Skull and Bones

Skull and Bones offers the promise of adventure on the high sea. While the game focuses a little hard on its naval warfare mechanics, they are nonetheless exciting and don’t grow old quickly. Though a bit grindy, Skull and Bones should offer hours of entertainment and many customization options to those looking to set sail into its waters.

Skull and Bones was more of an arcade style game than I was expecting when it comes to the gameplay – but this makes the game more accessible to players of all ages. Being able to leave port, target a passing ship, and then aim down the sights and fire away is a breeze. However, this can become stale until you come across a new blueprint which enable you to take on tougher opponents and settlements. Skull and Bones looks gorgeous as you sail from one settlement to the next, and despite the lack of an interesting storyline, the open-world nature of Skull and Bones allows players to play however they want. Skull and Bones is a sleek and sturdy vessel, but the lack of some sword-based combat means that it trails well behind the original Sid Meier's Pirates! which still remains my favourite – even after all this time.

An open-world pirate adventure from Ubisoft that exemplifies both the strengths and weaknesses of the studio. The graphics capture the atmosphere of the pirate era, and naval battles with ship maneuvering are excellent. However, the entire map, filled with boring, lackluster content, is not enough to compensate for the seven-year wait.

S&B is a massive looking pirate game with stunning views and amazing artwork. Includes improvements of the ships and epic battles as well. However there are no such things to do on land and the strong hand of the game is sea battles.

If not the ultimate pirate game, Skull and Bones is a good naval battle game that has arguments to make you want to get involved. So no, here, no third-person action phases: the adventure takes place almost exclusively on the waves, and once the element of surprise has passed, the qualities of Ubisoft's service game are revealed. The seven seas of the Indian Ocean are the subject of a solid atmosphere and technique, and the battles on the open sea are a real success. So, you may be struggling to get to the endgame, due to a fairly redundant progression, but believe us, the price is worth it. In short, a good surprise, far from the shipwreck that some saw on the horizon.

Skull and Bones has ended up being a rather decent game for the catastrophe it could have become. Playing it, you understand why Ubisoft didn't decide to cancel it and gave it a chance. The work of the French multinational may not be the ultimate pirate fantasy, but it is indeed an open-world game with MMO elements and a solid gameplay foundation. It's not a game for everyone, and only time will tell if it ends up being so.

Skull & Bones exists in the space between GaaS and MMO-lite at launch. There’s fun to be had, as long as you recognize that this is a looter shooter more than a pirate game.

The world is indeed wide enough for Skull and Bones and the increasingly few pirate games out there. But be careful. It won't let you get comfy. And after a long time in production, there's still work to do before Skull and Bones is feature complete.

Ubisoft has offered a decent base for an online pirate game, perhaps without a lot of variety yet, but it still has atmosphere and depth in terms of upgrading ships, building new ships, as well as trading and, of course, combat.

Skull and Bones is a solid pirating adventure that has its moment but is often weighed down by a sluggish grind and outdated quest design.

Skull and Bones is visually beautiful, and the frantic pace of its ship-to-ship battles can potentially provide intense PVP and PVE thrills. However, as a result of its turbulent, decade-long development cycle and the game's resulting "identity crisis", its high points end up getting lost in a sea of mediocrity.

Skull and Bones isn’t the successor to Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag that many seem to want, and it isn’t many of things Ubisoft itself said it would be at various points in its storied history, but the seafaring RPG we ultimately got is still surprisingly good. Sailing around the Indian Ocean firing cannons, mortars, and giant ballista at your foes is a fun time, the RPG mechanics and cooperative buildcrafting is as deep as the ocean with plenty of awesome gadgets to grind for, and the economy simulator is impressively in-depth. It doesn’t quite fulfill the promise of a decade-long cruise to port yet either, with a thin endgame, almost no story to speak of, and general instability that sometimes makes the adventure feel like a rough draft. But here’s hoping some of those shortcomings can be washed away by the waves of content already planned to come in an ambitious live-service roadmap that’s fast approaching. For now, its maiden voyage is a good start.

Combining moody and gratifying ship-on-ship combat with shallow live service trappings, Skull and Bones is great within the claustrophobic parameters of what market forces allow it to be.

Skull and Bones is the unfinished framework of a great pirate open world that still needs a lot more content.

As a whole, Skull and Bones is a very fun game, one that I genuinely couldn’t put down once the battles began. But that fun is uneven at best. Despite its long development cycle, the live-service element that is felt deeply throughout the game isn’t microtransactions. It’s emptiness.

For a niche audience, Skull & Bones may be a GOTY contender. But for everyone else, it’s hard to imagine the appeal. Skull & Bones is a grind-heavy game with not a lot of payoff, unless your idea of payoff is being asked to grind some more. You’d think that a game that spent 11 years in development would have more than just one idea repeated ad nauseam, but the evidence here suggests that’s really all there is.

Despite being in development for so many years, Skull & Bones offers fewer gameplay mechanics than the naval battles of past Assassin's Creed games. Yes, it does what it claims to do, but the turbulent development process unfortunately prevents it from getting any sympathy votes.

