Despite its troubled development cycle, Skull and Bones has plenty to offer for fans of naval combat or those looking to immerse themselves in a pirate fantasy. Engaging ship battles, a wide scope for ship customization, and immersive sailing mechanics all confirm that Ubisoft's latest live service open-world game has some strong fundamentals. However, thanks to a thin storyline, repetitive mission structures, and a narrow range of enemy types, Skull and Bones feels underdeveloped, like a pencil drawing that’s yet to be filled in by color or shading.

In Skull and Bones, you play as a ship captain during the second golden age of piracy in the late 17th century. The prologue has you ambushed by British sailors and your ship blown to bits. You are then recovered by the crew of a small gathering ship, and tasked with making a name for yourself. Soon, you arrive at Sainte Anne, a pirate port and hub location run by the ruthless pirate kingpin John Scurlock. So far, so pirate-y. 

From here, you carry out contracts, amass resources, construct better ships, and repeat. On paper, it’s not dissimilar to the mechanical loop at the heart of action role-playing games (RPGs) like Diablo 4. However, contrary to Blizzard Entertainment’s dark fantasy adventure, Skull and Bones has little to offer by way of a narrative throughline. 

Contracts follow a predictable formula. You go out, sink some enemy ships, take their loot, and deliver it to somebody. Even the story quests will tend to follow this style, too. While Skull and Bones’ central mechanics are strong enough to keep you coming back a few times, eventually, the repetition loses its luster, transforming thrilling piracy into dull bureaucracy.

This feeling isn’t helped by Skull and Bones’ crafting system. The things you can build are fun; that much is true. New weapons fixtures, hulls, and furnishings - which add passive effects to your ships - make for interesting choices when it comes to crafting loadouts and formulating your own distinct approach to battle. However, the process of gathering materials to build these new additions detracts from the pirate fantasy. After all, tales of swashbuckling and romantic high adventure on the seas rarely give much consideration to elements of resource management.

What’s more, those looking for hand-to-hand combat or complex on-foot exploration will be disappointed here. Though Skull and Bones offers plenty of sailing, everything from boarding actions to gathering is undertaken by your crew. There are pirate outposts on which you can land, but these are small areas that are only really relevant when it comes to delivering cargo for a particular non-player character (NPC) or digging up treasure for a sidequest.

Full sail  

Despite these drawbacks, Skull and Bones has a firm and impressive grasp on sailing and nautical combat. As a sailor myself, it’s a real bugbear of mine when sailing in games doesn’t take factors like wind direction and tidal currents into consideration. However, it’s also important for in-game sailing not to become too bogged down in the details. This is a line that Skull and Bones walks rather skillfully. 

As in real life, sailing into the wind is a great way to go nowhere fast. Conversely, filling your sails by traveling perpendicular to the wind or downwind gives you a nice little speed buff - useful in a pinch. However, you are not made responsible for manually adjusting your sails - your crew handles this at the touch of a button. With a single input, you can toggle your sail settings, allowing you to easily change course even in the middle of a hectic fight. The sailing mechanics are technical enough to factor into your movement and keep you on your toes, but not too technical as to alienate or bore those who aren’t quite as familiar with the ins and outs of sailing.  

All of this serves to add a satisfying edge to nautical combat. Much like in Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, you aim your cannon fire manually while controlling your ship in real-time. Depending on your ship’s loadout, your different weapons will be able to fire in various directions. Subject to cooldowns, you’ll need to patiently time your shots - a feat that becomes an exciting challenge when combined with managing your ship’s speed and position relative to enemy ships.

Do you thread the needle between an enemy formation, exposing yourself to fire but allowing you to unleash a left and right volley at the same time? Do you bear away from a foe to pepper them with your rear cannons, or is it best to stay engaged and attempt to board? These sorts of questions must be answered as battles unfold, making tough engagements feel tense and rewarding. 

There are plenty of weapons and furnishings to choose from for your ship, too. While there are more traditional armaments like culverins and long guns, mortars, torpedos, and even rocket launchers are all available to enterprising pirates looking to spice up their loadouts. What’s more, ships are highly customizable both cosmetically and mechanically. Equipping the right furnishing can be key to getting the most out of your weapons, while plenty of color schemes and embellishments for aesthetic enhancements are available with in-game currency. While the number of cosmetics only available with premium currency did leave a foul taste in my mouth, there were plenty of options to choose from for more frugal seafarers.

Low tides 

You are not alone on the seas. In some respects, Skull and Bones feels like a nascent massively multiplayer online (MMO) game. Other players can be found across the waters. You can form ad-hoc groups, banding together to take on tougher missions and contracts. Between other players and an abundance of NPC ships, the virtual Indian Ocean that Ubisoft has constructed feels well-populated.

The issue is that there’s little by way of structured missions or meaningful, player-created narratives to give this impressive open world its own distinct meaning. Grouping up with other players tends to be an ad-hoc affair, where you’ll form parties to take down tough settlements or bosses, only to part once you're finished like, well, ships in the night. 

The different flavors of mission offer little variation. Settlements can be plundered, forcing you to face waves of enemies as your crew ransacks the place. However, the battles themselves are much the same as you’d find while exploring or carrying out one of Skull and Bones’ many repeatable fetch or kill quests. Distinctive enemy types are absent, making for engagements that are fun the first few times, but lose luster after a while. Though boss battles do offer exceptions to this rule, there simply aren’t enough of them to paper over the cracks caused by the limited range of potential encounters on offer. 

