Pirates! As children we seem to grow up with a fascination with pirates which is weird as they are more like anti-heroes than the usual superheroes we aspire to be in our childhood years. Is it the alure of sailing the dangerous seas in search of treasure, the action-packed sword fights we see choreographed in movies like Pirates of the Caribbean or just the fact that you get to wear cool clothes and have a parrot on your shoulder as you captain a ship across the seven seas whilst engaging in frequent cannonball fuelled battles and plundering riches from your opponents?

I am guessing it is a combination of all of these things, and the call of being a pirate doesn’t seem to dissipate when we grow up either, not if the success of movies like the aforementioned Pirates of the Caribbean or games like Assassins Creed Black Flag and Sea of Thieves are anything to go by. It has been a long time since any new pirate games have been released and Ubisoft hopes to fill this void with Skull and Bones, first announced back at E3 in 2017 the games original trailer released to much excitement from the gaming community, especially all of the wannabe Captain Jack Sparrows out there, little did people know just how tumultuous the development cycle of Skull and Bones would be. After suffering five total delays and numerous beta events and major changes to the originally promised gameplay, the game is finally here and thanks to Ubisoft we have gotten our salty hands on it, let’s take to the seas and find out if the finished product is any good!

Skull and Bones is set in the Indian Ocean between the 1650s and 1730s in what was considered the heyday of pirates. You start out as a surviving crew member from a pirate ship that was destroyed trying to plunder the British navy and end up in a dangerous world full of pirates, politics, subterfuge and violence which all exist as a roadblock to your goal of becoming one of the most notorious pirate captains sailing the seas. Being a pirate is all about notoriety reputation, and riches and in Skull and Bones it is no different, you start off with what I would consider to be a makeshift raft and a couple of loyal crew members and set out to find the port of Saint Anne which is rumoured to be a pirate haven, it is there that you meet Captain Scurlock a notorious pirate himself who you must prove yourself to by completing missions in order to increase your reputation as a bloodthirsty pirate. You can also do side missions and jobs for other NPCs such as the blacksmith and carpenter to gain reputation, money and sometimes blueprints.

Saint Anne itself is one of the games main central hubs and it is here you will find yourself running around amongst other players much like safehouses in The Division franchise, which is a great touch as it helps the port feel alive as you watch other pirates going about their business in the settlement. The port is home to all manner of NPCs from carpenters and blacksmiths through to shipbuilders and outfitters and the helm, which acts as a black market of sorts. The port serves as a place where you can use blueprints to build new ships or upgrade your existing ships and the choices at play here are expansive from upgrading the canons on your ship through to changing the armour that protects your precious vessel. The weapon of the era is cannons, but you have a variety to choose from such as short range, long range, torpedos and even mortars that do damage to all the boats that you are attacking, it is up to you how you equip your boat and choose a loadout that compliments your playstyle. There are numerous options in regard to your ships armour and also furniture that you can equip on your ship that provides bonuses such as extra stamina for your crew or decreased reload time for your cannons. The more you grow your reputation the more blueprints you will have access to which will in-turn serve to upgrade your ships level once the items from the blueprints are crafted.

Once you leave the safety of port it is up to you how you wish to increase your riches and reputation, you can complete contracts and missions which mainly consist of destroying certain fleets of ships or dropping off or picking up valuable goods from other outposts, quests not only offer money as rewards but also blueprints and other useful items such as ship repair kits. You can also ignore quests and simply sail the seas exploring and plundering smaller ports for trade goods and taking on trading ships to sink them and steal their riches. Exploring is rewarding in Skull and Bones as there is a whole bunch of resources to be harvested around coastlines in the game, resources are harvested via a fun little mini game (this can be turned off if you don’t find it enjoyable) where you have to click in a certain place on an on screen meter in order to get the most resources from a particular node, you can then choose to keep these items for trade or use them to craft upgrades to your ships and weapons.

Ship to ship combat is the meat and bones of the game and I am happy to say that it is a lot of fun. If you are looking for realism then you are looking in the wrong spot, if you are looking for fun then you are in the right place. Combat whilst more arcade-like than the games original vision can still be incredibly tactical at times as you try to work out the best angle to attack from in order to utilise your most effective weapons whilst also getting close enough to board your opponent’s ship once you cause enough damage, boarding ships gives you the added bonus of receiving more loot than if you just destroyed it. I had a blast sailing out into deep waters and using my spyglass to gain knowledge on what other ships were carrying and how much of a threat they were to me before sailing in at full speed and engaging in naval warfare.

