Skull & Bones Review (Xbox Series X|S)

It's taken its sweet time making landfall, but Ubisoft's oft-delayed AAAA slice o' pirate life, Skull & Bones, is finally with us. We've already been hearing chatter from some of those indulging in the game's early access that it's all a bit boring, slow and bland. Me hearties, all of these things are absolutely true! However, there is something else here. Something (besides the need to write our review) that keeps us coming back to this odd mish-mash of an experience, a mish-mash that becomes more rewarding - to a point - the longer you're prepared to stick at it.

Of course, Ubisoft's recent statement that this is a "quadruple-A" game is pretty tough to grasp, we can't see much about it that would keep it from running well on the last gen of consoles, but let's not skewer everyone involved for that defense of Skull & Bones' steep price-tag. What we've got with this one is an undoubtedly slow-moving affair, a confusing mix of disparate parts, and a game that's very obviously seen multiple delays and changes to its underlying systems of play. It's also managed - somehow - to scrape its way through to release in a state that's provided us with some fairly good times amongst the unavoidable bad.

Jumping into Skull & Bones for the first time you're treated to a short sequence that sees you take control of a great big fancy galleon with a ton of firepower, let loose to destroy a whole bunch of enemy ships before you are - in time-honoured vidya game fashion - blown to pieces and left busted and broken at the bottom of the pirating leaderboards. It's now up to you, ye scurvy so-and-so, to take that tiny wooden raft you call a boat/home and make a name for yourself on the high seas. Good luck with that.

You'll primarily rise through the early ranks here via combat against other ships - AI and human captains alike - buying and selling goods and exploring and discovering trade routes. Your current ship, crew and fighting ability rank up and grow as you go, and early hours are made up of small-scale naval battles against weaker foes to get you warmed up a little. The ship-to-ship action, as expected, feels pretty great (not surprising with all the experience Ubisoft has with naval battling via Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag and the like), and although it doesn't have the depth of Sea Of Thieves - no individual roles for party members or even walking around on your ship here - it does enough to make for some fun fights.

Indeed, this is a game that does an amazing job of burying just how intense and fun its fights can get once you introduce high level PvE and PvP skirmishes to the mix. Once you've done your share of simple missions and got yourself into the late/endgame stuff, the scraps here can provide lots of challenging arcade fun with just enough strategy to keep things interesting. It feels great (if entirely unrealistic) to manoeuvre the ships around in Skull & Bones - even the biggest beast of a Brigantine controls like a nifty little speedboat - and there's plenty of satisfying feedback to firing off rounds from the many, many upgradeable types of cannon and bombardment devices you can fit to whatever ship you're currently rocking.

Enemy AI does a good job of putting up a fight too - once you get into the meat of it all, they know how to position themselves, how to use range to their advantage and when to steamroll into you for big damage. There's always a welcome risk of other parties becoming embroiled in your battles too, with passing players and AI often jumping into the mix for maximum carnage. Getting close to ships that you've damaged initiates a boarding sequence that sees you earn bonus spoils if you get your timing right and, even just playing against higher-level AI enemies, all of this stuff is rather moreish and relaxing in its own strange way. Just knocking about the ocean, riding the huge waves, battling through storms, gathering goods and getting to grips with turning on a dime and picking off targets with style.

Skull & Bones may not match the mighty Sea Of Thieves for how good its water looks and behaves (SoT remains best in class in this regard), and it absolutely doesn't have anywhere near as much fun, colour or personality to its missions as it stands right now, but if you've enjoyed life on the video game high seas before, there is still a comforting ebb and flow to slide into here. It's all a bit stifled and serious, you can sense the various redesigns and delays have made for a right old mess when it comes to the core vibe in all honesty, but it manages to capture the fun of sailing around and blowing people up quite nicely, thank you.

We're also quite into the gentle nature of the customisation and upgrading options thus far; the silly outfits and fancy attire, the bigger boats and guns and cannons and all that jazz. Rising from nothing to a proper pirate force to be reckoned with is a dream we're 100% committed to chasing, and once you get to the latter stages of the game that dream can be a rather more fun and challenging one. Once you unlock Helm progression, the game's late/endgame system that opens up more in-depth build-crafting, legendary heists, sea monsters, intense Hostile Takeover wave attack battles that require multiple players and so on...this is where the game belatedly starts to show some real promise.

It's just shame, then, that the asking price in terms of time spent plodding through boring early missions is too high as things stand right now. There's just not enough good stuff to engage with for a damningly long period of time getting started. This lack of enticing things to do is then compounded by janky walking sections around lacklustre locations full of stiff-looking NPCs. We're not sure these landlubbing parts need to be here (just give us a menu to buy stuff from), but if they are expanded upon they could provide more substance later down the line. There are a few big settlements already, so it's not out of the question entirely that we'll see this part of the game grow, but currently leaving our ship is usually met with a groan whenever it's required of us.

The core experience is then further dragged down by a total lack of any sort of intriguing narrative, bland NPC characters, and the overriding sense that this is a game that hasn't figured out what it wants to be yet. Even in terms of how you interact with other players, it all seems so slapdash. You can co-op, help each other out, call for support with waves of enemies when you're plundering a port, all that stuff, but none of this is clearly defined or explained. Its various trading loops - buy here cheap to sell there for max gains and so on - also don't get interesting enough until you hit a point way deep into proceedings when you can control your own empire.

If you can manage to keep on sailing through the rough stuff, there's a fairly good time to be had for fans of all things ARRRRR MATEY with Skull & Bones, and doubly so if you're engaged enough to reach a late game setup where you can really go to town on building your very own pirate enterprise. But as a multiplayer game, as an MMO, as a looter shooter of sorts or whatever this is meant to be in the end, it's is a very confusing and confused effort, one that gets the combat and feel of things right, but needs a whole lot of content updates, tweaks and DLC before we'd encourage anyone beyond the most enthusiastic of potential pirate kings to get involved.

Sea of Thieves managed to turn things around completely from a very lacklustre launch, and Skull & Bones definitely has the potential to do the same here. Let's hope it gets the support it needs.