Skull and Bones Reviews
"Skull and Bones offers solid naval combat and engaging endgame content with a good grind for upgrades, but it lacks a compelling story and has minimal on-foot segments. While the visuals and sea battles are impressive, issues like glitches and an always-online requirement hold it back from being great. The roadmap for updates provides hope, but the game still struggles with mediocrity."
Review in Dutch | Read full review
Skull and Bones is quite possibly the biggest disappointment of 2024 so far. The lack of content at launch reminds me of the first Destiny game, with somewhat fun moment-to-moment gameplay, but a complete lack of anything else to keep the player interested past the first hours at launch
Skull and Bones simply failed to follow on the success of Black Flag. It's a watered down version of a good game with insane amount of meaningless fluff. The years of development were simply not worth it.
Review in Slovak | Read full review
Skull and Bones appears to be a project pursued due to financial support rather than player demand. It borrows elements from Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag but omits enjoyable features like swimming. The game reduces the player to controlling a ship in a superficial world, revealing its lackluster content once the initial gloss wears off.
Review in Czech | Read full review
Years of development yield a little tension with spectacular sea fighting while playing. In the end, however, this looting offers too little variation to keep fascinating. The story and the main character also do not know how to commit to you because of absent development. Furthermore, live service elements and hated micro-transactions make cannon food from Skull and Bones. Ubisoft should have sat down again to sit around the drawing board or have this title sink.
Review in Dutch | Read full review
It is filled with some great ideas and I can see that it could have been something exceptional. Unfortunately, there’s simply not much here apart from the calming effect of sailing through a rather pretty world and several thrills that can soon become chores.
I had hoped that Skull and Bones might have been an underdog, and I had wished it had come out and surprised me. Unfortunately, it is undercooked and lacks direction.
Skull and Bones is not only not the "quadruple A" promised by Ubisoft, nor is it a game capable of bringing to life the pirate dream of all those who have ever dreamed of being able to command a black-flagged ship.
Review in Italian | Read full review
After about twenty hours of gameplay we wonder why they finally released a game that won't even manage to break even and put Ubisoft through even more promotion costs
Review in Greek | Read full review
Skull and Bones falls short of expectations, particularly in its lackluster narrative and repetitive gameplay loop. The exciting ship combat, deep customization, and visually stunning world can't fix the emptiness you feel when sailing the high seas.
Avast ye landlubbers! There’s enough pirate booty in Skull and Bones to fill the coffers of the entire Spanish Armada.
Skull and Bones is a pirate naval warfare game that is open to criticism in the areas of navigation and exploration systems. In spite of this, Ubisoft's title can be played and provides moments of adrenaline during battles or assaults, which are exciting and fun.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Despite the clear effort that went into build diversity and satisfying naval combat, Skull and Bones’s core gameplay loops simply aren’t enough to stop this ship from sinking. Mindless grinds, tedious busywork, and a complete lack of any meaningful gameplay hooks outside of the core combat result in an experience that feels incomplete despite the plethora of Ubisoft checklists that there is to work through in your time at sea. If you’re someone who enjoys tinkering with builds and doesn’t mind grinding for materials in a constant pursuit of that next upgrade for hours on end, then you may find something to like here. Otherwise, this is a voyage into tedium-induced insanity that you can definitely afford to miss.
Skull and Bones nails its ship combat and sailing so wonderfully it becomes a highlight amongst generic gameplay loops, bare bones story, and chore-like endgame tasks.
Overall the game is Decent, but with the amount of years it took to make, we both expected way more from the game. While the game invites players to explore the beautiful but treacherous Indian Ocean during the Golden Age of Piracy, if it weren’t for the Online Servers, this game would likely be one you’d see heavily pirated, just like the Golden Age of Piracy the game is set in.
Skull and Bones is an enjoyable sea-faring romp that has thrilling naval combat, but the grind-heavy gameplay loop can get a little tiring over time. It’d be something if there was a bit more to do on land to give the gameplay loop more variety, but with most of your progression based upon your antics at sea and grinding for resources, it doesn’t take long before you find yourself doing a lot of the same things over and over again. Did it make Skull and Bones a bad experience? Definitely not, with the naval battles offering plenty of thrills and exploration across the seas proving to be a real treat. Progression is rewarding too, whilst playing with friends makes a lot of the flaws a lot more forgivable. It just needs that little something extra to make the grind a bit less repetitive right now – hopefully it’s something Ubisoft can work on with the upcoming Year One content, because the foundations are in place for Skull and Bones to stand out as a mighty impressive pirate experience.
Skull and Bones has some fun naval combat mechanics and a largely engaging sandbox experience that's brought down by live-service trappings and a lack of freedom outside of controlling your ship. There's a lot of room for improvement, and Skull and Bones has the potential to realize its setting by reexamining the games it's influenced by.
Skull and Bones is not something I can recommend to anyone. If you want to play a good game about pirates, I suggest going back to Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, released years ago. It's really interesting that a game released 11 years after its development and seven years after its announcement ultimately turned out to be worse and more primitive than the older title that inspired it. Unfortunately, though, practically nothing worked out in Skull and Bones. It's an incomplete title, full of flaws and bad decisions. Playing it was a road through agony for me. It may not be the worst game we've gotten and will get this year, but it's still disappointing.
Review in Polish | Read full review
Skull and Bones is an aesthetically displeasing, barebones pirate game lacking base fundamentals such as boarding which provides an incredibly mundane and ultimately boring experience that is far below the par compared to its inspiration from Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.
Skull and Bones isn’t the absolute shipwreck that many expected it to be. However, after such a long period of time waiting for this come out, never truly knowing whether or not Ubisoft had actually cancelled it, it’s hard not to be disappointed with this corporate and generic end result. This is a shallow, empty, lifeless experience, where its admittedly solid core gameplay cannot carry the rest of its disappointing elements on its own. There is still some fun to be had, sure, but this isn’t worth the current pricetag, especially with other, much better pirate-themed games available in basically every modern system you can imagine.