Skull And Bones made me look up the word ‘Swashbuckler’. It’s a word that conjures up images of romantic adventures. Dashing pirates leaping from deck to deck and swordfighting the rival captain; perhaps firing their personalised flintlocks for good measure. See, it comes from the archaic word ‘swash’, meaning to swagger with a sword, and ‘buckler’, meaning the little, round shield. It creates up an air of violence and mystery when combined with the rolling sea.
I don’t think this is the type of pirate that Skull And Bones is going for. It’s slightly more realistic. Rather than scampering up rigging or firing muskets, we instead engage in the rum smuggling trade and prod at the Dutch Merchant Company. That’s not without promise, even true-to-life piracy can be exciting, but Skull And Bones has no idea what it wants to be. Exciting pirate adventure? MMORPG? Idle game? Its failure to commit to any of them is what ultimately sinks it.
A Pirate’s Life For Me
Let’s take each in turn, shall we? Starting with the exciting pirate adventure. Skull And Bones starts well enough. We captain a ship in the midst of a pitched battle. The sinking ships on all sides turn out to be a sign of things to come as we quickly get swiss-cheesed by an approaching flotilla. We’re fished out of the waters into a teeny-tiny boat and from that lowly starting point, we build back our reputation. That takes us to the pirate-infested port of Sainte-Anne and our own, cannon wielding pirate ship.
It’s a promising start, but suffers from a lack of any real direction. Once we step foot in Sainte-Anne, we make contact with the local Kingpin, John Scurlock. He gaves us the vague direction of disrupting the French Compagnie, but this mainly takes the form of fetching some random items, chasing up a ship or plundering a port. Each quest accompanied with about three lines of dialogue. All the side quests are the same. Basic fetch quests that don’t further the world, the goal – or anything except our wallet. So, our exciting pirate adventure isn’t really much of an adventure. There isn’t even any land combat. Best we can do is lurch around and chat up vendors.
That said, the impetus seems to be mainly on exploring and upgrading. I’ll talk about the actual sailing in a moment, but first I want to talk about what you an actually do in the world. Most of it is harvesting and crafting, which is about as interesting as ever. Say you need some ironwood planks; you’ll need to harvest some trees in a little quick time event. So you sail up alongside them, only to find some other bugger has harvested it before you get there. Skull And Bones is an MMORPG, after all, even if it didn’t seem to add much other than forcing me to go further afield to find the ingredients I need. The chat system seemed permanently down too, so I couldn’t even complement a fellow pirate’s booty.
A Leisurely Sail
Maybe I’m approaching Skull And Bones from the wrong angle. Rather than swashing and buckling, maybe this is meant to be a more meditative experience. Certainly there are elements that would fit comfortably in the idle game genre. The smuggling, for example. We undergo deals for sugar cane, which we then distill into rum before delivering it to the destination. It’s the 17th Century equivalent of long-haul trucking and, rather worryingly, I could see myself getting into it. But then it continually spawns in rogue ships and absoutely kills the vibe. Ah well.
Still, the actual sailing isn’t bad. Wind direction affects your speed, so you can’t just plow straight on. When you hit the open sea, it can be almost harrowing. I made the executive decision to pack the main story in and focus on trading out my small tub for a proper ship. That took me across the open ocean and my tiny ship was battered and thrown about by the waves. It was exciting. That said, Skull And Bones doesn’t give you many nice places to sail to. Some let you get out and stretch your legs on a small parcel of land, with two or three traders, but most are just a plain text interface. Given the whole ‘pirate’ thing, I was hoping for a bit more flintlock-related negotiation.
You may have noticed a glaring ommision in this review so far: the combat. I’ve left it until last, partly because of drama but also because it’s unquestionably the lynchpin of the whole game. It needs to be fantastic. The unfortunate truth, though, is that it isn’t as good as it could have been. Granted, there’s a fantastic array of weapons – from basic cannons to torpedos – and they fire based on what part of your ship is facing the enemy. My issue is that it just doesn’t feel like ship combat. Your cannons can be aimed any direction and the cannon blows feel quite light. It can be exciting, but I never felt like I was wrestling against the waves, or like my ship was splintering. Most of the time I was just going in slow circles, waiting for my side cannons to reload or blocking the obvious attacks.
Skull And Bones – Disappointing At Every Level
The upshot is that this game about sailing a 17th century sailing ship doesn’t really feel like we’re sailing a 17th century sailing ship. If you paved over the ocean, you could be in any old vehicle. So where does that leave us? Well, it’s a pirate adventure that’s not exciting or adventurous. An MMORPG, where the multiplayer just gets in the way. An idle game that doesn’t let you relax. Skull And Bones has sailed into a strange dark area, where it can’t really be called anything. Actually, scratch that, I can call it something: boring. It’s a bad month for ship games around here, isn’t it?
I wonder if this is down to the lengthy cooking time. Development began back in 2013, after all. Its vision, scope and gameplay focus have all changed as various hands have dipped into it. The fact that it released at all is impressive, but perhaps it was best to leave it docked. No wonder there’s no focus if a decade can go by without anyone knowing what it’s meant to be. It’s a shock it didn’t explode the moment it started up. Regardless of the cause, Skull And Bones is a dull, unfocused sailing game, from a publisher that should be able to churn out better than this.
