Skull and Bones /IMPRESSIONS

In development since 2013, announced in 2017, and delayed countless times since then, Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones has finally arrived. And… well, it didn’t turn out very good.

Or at least it didn’t leave good enough of an impression in the first hours to keep me interested in checking it out some more. And I tried, I really did. Multiple times. Hell, before it released, I was even more optimistic about its prospects than others (like I usually am when it comes to most games). But it is what it is.

And what it is, is a game that feels off from the very beginning, when it drops you in the middle of a ship battle that feels more like an on-rails arcade shooter than anything else. It basically lets you move the crosshair around the screen while shooting at enemy ships by holding the right trigger for a minute or two, before you get blown up and sent to the bottom of the pirate food chain.

Things then get even worse — you get to control your very stiff (and annoyingly mute) character on land, where you will be running between different vendors, gritting your teeth through some boring cut-scenes that always begin and end by cutting to a black screen — which is a far cry from something you would expect in a “AAAA” game, as Yves Guillemot put it in a recent earnings call with Ubisoft’s shareholders. And let’s not even talk about the initial missions that will see you collecting crafting resources to upgrade your ship, either by sinking enemy ships or initiating a cut-scene in which you will board them to get slightly more resources. But then again, those will at least require you to engage in some naval warfare, unlike some missions in which you have to collect resources from various islands around you — which you do by approaching them, being annoyed by shadows and other graphical details distractingly popping into existence in front of you, and then… playing a very basic and totally out of place quick-time sequence.

Sure, the game can look nice at times, especially when you are on the open sea and approaching some interesting looking islands — with your crew singing some merry shanties — but everything else was, at least for me, very off-putting.

And the sad thing is that Ubisoft actually managed to make a great pirate game all the way back in 2013, when we got to play Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. It had an interesting story and fun characters, it let you properly explore its world (both on foot and while sailing your ship), just as it let you engage in hand-to-hand combat while on the ship — and while boarding enemy vessels.

Add to that more engaging ship combat, fun diving and hunting sequences, seamless transitions between gameplay and cut-scenes, as well as seamless transitions between your character being on ship and on land — and you get a pirate experience that’s so far ahead of Skull and Bones, that you simply have to wonder why Ubisoft spent untold millions and a whole decade on this, when it could have developed a proper follow-up to Black Flag.

Skull and Bones | developer: Ubisoft Singapore | publisher: Ubisoft | platforms: PlayStation 5 (played), Xbox Series, PC