Skull and Bones Review: Ubisoft’s Pirate Game Finally Sets Sail After Years of Delays

After six delays and a turbulent development, is Skull and Bones worth the wait?

Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones has had one of the most chaotic development cycles in recent gaming history. First announced at E3 2017 with a fall 2018 release date, the game spent years lost at sea before finally launching in February 2024. After 60+ hours of plundering, pillaging, and naval combat, here’s the honest verdict on whether this pirate adventure delivers.

What Actually Is Skull and Bones?

Forget everything you thought you knew from those early trailers. Skull and Bones isn’t Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag 2.0, and it’s definitely not the 5v5 arena shooter Ubisoft initially showed off. Instead, it’s a naval-focused open-world RPG set in the 17th-century Indian Ocean where you play as your ship rather than a swashbuckling pirate captain.

Think of it like Forza Horizon, but instead of racing cars, you’re commanding warships and committing high-seas piracy. You never swing a sword or fire a pistol on foot—this is purely about ship-to-ship combat, resource gathering, and building your maritime empire.

The Naval Combat Actually Slaps

Here’s the good news: once you get past the boring opening hours with your glorified piece of driftwood starter ship, Skull and Bones combat becomes genuinely engaging.

The ship-to-ship battles require actual strategy, especially when tackling higher-level content. You’ll need to coordinate with your crew (up to two friends can join your fleet), position yourself strategically, and build your vessel to complement your playstyle. Want to be a tank that soaks damage up close? Go for it. Prefer long-range artillery bombardment? Craft those mortars. There’s even support builds where you heal allies by shooting them with “medicinal cannonballs”—don’t ask how that works.

The endgame builds get absolutely wild. We’re talking ship-mounted flamethrowers spewing ghostly blue fire, rocket launchers raining dozens of burning projectiles, and devastating mortar strikes that make you feel like you’re calling in airstrikes from the 1700s.

There’s Barely Any Story (And That’s a Problem)

If you’re looking for a compelling pirate narrative with betrayal, drama, and memorable characters, you’ll be disappointed. Skull and Bones story is paper-thin.

You get two forgettable NPCs—Captain John Spurlock (vulgar English pirate) and Admiral Rahma (violent political dissident)—who give you a handful of missions before basically telling you to get lost. There are a few colorful side characters like Yanita, the black market trader, but nobody with any real depth.

The weirdest part? Content that existed in the closed beta got cut from the final release. Characters who used to have actual storylines now just show up dead. It’s clear Ubisoft wanted players spending time on the ocean instead of in social hubs, but completely abandoning narrative feels like a missed opportunity.

The Pirate Economy Simulator You Didn’t Know You Wanted

Where Skull and Bones genuinely surprises is its economic gameplay loop. You’re not just a pirate—you’re a businessman with a cutlass.

Trade routes matter. Supply and demand fluctuate between regions. You’ll buy low in one port, sail across the Indian Ocean dodging rival ships, then sell high somewhere else. The black market mechanic (called The Helm) lets you traffic contraband like opium for massive profits.

Later, you can conquer coastal settlements and turn them into manufactories that generate passive income. Suddenly you’re managing lumber yards and farming operations like you’re playing SimCity with cannons. It’s genuinely compelling and gives you something meaningful to work toward during the endgame grind.

PvP: Fun But Broken

Skull and Bones PvP is entirely opt-in, which is smart design. Hostile Takeover mode has players fighting for control of settlements, while Legendary Heists send everyone after the same treasure convoy before turning on each other.

There’s also a risk-reward system where you can double your settlement earnings by becoming hunted by every player on the server. When it works, it’s thrilling.

The problem? It’s buggy as hell. Hostile Takeover frequently points you to six or seven locations instead of one, forcing you to guess which is correct. Legendary Heist targets sometimes become un-targetable, completely killing the PvP element. The game even crashed mid-supply run and deleted thousands of my hard-earned coins.

The Endgame Grind is Brutal

This is where Skull and Bones stumbles hardest. The endgame is repetitive and grindy without enough variety to justify it.

Single items cost thousands of Pieces of Eight (the in-game currency), forcing you to repeat the same handful of activities ad nauseam. Worse, there’s no content that actually requires your maxed-out gear once you’ve earned it—unless you’re grinding PvP for bragging rights.

Ubisoft has promised a year of seasonal content, but right now, the endgame loop desperately needs more activities and reasons to chase those powerful upgrades.

Technical Disaster at Launch

Skull and Bones performance at launch is rough. Constant crashes every few hours, pixelated textures loading right in front of you, and the most annoying bug of all: repetitive error notifications that spam the screen for hours.

For a game that spent six years in development and got delayed repeatedly, this level of instability is unacceptable. The foundation is solid, but the technical execution feels like a live-service first draft.

The Verdict: Good Foundation, Needs Work

Skull and Bones isn’t the AAAA masterpiece Ubisoft hyped it up to be, and it’s definitely not Black Flag 2. But judged on its own merits as a naval combat RPG, it’s surprisingly fun—when it works.

The ship combat is tactical and satisfying. The economy simulator is deeper than expected. Playing co-op with friends while blowing up merchant convoys genuinely entertains. But the thin story, repetitive endgame, technical issues, and missing features make it feel incomplete.

If Ubisoft delivers on its content roadmap and fixes the bugs, Skull and Bones could become something special. Right now, it’s a decent pirate game held back by poor technical execution and live-service growing pains.

Score: 7/10 – A seaworthy adventure that needs a few more months in port for repairs.

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