Skull and Bones Review

"AAAA MADNESS"

Multiplayer

February 22, 2024 at 5:13pm
By Jason Stettner

A mature pirate adventure actually sounds like a rather compelling gaming experience, particularly when one’s origins come from the foundations of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Alas, a decade past and what we have is a rather barebones meandering slow adventure that’s more akin to what Sid Meier’s Pirates accomplished ever so many decades ago.

A game that feels like World of Warships but with a premium, allegedly AAAA budget attached to it. That is of course due to the long development cycle that hasn’t really yielded anything of actual value. I do understand to some degree that this was a contractual obligation release wise, but it’s a game that feels out of time and behind its competitors.

The lack of boarding enemy ships, doing anything on land or really anything beyond fetch quests make this a rather lame experience. It’s a pirate game without any of the thrills of being a pirate. Being multiplayer only as well I do imagine this one won’t go on forever.

Now, there is a bit of a story here. It largely comes down to you being a worthless lowlife with a first mate that says a few words and then is silent from there on out. You meet a pirate dude, he garbles pirate verbiage buzzwords for a few minutes and sends you on a fetch quest or kill quest. You sail a bit to do that, then you come back.

He gives another speech, rinse and repeat for several hours. Things then open up as you get to the black market which has a woman bartender give you pirate spiels and you do what you did with the pirate dude but these missions are more hazardous. Finally you go across the ocean to repeat what you did with the first guy but elsewhere.

That’s basically the game and its story. It’s meaningless, mundane and pointless. The world itself is vast in scale and has many activities. These range of world events with the odd neat creature or mostly just plundering fortresses. There’s not a large amount of depth, but lots to do out there kind of. You may also do some PVP at times or work with others to battle in live events but it was rare to see others. It’s an empty, sad ocean.

Gameplay

The mechanics really do feel as though they’re from the Black Flag era of Assassin’s Creed minus the features of being able to leave one’s ship. Boarding is a terribly awkward cinematic of reaching an enemy ship which often leaves you stranded while others wail upon you during the never pausing online world.

When you do leave the ship you’re this custom pirate that walks within tiny linear spaces to chat with merchants. It’s an awkward transition, particularly when attempting to fast travel across spaces. The cumbersome menus, the chatter from NPCs that are spieling random empty thoughts and it’s all just designed to awkwardly pad the time in an experience that is so mundanely boring that I thought at times I would lose my mind.

The core of the game is of course the sailing and at times this is peaceful, too peaceful as I felt as though I would pass out at points or also be frustrated by running out of resources such as cannonballs. That makes it feel like it’s a free to play game to some degree, masquerading as some premium AAAA monster from beyond the deep.

There is some minor thrill to destroying other ships when in combat, but the Akrid from Lost Planet like bubbles do slightly detract from the strategy of figuring out how to kill ships. It’s another Ubisoft forced role playing mechanic of having to grind levels instead of just playing and it’s getting tiring. The only difference for your ship against an enemy is level, no strategy.

There are some ships you can build to get better options, these require resources you buy or find. The resource collection are hilariously lame little mini games you do while on your ship. It’s just puzzling to do a pirate game where you’re just, not really a pirate at all. From a visual standpoint this game looks awful.

It’s using heavy amounts of FSR which is a resolution scaling technology on Xbox Series X and its atrocious. You spend most of your time sailing and the water is so aesthetically displeasing that I don’t even really know if I have the wording to describe it. Just ugly, so ugly with that FSR shimmer. Water is such an important part of a pirate game. I’m not even getting to 2D trees on islands or the fact the game is so minimal that there’s no excuse that it looks so visually atrocious.

Then there are NPCs that are like, broken onboard your ship doing circles or also game crashes. The crashes are rare, but they do happen and one shut off my Xbox. There are two visual options on Xbox Series X at least. The first is a dynamic resolution scaling 4k at 30fps which does look a tad better but feels awful for combat.

Then there’s the 1440p resolution scaling that is far below that at 60fps. It’s smooth but everything is incredibly fuzzy due to AMD’s awful FSR, I passionately hate FSR. It’s terrible. There’s also HDR support and the resolution mode features ray tracing from a global illumination standpoint. Finally there’s mouse and keyboard support, so that’s nice if you’re into that on consoles.

The Conclusion

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 feels like a decade long devolution of technology.

It shouldn’t be hard to make such a miss on a mature pirate game, but alas here we are. I have no idea what they were doing for so long on this alleged AAAA game but this feels generations aged. At times the sailing and battling can be fun, but most of the time it’s just slogging through fetch quests.

There’s no depth, no excitement or even really enjoyment to be had here. It takes forever to feel like you’re doing anything and by that time you just want to put it away because it’s just slow meandering nonsense. Go check out Sid Meier’s Pirates as that was at least innovative for the time, or maybe Sea of Thieves for fun.

Read our Sea of Thieves Review
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Skull and Bones Review on Xbox Series X
Review Code Provided by Ubisoft

Rating Overall: 4.6