Despite its shortcomings, Skull and Bones does boast stunning visuals and a few moments of thrilling naval warfare—the first time you encounter them. However, its lack of depth in gameplay mechanics and story left much to be desired. Even though it continues to evolve with a trove of promised content updates, I’m not entirely sure if I want to return to its turbulent waters. Personally, not being able to roam about my own ship or disembark on islands felt incredibly frustrating and limiting. Skull and Bones isn’t necessarily a bad game; it’s just not great. It feels like lots of pieces of rope strung together with loose knots, hastily fashioned and thrown together to show that they had a working net. Unfortunately, I don’t think that net is strong enough to be worth the $70 fish they’re trying to catch.

Skull and Bones has well-built fundamentals, but lacks the follow-through to deliver on the potential of its fun naval combat and earnest commitment to the pirate fantasy.

We got kind of a simplified version of a pirate game, with limited options on what to do outside your ship. Maybe some of these things will be fixed and improved in future updates, but for now, all that remains is to explore the vast map and strengthen your ship as much as possible.

Skull and Bones has tight ship play and immersive naval exploration,making it a memorable addition to the pirate genre catalog. While certain gameplay mechanics didn’t pan out well, and the characters largely fell flat, the pirate fantasy on the high seas is still very much alive and well in Skull and Bones.

I believe that the AAAA description, envisioned by Ubisoft's boss, will become a meme associated only with Skull and Bones. This game is so shallow on many fronts that I doubt even long-term growth will be able to help it.

Its ship combat is weak, and for all intents and purposes the on-foot gameplay is nonexistent. What little story the game has is threadbare at best, and it gives the player no good reason to slog through the grind. It is saddening, as the game could've been something great, especially since there aren't a ton of pirate games out there. However, there isn't much about Skull and Bones that I will remember a year from now.

I have to wonder what happened to this project over its lengthy development cycle that took it from a promising spin-off of one of Ubisoft’s most beloved games to what will undoubtedly be remembered as one of 2024’s more underwhelming big-budget releases. It’s not entirely disposable, but it’s far from the treasure it promised to be.

Skull and Bones is simply uninspired and tells a boring story, yet is relatively fun in its moment-to-moment gameplay.

Playing Skull and Bones is like taking a really long boat ride. Sure, it gets exciting at times, but most of the time you’re just going through the motions, raising those numbers and wondering why you are even playing a game that’s clearly inferior to the game it was based on.

After a long voyage on a rough sea, Skull and Bones has reached a safe harbour. It's not the disaster many were expecting, but it doesn't offer an outstanding experience either. There are positive and genuinely enjoyable aspects, such as the combat or the artistic direction, but these are swallowed up by the swamp of live-service elements and the time it demands from players.

Skull and Bones turns the Golden Age of Piracy, one of the most exciting periods in history, into a mundane and plodding experience.

Skull and Bones was in development hell for many years, and unfortunately this effort was mostly in vain. Instead of - as Ubisoft calls it - a 'AAAA' game all we got is a simple MMO, created in a very archaic fashion.

Skull and Bones has its moments, but these brief snapshots don't encompass even half of the full experience. Everything that was great about Black Flag has been ripped out to accommodate tedious live-service elements and a half-baked multiplayer that makes you feel disconnected from other players. Some of its more egregious issues will hopefully be fixed in future updates, but it would still take an entire overhaul to salvage the game's core mechanics and overreliance on banal, repetitive activities. It's disappointing that this is the outcome after an 11-year wait, but Skull and Bones is teetering on the edge of confinement in Davy Jones's Locker.

Ubisoft's long-in-the-works pirate adventure boasts a beautiful world and bombastic ship-to-ship combat, but it sinks amid boring busywork and tedious traversal.

Skull and Bones is the result of a long wait and not receiving what was expected. It is an ambitious but monotonous game. Visually speaking, it has very good graphic details, good atmosphere, sound and a decent level of customization. Being a multiplayer service game is absolutely an advantage for this pirate game, although unfortunately in a few weeks everyone will stop talking about it.

As much as I wanted to enjoy it, Skull and Bones feels like an underdeveloped, unpolished, and unnecessary game that was better left on the cutting room floor. With awkward quests, little incentive to explore, and far too many problematic features, it’s left us wondering how this took 11 years to release and how quickly it’ll drown in its own seas.

I don’t see much of a future for Skull and Bones. Ubisoft has announced its Year 1 roadmap, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the studio jettisoned the cargo and let it sink to the bottom of the ocean way before that, it certainly feels like they only finished it out of obligation anyway.

Instead of a "gritty pirate game," Skull and Bones is a looter shooter on the high seas that keeps stepping on its own toes. I hope future seasons will transform it into a game that's good for more than novelty ship battles.

Skull and Bones promises the pirate adventure of our dreams and falls far short thanks to a sparse storyline, lack of personality, and gameplay that oscillates between frustrating and boring.

There are brief windows within Skull and Bones where I can see some remnants of passion. Everything else is a chore. A predictable one, considering the game’s delays and development issues, but a disappointment all the same.