GaZowmn

This game reminds me a lot of Rebel Galaxy (2015), a space sim where you also play mostly as your ship (more like as your ship). I dare say that Skull And Bones could have probably dropped the whole on foot gameplay and be more like Rebel Galaxy where actions at hubs/towns are options in menus instead of free roaming, but I do like the treasure searching and the stalls where NPCs gather do provide a village like touch to these locations, specially in the endgame where some NPCs get additional interactions for a particular gameplay system. Ship combat feels great, specially once you get out of the culverin (standard cannon) comfort zone and start experimenting with other weapons, which come with their own quirks, not just between cannon types, that include scatter ones, explosive ones with arching trajectories and even straight firing large ballistas, but specialized variants with traits such as a single concentrated shot instead of the standard 3 shots of a bombardier, and ones with burning or flooding effects, which can have additional synergy with particular ships and furniture (equipment with diverse effects) for more specialized builds. Aside from combat, gathering resources for building gear and even outright cash from wreckages are available all over the place. Although the game has a minigame for these, since I frequently try to loot everything on my path to another location, I enabled the function that skips the minigame and does it automatically (think of Skyrim mining and you will get a good idea). You can get some bonuses from doing it manually (a furniture further increases it), but I prefer leaving that to my crew and instead open my map to see what is going while the looting/gathering is taking place. If grabbing stuff from the map isn’t your thing, you are in luck: in many cases you can instead head to particular locations to buy them, steal them altogether… or even both: go to a town, buy their stock and then plunder it for getting more out of it. A few of the endgame resources are not buyable and will require taking down a fort or hunting ships with the items on their trading routes. Seasonal enemies (current one being Plague/poison themed) provide some extra variety, though I do am concerned that some of these high level enemies seem to also sail around the starting game areas. Admittedly there are some late & endgame task to do there to, but when I was lower level I once ran into one of these enemies while plundering a low level town and got killed quick. Fortunately, these enemies are also trying to pick fight with other NPCs ships, so once you know of them, it’s not too hard to avoid them while they are busy attacking someone else. My favorite enemy so far is a recently added special ghost ship boss with very unique mechanics, including teleporting and “organic growths” that function as weak points to make the rest of the ship vulnerable. Taking down forts is also quite challenging, though there do is a menu option in their icon to call for help to take them out. Things I didn’t like: the Dhow as an own able extra small ship. This thing should have been an outpost or town only ship for doing the wildlife hunting minigame. It’s not terrible as a means to switch things around, but you don’t want to go around through the world map in this thing. Worst part? There are a few parts of the map that seem to be designed to be only traversable with the Dhow due to its size to fit through very narrow sections. Nothing unique AFAIK, but makes me concerned they might want to add more extra small ships and incentives to use them. Speaking of ship sizes, currently only small & medium ships are available to players, though enemy large ships are already around, supposedly still being worked around. Medium ships have better stats than small ones, so I guess it makes sense to save them for when the ship level cap increases, but I dare say it is everyone number one request at this time. I will conclude saying that I don’t honk this game needs on foot combat: Elite Dangerous was for 7 years a ship only game, and when they introduced on foot combat with the Odyssey update, that basically killed their playerbase. For extra context, the first iteration of S&B shown to the public was a 5vs5 ship arena multiplayer, so it does seem that the focus was on ships only from the start, making the little on foot gameplay we have likely the result of people asking for some such gameplay that probably wasn’t part of the original scope. Lastly, I will mention that much like in Rebel Galaxy, a single player game, I have mostly played S&B solo. I don’t like PVP and I’m glad to say that so far it seems entirely avoidable. Some content is intended for co-op, and ways to coordinate that aside from plundering (which already has a support request option) need work. Devs do are being responsive and have been making several updates so far. Overall I can greatly recommend it, specially if you liked Rebel Galaxy.