that always feels fresh, and ships that noticeably handle differently based on the type you have chosen.

If you want to withstand endless hits? Run a tank ship. Want to support people? Well, have a support ship and drop support mortars on your party to replenish health. And if you want to just be a glass cannon, there are DPS-focused ships that go fast and deal damage just for you. With 10 types in total, the ship variety may not be extensive but every single ship is unique in how they deal with speed, damage mitigation, and attack damage.

The naval combat in Skull and Bones sets a new bar for combat mechanics of this kind. The dynamic weather and attention to detail in the ocean mechanics are not just innovative but engrossing. Sailing and fighting in the sea during a storm is a tense experience that builds environmental drama, deepening the stakes of a physical fight between you and the enemy ships.

There have been countless times that I have been winning against a higher-level enemy Privateer only to get severely damaged by a Rogue Wave and then be swarmed by Privateer reinforcements. The water is as much a component of how you do combat as your weapon loadout. That is exciting and remains so, no matter how many battles you go through.

Additionally, fighting Kuharibu, the sea monster, and the ghost ship Maangodin, adds a level of variety to the combat that makes the game even more entertaining. While most ships are fought the same way, by targeting weak spots and blasting sails, they do take damage regardless of where they’re hit. So, when in doubt, a powerful enough weapon can, most of the time, win the day. That said, when fighting Kuharibu, players are tasked not just to bring a good offense but also to use their Brace in order to absorb hits that come unexpectedly as a sea monster emerges from the water. Balancing your attacks and bracing can become more difficult over time as your stamina lowers, which makes this battle unique.

When it comes to the Ghost Ship, the battles become all about coordinating with your group and learning precision. After collecting the Oceans Apart contract, you will fight the Maangodin, which is immune to damage. To do win, you must destroy the weak spots, dealing damage along the way. The precision this asks for makes it a difficult task to do alone, especially when the ship is at a higher level. It can even be difficult with another person if you’re not in sync.

Combat is also diversified when you take on Helm Delivery quests of rogue products like rum and opium. When you carry illicit cargo, you will be hunted by rogues. Sporting black sails, the Rogue ships overwhelm you quickly. Additionally, while on supply deliveries, you can’t fast-travel, pushing you into sailing the high seas and fighting along the way.

Upgrading your ships for battle involves buying blueprints from traders at outposts or vendors at ports. Then, you use collected materials specific to different locations to craft them at places like the Blacksmith, Carpenter, or just build a whole new ship at the Shipwright. Building better weapons and finding the right ship is a core part of the game loop. Go to a main port, use your resources to craft and get better gear, then go on the ocean and fight. Rinse and repeat. That said, the final part of returning to the seas also involves exploration as much as fighting. The only thing here is that the land has been devalued, with Ports serving as little more than upgrade hubs to be ignored once you’re done.

For all the innovation and genuine excellence that Skull and Bones shows off when you’re at sea, on land, it’s almost empty. With little investment in your character beyond cosmetics and picking up quests, life on land feels like a placeholder. This isn’t to take away from the gorgeous environment designs and layers of people and details that build up each place, especially the major ports like Sainte-Anne and Telok Penjarah. The outposts you visit and the ports themselves have an astonishing amount of character.

However, much of the activities on them feel empty. There is no real story to connect across the characters you meet. Yet, every time you meet a trader you’re pulled into a long dialogue sequence that if you skip through too fast will crash your game. The interaction you’re forced into is too much chatter without any real substance.

That is the hard thing about Skull and Bones, a game I have genuinely loved my time at sea with. It has turned me from a person who hates naval combat into one who genuinely loves the challenge of battles at sea with no safe harbor in sight. There is a tactile quality of life in the water. Whales and dolphins appear as you sail, your boat breaks into a variety of pirate shanties in various languages. Life on your boat feels whole. But that also means that your boat is really the main character of the game.

With so little to do on land, your pirate is inconsequential, even if you do make them look cool. You’re not leading any plunders of your own, and the only weaponry on your person that can’t be used at all is attached to your outfits. It’s not entirely fair to bring up what a game is not. It was never supposed to be Black Flag and it’s not Sea of Thieves. It is all about naval combat and not your own investment in plundering.

That said, by making elements like plundering trading posts and boarding enemy ships into small cinematics, it’s hard not to yearn for what you could have had. In an expansive world that can clearly be built out more in future seasons, the longevity of investment may be difficult. You can fight with the ships at your disposal in so many ways. You harvest materials while on your ship. You fight as your ship and even fulfill quests in your ship. This is your real character, not the one you’ve created.

In fact, the lack of attachment to your pirate character undercuts the way that pirate life is represented. A cultural mosaic of languages and people across the world, the language variations and cultural aesthetics throughout Skull and Bones are gorgeous. For anyone who has actually explored the history of piracy in that time period, the historical influences are clear. You push back against the French, Dutch, and British. You travel the world and find new

The vibrant world that has been created for Skull and Bones feels distant. There is an emptiness to it that could have easily been solved by putting more player investment into their character as much as their ship. The easiest way to explain running through outposts and even the main ports is like you’re looking at it all through glass. While the sea and oceans are tangible spaces, the land is not.

As a whole, Skull and Bones is a very fun game, one that I genuinely couldn’t put down once the battles began. But that fun is uneven at best. Despite its long development cycle, the problem with the live-service element of the game isn’t microtransactions. It’s emptiness. The game is clearly finished—the beauty and dynamic mechanics of naval battle show that. But with outposts all but inconsequential, only two Kingpins to grow from, and not much variance in the sea monster and ghost ship encounters for replayability, you can see the spots where there can just be more.

Skull and Bones feels epic in scale. But that large size also means that there are clear places that can be something in the future, which makes some of the game feel empty right now. While I may be intrigued with what will down the pipeline as new Seasons of the game begin, but I’m also not attached to it.

Skull and Bones is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.