Skull and Bones Reviews
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
There was so much potential for Skull and Bones to be a fantastic pirate MMORPG, but it is not even close. And due to the lack of meaningful content, Skull and Bones has the potential to be the most disappointing full-priced Ubisoft game that I have ever played. Our money seems to be going toward what seems like a free-to-play game that managed to squander an AAA developer's resources.
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 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's everything surrounding those battles and skirmishes that makes Skull and Bones a harder sell. The simulation aspects are limited and under-baked, the questing is almost always tedious, and there are only a few main ship models to work with. Lacking the ability to dock and explore, ocean exploration feels perfunctory and artificially hampered. Better ship customization options open up eventually, and it’s initially interesting to tinker with armaments, but it’s hard not to want even more of the best boat blueprints, more gear, more detailed inclusions that would make these vessels feel authored and unique, something to elevate the vacant core routines. Skull and Bones could have been a welcoming and rare new beacon for pirate game fans but, even with seasons of promised premium content yet to come, this boat is visibly sinking.
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, unfortunately, doesn't offer much more than a disappointing experience. Ubisoft insisted on a project that, from the beginning, lacked the necessary elements to result in a satisfactory final product. The result is in many ways embarrassing: it turns out to be one of the most boring games I've tried in recent years. Most of the time is spent in a never-ending search for resources to improve our boat, an activity so monotonous that the desire to return is practically nil.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
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.
Skull and Bones is a massive letdown and one of the most disappointing games in recent years. Creativity is almost nonexistent, 70 dollars price tag is unjustifiable and combat becomes repetitive extremely fast.
Review in Persian | Read full review
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.
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 strips away everything great about Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, resulting in a dull live-service game that's often a chore.
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 has potential but the result is disappointing. the gameplay gets boring after the first hours and the game fails to deliver story wise.
Review in Persian | 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.
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.
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.
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.
At first, Skull & Bones seemed to provide a little surprise, but the longer you play, the more frustrating it becomes. The same missions are repeated over and over and the fact that almost all of the gameplay takes place on the boat is simply not fun enough. The choice to focus almost the entire game on sailing was a mistake. The potential of Skull & Bones was enormous. There aren't that many of a major publisher that makes a pirate game. The big question is why they didn't opt for a complete pirate adventure, where you had the freedom to explore all the islands on foot and discover the secrets and treasures.
Review in Dutch | Read full review