Skull and Bones

With its stunning visuals, immersive gameplay mechanics and richly-detailed world, Skull & Bones is a must-play for any fan of action-adventure games. If you liked Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag's take on ship combat, you'll love this game. So grab your cutlass, raise the black flag and prepare to plunder your way to infamy on the high seas. Fair winds and following seas, matey!

Skull and Bones is, despite half a dozen delays and some lingering dark clouds, one of the most addictive and vibrant piracy simulators we've ever played; not that many exist. It offers a surprising amount of freedom in how players approach it, and it looks and runs beautifully on PS5, even during large-scale fleet battles. Developer Ubisoft Singapore has created a vibrant, interconnected world of seamless swashbuckling action, and if you can recruit a few reliable mates, sailing the high seas and engaging in all kinds of nautical hijinks will be a blast.

Skull and Bones is a solid pirating adventure that has its moment but is often weighed down by a sluggish grind and outdated quest design.

Seafaring misanthropy, with crafting: Skull and Bones is a fun game about boats hamstrung by today's live service conventions.

It’s not without its charms when a fleet is sailing in synchrony, crashing waves and plundering merchant ships or other players. There’s some excitement to be had, but the drawback is that quite a bit of monotony and visible limitation will be found amidst these moments. There is potential and room for improvements however; Skull and Bones seems to be the type of game that will receive a host of content in the coming years, so hopefully we’ll see significant enhancements to turn it into a remarkable seafaring adventure.

A pirate adventure still finding its sea legs.

When I heard that Skull and Bones was released, I was over the Moon. The chance to be a pirate again and relive the time when I played AC Black Flag seemed like a dream come true. But the reality is different.

Skull and Bones is simply uninspired and tells a boring story, yet is relatively fun in its moment-to-moment gameplay.

Ubisoft's long-in-the-works pirate adventure boasts a beautiful world and bombastic ship-to-ship combat, but it sinks amid boring busywork and tedious traversal.

There are brief windows within Skull and Bones where I can see some remnants of passion. Maybe your crew will break into an unprompted shanty while you’re sailing to your next destination, or maybe you’ll stumble across one of the few unique discoveries worth seeing out on the ocean. Everything else is a chore. A predictable one, considering the game’s delays and development issues, but a disappointment all the same.

11 years in development and the controversial pirate game Skull and Bones has docked into port, but does it rise like a wave in a storm, or sink under the weight of its own cannons and cargo?

Skull and Bones is a dreary and dull open-world game that completely fails to capture the fantasy of being a pirate, failing to deliver anything worth experiencing.