Skull and Bones review: Too many cooks spoil the broth

Skull and Bones, to me, had the potential to be both a nostalgic trip to one of the best Assassin's Creed experiences of all time and the next sea-faring title benchmark that players will enjoy for years to come. Having spent some time setting sail and tasting the seawater in Ubisoft's latest offering, a feeling of disappointment has largely sunk in.

Skull and Bones spent a little more than half a decade in developmental hell, being shuttled between various Ubisoft studios. The opening sequence credits numerous of them one after another, enough to leave me wondering whether too many cooks would spoil the broth.

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Skull and Bones: An AAAA title that doesn't live up to the moniker

At launch, there's not just much to do in Skull and Bones. You step into the shoes of a nameless pirate who dares to make a name for themselves. The starting fight and engagement will get your blood pumping. After all, that's what Skull and Bones promises - swashbuckling pirates and roaring cannons on the high seas.

The skirmish ends in a shipwreck, with you beginning your journey in a small boat with two other occupants. As you progress, you will meet vendors offering fetch quests to help you progress. Captain Scurlock will hand you the main quests initially.

Hunting in Skull and Bones (Image via Ubisoft)

You are to complete missions, gather resources, fight naval battles, and grow your notoriety as you attempt to become a pirate overlord. The latter requires you to grow your infamy rank and ship rank. As your infamy grows, you also unlock better blueprints. Ship rank will improve depending on the arsenal and weapons fitted.

It soon breaks down into merely collecting and fetching resources for the next tier of weapons. This cycle continues incessantly throughout the regions, and the game forever pushes you to gain ranks through these means.

It is a grind that took away any fun I had with the title and also appears to be a common complaint among the community. You cannot even get down to gather the resources at the islands, and parallel parking and mini-games do the job for you.

The game's ship traversal is pretty straightforward, with Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag veterans unlikely to have a rough time. And therein lies one of my primary gripes. When Black Flag debuted all those years ago, it provided players with a taste of something that they had already teased in naval missions in Assassin's Creed 3.

You got to embody the life of a pirate, sail the high seas, dive into the depths, hunt fish, sing shanties, and plenty more. All this was accompanied by the normal Assassin's Creed shenanigans, a beautiful storyline, and carefully wrought characters.

Naval combat (Image via Ubisoft)

Skull and Bones picks the naval mechanics from Black Flag, but somewhere down the line, it gets stuck in the past. The dialog juts out awkwardly, the facial animations don't do the game any favors, and the characters are variations of standard pirate tropes. The exciting onboarding mechanics from Black Flag have been replaced with a short cutscene.

The existence of a pirate/sea-exploration game like Sea of Thieves doesn't help either. It pales in such a comparison on almost all basic scales, especially since Rare's title allows four players to crew one ship, has a more immersive cannon-firing and combat, and provides a large amount of land exploration without intrusive loading screens.

In contrast, Skull and Bones lets players control the entire ship by steering and dealing with the wind by manipulating the sails. In combat, weapons are dependent on the side from which players are aiming. Various weapon types exist that have different effects on impact.

To their credit, Ubisoft has ensured that Skull and Bones looks absolutely gorgeous. Be it on sea or land (the little you are on it), I never had a complaint about the game's graphical fidelity or how the world looked.

The live-service quadruple-A title sadly isn't bereft of pesky bugs. While I faced quite a few during my voyages, one of the most annoying ones was the well-known 'Death Mark expired keeps popping up' issue.

Setting sail for Pirate Overlord (Image via Ubisoft)

In Conclusion

Will we see Skull and Bones grow over the years and actually fulfill the hopes and dreams that the game once instilled in the community? It's hard to say. The current urge to overwhelmingly focus on live-service aspects and microtransactions for immediate results in the gaming industry may not bode well for the MMO's future.

The repetitive grind, the hefty price tag, the pesky bugs, and the lack of basic exploration mechanics negatively impact anyone wanting to stick with the title. While the gorgeous graphics will surely be a draw, there's simply not enough to hold players in.

However, one can surely hope that Ubisoft will dig deep to turn things around, with Skull and Bones Season 1 already underway. After all, Rome wasn't built in a day. Maybe a few years down the line, we will actually consider Skull and Bones one of the best co-op pirate/sea-exploration games around. Sadly, it is far away from claiming any such title for now.

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Skull and Bones

Scorecard (Image via Sportskeed)

Reviewed on: PS5 (Code provided by Sony)

Platform(s): PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, Microsoft Windows

Developer(s): Ubisoft Singapore

Publisher(s): Ubisoft

Release date: February 16, 2024