Skull and Bones Review: Sunk to the Bottom

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I’ve never found the pirate fantasy to be mesmerizing, but every so often there comes a piece of media that really captures my imagination within that setting. The Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag…yeah that’s about it. So when Ubisoft decided to create an entire game designed around the golden age of piracy from Black Flag, I was excited. Unfortunately, Skull and Bones is an empty husk containing dated ideas and some of the worst mechanics that modern gaming has to offer, lagging far behind the game it was inspired by.

Skull and Bones is a game that delivers on its promise on the most surface level possible. You’re a pirate, with a crew, in command of a ship, sailing and plundering through the high seas looking. And yet, it’s completely boring. What happened? For starters, it’s a product that is lacking in core services that one would expect from a game of its scale. Its gameplay mechanics are a shallow imitation of what came before with the depth of a puddle, and the remaining mechanics after its prolonged development period offer the bare minimum.

Skull and Bones starts where Black Flag did, by plunging you into the middle of a highly intense naval battle. It teaches you its combat and navigation systems, which are almost the same as those of Black Flag, and then it strips you of everything. What’s baffling is that even after putting almost a dozen hours into it, I was never surprised by any addition that wasn’t already covered in its tutorial. Ship combat and traversal never go beyond the base mechanics presented at the start, and unlike Black Flag, you can’t just abandon your crew to swim to an island for riches when you’re bored.

The core gameplay loop of Skull and Bones is all about resource gathering and crafting. Everything in the game revolves around crafting, with it being the only way to progress through its leveling system. I’d have been fine with it had it not been so boring. How do you collect resources? By either destroying other ships or playing a tame minigame when parked near an island. It’s the kind of stuff you’d expect to see in a misleading ad for a mobile game, not a “AAAA” game as Ubisoft likes to call it.

What about combat variety? Well, technically you can pillage settlements and conquer forts, but you never leave your ship while doing so. Every combat-focused gameplay activity boils down to the same loop - brace for enemy attacks, and fire cannons at weak points. Rinse and repeat. There are small variations like other ships trying to stop you from looting stuff from settlements but it’s never enough to make things interesting.

There’s barely a story that glues all these experiences together. NPCs exist solely to offer mundane exposition to flesh out the lore of this world, and there is an illusion of agency with the inclusion of dialogue choices. It doesn’t help that the few characters that get the privilege of being in cutscenes aren’t interesting either, and Ubisoft’s tried-and-tested animation system takes away any soul that the performers would have imbued these characters with, to begin with.

The customization options include a decent variety of modules to change your chip, but we all know that it really exists for the in-game store. Thankfully it doesn’t draw attention to itself, so you can add a unique flair to your ship by earning modules through in-game events.

There are also some fantastical missions involving sea monsters and large raids, but these fall flat due to a lack of meaningful combat options. The turning radius of your ship (regardless of class) is too high, with slugging movement for any input. This makes every engagement a chore as you have to commit to a full-length fight unless you’re over-leveled.

There are also baffling design choices such as the addition of light survival mechanics. Your ship has a stamina meter. What? You can cook and eat food to increase the stats of your ship. Huh? If this came out just a couple of years after Black Flag, maybe it would’ve satisfied players. Heck, the build that we saw being shown off at E3 a few years ago was way more complicated and interesting than what it ended up being.

Check it out and tell me how the final game is better in any shape or form. If there's one thing that Skull and Bones has done right, it's to steer me towards better pirate games like Sea of Thieves. With that game coming to PlayStation, maybe I'll check it out and probably have a better time with its more engaging gameplay mechanics. Ubisoft has committed to delivering at least one year of post-launch support with new activities through a seasonal model, but even if they're transformative, it may be too late. The ship has sailed and sunk to the bottom.

Skull and Bones PC Performance

I played the game on a mid-range PC, equipped with an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X CPU and the Nvidia Geforce RTX 3060 Ti GPU. Performance was decent at the highest settings, usually hovering above 60fps for the most part but dipping during CPU-bound battles. The graphics menu offers a good view of what each setting alters.

The inclusion of image reconstruction solutions like DLSS and FSR is great, but the output at 1080p is a tad softer than my preference. The game pushes the CPU so at lower resolutions you’re probably better off with TAA for anti-aliasing. It could look better and is nowhere as good as its system requirements would indicate. Ray-traced global illumination is a welcome addition that is wasted on being utilized only for your ship, and since you’re usually playing with a wide view, it’s not really that noticeable.

There’s also an in-game benchmark which is nice to see, although the dynamic conditions in it (like weather, particle effects, etc) don’t offer completely repeatable scenarios. Still, it gives you a good idea of what to expect. Here are some benchmarks on our system to give you an idea of how the game runs (all benchmarks on the “Very High" Preset):

• 1080p, TAA - 70fps (avg)

• 1080p, DLSS Quality Mode - 83fps (avg)

• 1440p, TAA - 55fps (avg)

• 1440p, DLSS Quality Mode - 69fps (avg)

Skull and Bones Score & Verdict

Score: 4/10

Skull and Bones is a disappointing mess that offers the bare minimum a pirate adventure should promise, and sometimes below it. It has everything I’ve come to hate about modern AAA gaming and its asking price of $70 is hilariously shameful.

Related: Skull and Bones Roadmap: Endgame and Year 1 Content Explained

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