Skull and Bones may, one day, be transformative. Its mastery of naval combat fundamentals and ability to capture the sights, sounds, and visuals of the pirate life make for impressive achievements. However, right now, there is little beyond these robust foundations to keep players interested. Much like a house without a roof, no amount of sturdy brickwork will suffice to keep the storm out. However, there is hope for Skull and Bones. The live service model gives Ubisoft scope and opportunity to add some much-needed embellishments and variety to its impressive yet samey nautical world.  

Looking for other online experiences? Check out our lists of the best multiplayer PC games and the best MMO games.

My friend is screaming my name in a Discord channel like an accusation. I know what I’ve done. I’ve killed her again in third-person shooter Helldivers 2. Her death is down to a combination of my poor spatial awareness and lackadaisical approach to utilizing high explosives - and while I protest that it isn’t my fault, it is. 

Helldivers 2 is a fairly unique, third-person co-op shooter that drops players into procedurally generated killing fields to accomplish missions for the glory of New Earth. It owes a debt to Paul Verhoeven’s film adaptation of Starship Troopers, and some of its best moments feel like they could have come from this movie themselves. It's deeply satisfying to fire a disposable anti-tank munition into a bug hole to close it, turrets barking as they chew through the advancing hordes, or to be saved by close-range air support that crashes into the dirt around you, a hail mary that buys you a few more seconds to try and survive. 

Regardless of your role as a boots-on-the-ground commando in an interstellar war, you’ll often get your hands on the sort of battle-defining firepower more familiar to real-time strategy players. Napalm airstrikes, bombardments from your orbiting starship, and even a planet-cracking laser are all yours to command. However, even with the weaponry, you’re not a space marine. You and your teammates are agonizingly mortal and death comes quickly: teamkilling is just part of the rich tapestry of Helldivers 2, so you’re going to have to get used to it. 

Airstrikes and bugs and robots, oh my! 

To contradict the Starship Troopers vibe, however, you’re not just bringing the pain to bugs in the game. There are robots on the scene and the two opposing forces have distinct feelings in combat. The bugs are a tide that threatens to wash over you, all melee attacks and spewing acid. By contrast, the robotic menace mixes it up with heavily armored monsters and long-range laser blasts. The strategy for fighting each is different, and you’ll have to mix up your tactics depending on what you’re fighting, which keeps you on your toes.

With that said, you’ll always know who the enemy is. The huge galaxy-spanning campaign map will let you pick a planet to engage on before you choose a specific mission. The planets have their own feeling to coincide with which enemy occupies the territory. Robots have a Terminator-esque red glow and their planets are full of eerie red light and pollution belching chimneys. The bugs meanwhile have huge tunnels leading into the ground and vivid colours.

The creature design is fairly by the book: bugs look like giant bugs with a fair bit of variation, all bulbous sacks, and glowing appendages. The robots, meanwhile, model themselves after something between Terminator and Warhammer 40,000. Needless to say, the game looks great in motion, and the characters look the part during play. They look much better as they’re coming apart under gunfire, with limbs and appendages being thrown in all directions as you take your enemies out with heavy weapons.

It’s hard to translate what playing Helldivers 2 actually feels like, though. It’s riotously violent without feeling oppressive, diluted by the slapstick comedy that Arrowhead Studios has built a reputation on. Something will always be exploding in Helldivers, and it’s funny no matter who is getting turned into a bucket of wet meat.

With great power comes no responsibility

The progression systems in the game reward playing however you want, with higher-level stratagems available as you level up using requisition points you earn through play. You only need to unlock these once and then they're available forever. In addition, cosmetic outfits and weaponry are available from the game’s Warbond system which works like a battle pass system, except that you can buy them forever like a shop - it's a generous system at that. Most missions hand out a handful of medals, and your daily challenge will give you 15 of them. Most weapons go for around the same, meaning that you can treat yourself to something for every day of play. 

At launch, the game has two separate Warbond passes, one free and one premium. I had access to both because of the code Sony provided, but I assume the premium pass is paid for otherwise. Luckily, while the premium pass gave me a different set of unlocks, they didn’t feel like straight upgrades offering a variant that had benefits and minuses on the items available via the free tier, which is reassuring for players unprepared to commit to a paid pass.

You can get unlocks over time for your ship too, which will enhance your strikes and weapons in a variety of ways. I didn’t get a chance to play too much with these because they require a lot of resources and feel more like an endgame than something to engage with as you’re settling in. I’m 20 hours in and only now approaching the first upgrade. 

As you progress, you’ll want some beefier stratagems and weapons for some of Helldivers 2’s later levels. You can take out any enemy with an orbital precision strike, a machine gun, and a dream, but it’s hard work and the slog will be much less so if you can unleash a creeping barrage of artillery fire to clear yourself a path instead.

There are nine different difficulty levels, but I think most players will find a level of challenge that feels comfortable and sit there rather than try something new. Currently, I’m happy with the fifth difficulty level and don’t fancy anything harder for the sake of my blood pressure, but I've played them regardless and, if you truly do want to challenge yourself, there’s plenty there for teams looking to challenge themselves in co-op.

Dive bar

All that aside, the most impressive part about Helldivers 2 is how effortlessly Arrowhead has managed to take the Helldivers formula and adapt it to third-person. Shooting feels weighty but easy to get to grips with, and weapons all have a concrete impact on your foes. For anyone after something more intimate, you can also switch to a first-person mode which is helpful for several guns but offers a level of precision that I found I just didn’t need. 

Mechanically, the shooting feels like the work of a studio with much more experience, and it’s surprising how good it feels. It’s not particularly precise - nothing in Helldivers 2 is particularly precise after all - but it’s a hell of a good time and firmly worth the purchase, if you’ve got the people to squad up with.

Fancy something else? We have a list of the best multiplayer PC games. If you’re playing on the Xbox, here’s a list of the best Xbox Series X games instead.