Pirates! Such an evocative word! But if it’s swashbuckling tales of derring-do you’re after, of sea monsters and high seas adventuring, of buried treasures on distant shores and smuggling escapades by the light of the moon, there are other, better ways to fulfil that classic pirate fantasy, because Skull and Bones’ take is, regrettably, a bit of a bore.
Skull and Bones reviewDeveloper: Ubisoft Singapore, UbisoftPublisher: UbisoftPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC (Ubisoft, Epic), PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Amazon Luna
It begins, though, as all good adventures often do, in the midst of battle, wood splintering and canons booming as your ship is pursued across the 17th century Indian Ocean by a British armada intent on delivering you to Davy Jones – a wonderfully cinematic opener slightly undone by the fact straying beyond an arbitrary boundary immediately presents you with a stroppy message to turn around. Fortune, though, is on your side, and you escape – after bobbing through shark-infested waters on a bit of flotsam – with the shirt on your back, a rickety old dhow, and a burning ambition to become the most renowned pirate in all the land.
In rather less romantic terms, it’s a live-service progression track grind masquerading as a rags-to-riches story, but it’s one that Skull and Bones, to its credit, tries really hard to sell. Over its near-decade of development and across countless iterations, Ubisoft’s pirate adventure has doubtless taken many forms, but what I wasn’t expecting to find – amid its live-service trappings and its flexible fusion of drop-in co-op and optional PvP – was quite such a lengthy, narrative-driven campaign. Granted, its story – a self-serious, by-the-numbers tale of factional warfare, populated by a cast of largely charmless characters that could have been wrenched from any number of blockbuster Ubisoft games – isn’t a particularly engaging one, but it does at least give Skull and Bones’ rather graceless tangle of underlying systems some narrative drive.
Your journey from destitute castaway to the mightiest pirate is, ultimately, one of glacial XP accruement and the ponderous tick of a progression bar, driven by a level-gated crafting system and an endless resource-gathering grind. It’s a set-up that, truthfully, feels more grocery delivery driver than pirate a lot of the time, and it’s a thematic mismatch Skull and Bones, for all its tricornes and shanties, never quite resolves. But still, the underlying acquisition loop does what it’s supposed to, providing a reasonable enough excuse to raise anchor and move.