I have dreams of becoming a pirate but even sea shanties can’t save Skull & Bones

UBISOFT knows how to make a spectacular pirate adventure, and this was proven with the hugely successful release of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag.

Taking its popular IP and putting a much-needed twist on it gave gamers exactly what they wanted.

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This is where the idea for Skull and Bones was born; taking the idea of a high-seas adventure and spinning it into an entire game.

Hoping to improve on the formula, Ubisoft has made Skull and Bones an online multiplayer game.

This means that you can play with others online, or even fight against them and plunder their gains.

However, this change strips what made Black Flag so good, and it’s hard not to make the comparison when they are developed by the same company.

There is no melee combat here, and this is a big part of what you would expect from a pirate’s swashbuckling adventure.

When you take over another boat, the adventure ends as soon as you capture it and the booty lands seamlessly into your inventory.

An easy surrender might be more realistic, but games like this offer escapism and players want to buckle their swashes.

This doesn’t matter too much as you will spend more time crafting than plundering ships.

Ships, cannons, tools and ammo all require crafting, and you’ll even have to chop down trees in a timing mini-game.

Crafting is not necessarily a bad addition, but it is so essential that we found ourselves rarely doing anything else while playing.

Missions are also fairly short and repetitive, and don’t offer much of an escape from the crafting loop.

Despite the multiplayer aspect, Skull and Bones claims to be more about the PvE content, but not a lot of effort seems to have gone into this.

It serves only as an excuse to explore further, but even this keeps you in a similar loop of plundering, and crafting.

The combat here isn’t as strong as that of Black Flag’s either, as it slows down the pace and decreases the amount of strategy needed.

It’s nice that you can customise the layout of your ship, but it doesn’t drastically alter how the combat works.

There are unique stronger encounters you can face, like a ghost ship or a sea monster, but these are trivialised in multiplayer if you can get a few ships to join you.

Ubisoft has announced a one-year roadmap for Skull and Bones but we don’t see the game sticking around much longer than this.

There isn’t much to keep players coming back, and releasing in 2024 feels like the live-service pirate fantasy ship has truly sailed.

If you want to read more about recent gaming releases, check out our Helldivers 2 review.

Written by Georgina Young on behalf of GLHF.

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