Skull and Bones Review (PC) – More Is Sometimes Less

One of the most prevalent opinions in the gaming sphere is that Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is the peak of the Assassin’s Creed series. That fueled the idea of a game mostly oriented on the pirate aspect of Black Flag. This is where the game Skull and Bones comes from. It has taken ten long years, and we finally have it in our hands, but how is it? Find out in our Skull and Bones review.

Game Name: Skull and Bones
Platform(s): PS5, Xbox Series S|X, PC (Reviewed)
Developer(s): Ubisoft Singapore
Publisher(s): Ubisoft
Release Date: February 16th, 2024
Price: $69.99

Skull and Bones starts with your player character surviving a fiery war with the British Navy. The entire fight is playable, as you get to see the mechanics of a fully developed ship before it gets destroyed. You find a few other survivors who band with you to get some supplies from the crashed ship. Eventually, after being with you for the first few levels, they decide that you should be the next captain and want to follow you to the rising levels of infamy only a pirate can provide.

Learning To Be A Pirate 

Skull and Bones has a very simple gameplay loop. You grab a mission from one of the NPCs and go grab a certain doohickey or destroy a certain ship and grab a souvenir to show that you have destroyed the ship. The gunplay in the boat is quite enjoyable in this game. Being able to customize the different weapons on your ship with cannons, mortars, torpedoes, demi-cannons, fire breathers, and more is quite fun to test. Sadly, most of your game time will be sailing in the sea towards a big light in the sky as you mark your next objective on the map. Storms and winds can come at you at any time which will slow or speed up your ship based on how high your sail is raised.

You can mine materials or chop trees in the very same way as everything else you do in this game, by a small QuickTime event that requires you to have precise timing with your trigger finger. The resources then get removed for a small amount of time before they respawn in the world again. However, if another player ship stops by and takes a resource, it will also remove it from your view, so you will have to wait for it to come back either way. Be sure to grab the resource you want quickly. You can also go another route and shoot down a ship that could be carrying that resource.

You can plunder outposts with other players to get resources as well. The co-op in this game allows for a lot of freedom. You can join each other for missions you both have or even help them with their mission regardless of your ship level or infamy level. You can be next to each other sailing the high seas or be on completely different sides of the map dealing with your quests and objectives. The best part of this game is probably the amount of freedom they give you while in co-op. You can have up to three players in a group. When you are grouped up, be mindful that enemies get higher stats and become harder to take down. If you are trying to level up your friend’s infamy or helping them collect resources, be sure to note that. It might be easier with two players instead of three if you are trying to speed-level a friend of yours.

Becoming a Captain

When it comes to the visuals, Skull and Bones is a real mixed bag. The model of your main character is not the prettiest thing in the world, but with the outfits they have, you can have some fun combinations. You can have four different body types, and the variety isn’t anything to write home about. The part that this game shines is in the water and the cosmetics. Namely the ship cosmetics. The ships have some gorgeous aesthetics with skeletons, octopi, or even sirens to put on your ship. When it came to the ships and everything surrounding the ship, the team behind this game put a lot of effort into making it look good and feel good. Everything else, however, falls flat in the visual department. The animations aren’t bad, at least not on a PC with capable video card and playing the game at a high framerate. However, when you drop down the frame rate, the animations somehow look a lot worse than games normally do when dropping to 60 fps. When I put this game on my TV via my beefy laptop, it still ran well, but dang, the animations for speaking, walking, and moving the character’s body in any way took a hit.

Skull and Bones runs well with only a few frame jitters when storms start. Otherwise, it is a smooth sailing experience at whatever framerate you put it in. I usually attempt games on my Steam Deck when I review games, but I didn’t want to mess around with my Steam Deck settings to get the Ubisoft launcher working. So I can’t say if it runs well.

My Problem With Skull and Bones

Skull and Bones isn’t a bad game by any means. My issue stems from what it is trying to do or say as a story rather than as a game. The loop of pillaging ships and outposts is solid and can even be fun, especially with people. As you get further and further into the story as an infamous pirate a lot of the characters you meet just automatically know who you are and what you are meant to be as a person in your values and what your character is trying to do as a pirate. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind of your “pure intentions” to get to the top, even though you can have dialogue interactions that put you basically as a diplomatic merchant or as a bloodthirsty pirate. No matter what route you take the people have no shame or differences in how they react to you. You, as a character, don’t get to make decisions that impact anything in the ocean. There is no reason for anyone to trust you, but they do wholeheartedly to get ahead with their desires.

That story is also what I would say is the problem with this game. It says nothing. You can do something, and it will impact nothing. You can pillage somebody, and the forces will forget that anything happened in the next minute. There are no consequences to being a pirate in this game. You ride your ship somewhere and take down an armada, go to their outpost and plunder it, then go into that faction’s territory almost immediately afterward. You can sell off all the loot you got from the ships you destroyed and receive no repercussions. Do you want to destroy the British Navy? They don’t care if you do destroy them. Do you want to become a merchant and do things more peacefully? The British Navy still doesn’t care. There are a lot of factions in this game, but it only changes the sails of the ship and the outfits the crew is dressed in.

Scallywag

Overall, Skull and Bones is a pirate game that doesn’t want to offend anyone by making a message about anything. The biggest problem is that there is no purpose to playing this game unless you like the gameplay and the gunplay of the ship. Sailing is still fun when you get a good ship, but I wouldn’t say it’s a game worth the price tag. This is not an AAAA experience in any way, despite what Ubisoft otherwise says.

Skull and Bones is available on PS5, Xbox Series S|X, and PC.

Review Disclosure Statement: Skull and Bones was provided to the reviewer by winning a giveaway. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy.

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