Skull and Bones Review

At last, through the doldrums comes Skull and Bones. The game has been drifting in the choppy lull of development limbo for about a decade. It began life as an offshoot of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, whose naval battles were a blast. That adventure, buoyed by gunpowder and stirred by salty wind, was drenched through with the piratical, to the point where its status as an Assassin’s Creed game was all but drowned. No such identity crossover here. I kept my eyes trained for any white hoods, for the stray glint of a hidden blade. Nothing. Skull and Bones is its own beast – a drugged-up Hydra, perhaps, its various heads unbothered to even bicker among themselves.

We have sailing, battling, crafting, plundering, completing contracts, and trading with other players. All of which rolls along in a dazed and lazy rhythm, and you wonder why it all falls short. You long for a true open-world swashbuckler, spiced with a rich and rum-glugging mood, but you end up with a sandbox of damp and clumpy thrills, washed out with stretches of open sea. The action is set on the Indian Ocean, at an unspecified time in the 17th Century. An early voice-over informs us that we are in “the dawn of capitalism,” and that the world is being bruised and bullied by “corporations as mighty as nations,” known as the Compagnie. “With an iron first, they forge a path of tyranny and exploitation.” Incidentally, the publisher and developer of Skull and Bones is Ubisoft, a humble family business of modest ambition, whose global network of studios presumably donate most of their profits to charitable causes.

Indeed, the cinematic introduction, replete with craning shots of ships and faraway lands, credits Ubisoft’s studios in Singapore, Belgrade, Berlin, Chengdu, Kyiv, Montreal, Mumbai, Paris, Pune, the Philippines, and Shanghai. In other words, we are in the dizzying realms of Triple-A development. Or, in the words of Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot (channeling that scene in This Is Spinal Tap) a “quadruple-A game.” The result, with so many cooks looming eagerly over the broth, is as you would expect: not a dish that feels rejuvenated and enlivened by its worldly reach, rather a bland and shapeless course, with the juice strained away and the flavours blurring into one.

The plot begins with you, a pirate captain, getting blown to splinters by the British. From here, you patch the sails of your reputation until they once again fill and flutter with infamy. This process is, like many of Ubisoft’s games, a matter of administration. Slosh from A to B, hopefully with a hold full of goods; sell them; upgrade your ship; set objective markers; and, periodically, sink other ships. It hardly reeks of hot-blooded excitement, does it? In these worn routines, Ubisoft shaves away the romance of Blackbeard and his ilk and emphasises the dull busywork, the sheer daily grind, of muscling the waves to your will. The combat is of the same swivel-and-fire kind that held sway back in Black Flag. Only, where that game had its sea legs and catered for landlubbers – with a spread of city streets and clattering melees – Skull and Bones is all water.

True, there is a compass of islands on which to drop anchor, but they are like stage sets: depthless boardwalks, peopled by a stock troupe of NPCs with stick-on features, extending barely further inland than the beach. You create a custom hero, gazing at your reflection in a puddle – a perfect symbol for the stagnant story, with its wavering and murky motivations. What begins as a thirst for pirate fame soon ebbs into a quest to defog the vast map, slipping here and there into a mission to merely stay afloat. With no narrative tether, Skull and Bones falls back on the currents that have borne so much of Ubisoft’s recent back catalogue. No wonder it feels unmoored. After a string of hours, you’re left with a litany of chores, checking off item after item, listing on the tide.

Still, this is not without its consolations. For one thing, sailing is often a pleasure, with its quick blend of the placid and the tense. One moment you’re coasting through a calm expanse; the next you’re met with a mountain range of breakers, whipped up by a storm, as if you had plunged nose-first into a furious cappuccino. Skull and Bones runs in Ubisoft’s Anvil engine, and the sights that are regularly churned forth warrant a look. The game doesn’t go for the roiling colour of the oceans in Sea of Thieves, which are brushed with a cartoon brightness. Instead, we get beauty of a more traditional flavour: the breach and twist of humpback whales, fingers of rock that poke through the mist and pull it away like a curtain, revealing unseen lands. As much as it may crack the immersion, seeing boats zoom past bearing names such as “Morbius65,” it’s easy to tune out and let your fellow-players float by, like toys passing in a giant tub.

You could spend an afternoon in this pleasant in-between. In these seafaring moments, it’s as though we were watching Ubisoft do The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. In the end, that is exactly the problem with Skull and Bones: those innocent joys of movement and discovery, which Nintendo so perfectly corked, are categorised and stencilled onto your HUD. As with a lot of the developer’s games, you feel as if they could almost play themselves, while you rest a hand on the rudder and watch. Why resist, when the ocean and its myriad wonders have been conquered and prepared for you by Ubisoft? Both the fatal shortfall and the light allure of Skull and Bones is laid out perfectly on the menu screen: “Press any button to rule the seas,” it says. Vive la Compagnie!