The long-awaited release of the long-suffering pirate adventure Skull & Bones took place yesterday, February 16th. And published reviews from critics show that no miracle happened. According to Metacritic The average score for the game was only 64 on PC and Xbox. On Opencritic The action movie’s performance is even weaker: 60 points with 25% recommendations.
Reviewers note that Skull and Bones is difficult to consider as a successor Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag. Despite the winning setting and successful approach to naval combat, the world is not connected by a single plot, and non-player characters serve only to give out a few missions.
Alas, there is only a faint hint of a plot in Skull and Bones. It focuses on two of the few significant NPCs: a vulgar English pirate named Captain John Spurlock and a brutal political dissident named Admiral Rahma, and neither of them are particularly interesting. You communicate with each of these scoundrels, complete several missions for them, which culminate in a boss fight on a particularly evil ship, after which you are told to quickly get lost and mind your own business.
Almost all reviewers praise the combat system, in which a large selection of weapons and various modifications to them allows you to experience different playstyles and types of damage. During the battle, players can use flooding or breaking through enemy ships, blowing them up, or showering them with a rain of shells.
The combat encounters are truly tense and fun at their best. At the beginning of the game, the system may seem cumbersome and even terrible, until the logic of controlling the boat becomes clearer. Ubisoft Singapore invented for Black Flag (and Assassin Creed 3) naval battles, and they did it well. Fighting in a rough region of the open sea at night, during strong storms, is exciting, especially when a stray wave threatens to sweep away not only me, but also the French bastards on my tail. Maneuvering and combat are fun, provided you have the patience to navigate the ship through an endless parade of MMO-style quests.
The most disappointed were those who expected from Skull and Bones the dark and realistic approach that Ubisoft. As a result, the gameplay is part arcade, part casual, and the fragmented story is more silly than gritty.
For now, the only redeeming feature of this dark pirate game is the combat – but only if you accept that it’s not a dark pirate game. If you want to enjoy Skull and Bones, you should approach it like most live service games. Not too deep or too exciting, Skull and Bones is an enjoyable, easy-to-learn looter shooter with a pirate twist.
Skull and Bones is, if not the best game about pirates, then just a good game about sea battles. Don’t expect it to be a third-person action game: the adventures take place almost exclusively on the waves, and once the element of surprise wears off, the strengths of Ubisoft’s service game are revealed. The seven seas of the Indian Ocean delight with a good atmosphere, and battles on the high seas are a real success. In general, the result was far from the shipwreck that some had predicted.
So far, the ocean in Skull and Bones feels like it’s a mile wide and an inch deep, and lacks any real personality.
Let us remind you that Skull and Bones is available on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series. The eight-hour free trial can be activated through Ubisoft Connect and Epic Games, as well as on consoles.