Skull and Bones is really a very beautiful game, whether you are calmly traversing the narrow channels in between landfall or out in the middle of the ocean trying your best to avoid massive waves and fleets of pirate ships that are out to get your cargo, the sights and the sounds all come together beautifully to pleasingly portray what living as a pirate must have been like, at times the water physics are absolutely jaw dropping. Call me a massive ‘landlubber’ but the lack of being able to visit and walk around on land, except for the port hub areas, is a massive oversight on the part of the developers, they have built this magnificent world full of all types of wonderful and mysterious looking islands, yet we can’t explore them. It is so confusing to me why land exploration is not a thing, it would have been great to go on animal hunts on land or to be able to run in and plunder different colonies and engage in sword and musket fights, its not even that all of these things would have been that difficult to implement either and it would have just added so much more to the game.

The more I played Skull and Bones the more I got invested into it, the game throws a steady number of upgrades at you as long as you are prepared to grind for them, I am fine with this style of gameplay, but it all depends on what type of game you enjoy. Once you start to reach end game you will start to unlock a whole lot more content and it was at this point that the game really became enjoyable for me. First you will unlock ‘the helm’ and a new type of currency called Pieces of Eight. The helm serves as a smuggling ring and black market of sorts, you seek out items such as sugar cane and poppies and refine it and then do delivery missions, if you are successful you are rewarded with Pieces of Eight that can be spent on the black market for all types of cosmetics and blueprints amongst other things. These smuggling missions comes with higher stakes than normal missions, for a start you are not able to fast travel to the colony you are delivering to and you will also have a bunch of pirates hot on your tail trying to sink your ship and steal your precious goods off you, these were some of my favourite missions in the game as some of the deliveries are a very long distance away over treacherous seas, it really gets the adrenaline flowing and is the type of risk vs reward gameplay that I highly enjoy. End game doesn’t end here though once you have established enough trust with Yanita, the manager of the black market in Sainte-Anne, you are tasked with sailing to the far-off region of the East Indies and establish contact with Houma, the leader of the East Indies smugglers. Once you talk to Houma you will unlock the ability to access the Helm Empire Overview which will allow you to receive buffs to items produced by your distilleries, increased rewards from chests and legendary heists and increased profits from dealing with other factions. You will also unlock PvPvE events where you can attempt to take over settlements that have manufacturing facilities or you can attempt to take on elite targets that provide special rewards when you sink them, be wary though because once you receive the reward other players can attempt to sink you and steal your precious rewards off you.

PVP is an optional part of the game but one that is very exciting and fulfilling if you are successful in your goals, it is also one of the more problematic areas of the game in that there are some exploits that make it incredibly easy for your opponents to bully you and gain an unfair advantage over you. A couple of the major issues I personally witnessed was ships being able to heal other ships but remain immune to your fire as they aren’t considered to have entered PVP unless they attack you, this effectively means that people can team up and have an immune pocket healer to heal them and you can’t do a thing about it, a simple way to remedy this would be to place a PVP flag on any ship that heals another ship already partaking in PVP, another issue is that even if you fight off opponents that are after your cargo and sink them they can respawn and fast travel to anywhere on the map, this means if they guess where you are travelling to, which in most cases isn’t too hard, they can fast travel ahead of you and lay in waiting to ambush you at your destination, which gives them a highly unfair advantage.

Skull and bones is a good game that unfortunately falls short of being a great game, there is a lot of immersive, addictive and engaging content here that will reward you for the amount of time that you put in, but I just can’t get past the extra dimension that being able to explore on foot and fight with swords and muskets would bring to the game, it is such a missed opportunity that the scope of the game never included this, hopefully it is something that could possibly be added in a future expansion. I highly enjoyed my time playing Skull and Bones and you will too if you love the idea of being a pirate that runs their own smuggling empire as long as you go in knowing the limitations and scope of the game, if you are on the fence about it then I recommend that you wait until the game goes on sale as I would consider the price to be quite steep for what the game offers.