Skull & Bones Review - Stormy Seas

23.02.2024 - 20:25 / mmorpg.com / Ubisoft

I had high expectations for Skull and Bones, anticipating a stellar “AAAA” pirate experience: peg legs, sliders—the whole nine yards. However, my hopes were quickly dashed as I emerged from a botched naval battle, coughing up sand on an unfamiliar island. Surveying my reflection in a broken barrel on the shoreline, I sifted through the limited presets available to customize my pirate avatar.

While I was relatively surprised to find options for altering her body type, being unable to see below the shoulders made it hard to pick. All pirates start in a potato sack, so it shouldn’t be that big of a deal, but I wanted to choose my own lumpy potato based on how it might look in that sack. It seemed a little bit like a missed opportunity to immerse players entirely in the pirate fantasy. The most customization I would get here was choosing a base, hairstyle, hair color, eye color, and tattoos. 

A Curious Tattoo

The one detail that immediately caught my attention during character creation was the inclusion of tattoos— particularly the Sak Yant. While not an expert on the intricate symbolism behind these tattoos, my recent immersion in Muay Thai definitely sparked an interest in their significance. Seeing these tattoos in Skull and Bones left me feeling both excited and slightly confused. How would these tattoos, deeply rooted in Thai culture and tradition, tie into a pirate-themed adventure? As far as I knew, Skull and Bones was based on real-world locations, so maybe that had implications for future areas of the map we would uncover or enemies we would fight. Naturally, I slapped that sick ink on my gal and hoisted her by her bootstraps. 

Luckily, a couple of my former crewmates arrived just in time to pull me aboard their small boat. With the British fleet wreaking havoc on our vessel and their 'no mercy for pirates' policy in full swing, joining them seemed the only viable choice. However, upon closer inspection, I couldn't shake the eerie feeling that something was off. While their eyelids blinked and their hands moved, their faces remained frozen, devoid of any emotion. Faced with the options of diving into shark-infested waters or accepting the company of these unsettlingly lifeless pirates, the latter seemed much more appealing. I could pretty plainly see where the budget hadn’t gone in the past several years of development for Skull and Bones.

Uncanny Pirates

If it wasn’t enough that they looked a little off, my two companions then began to tout the praises of “pirate paradise”, Sainte-Anne, and said I had a familiar “glint in my eye.” The longer I stayed with these two, the more it began to feel like an episode of One Piece. So, our past ship was done for, and we were going to start over as a new