Bully Review (X360)

They say that your schooldays are the happiest days of your life; personally I’m inclined to disagree, and I think Jimmy Hopkins may be of the same persuasion. Dumped by his mother in to one of the toughest boarding schools around for a year while she’s off on a cruise with her new husband isn’t going to give him an objective viewpoint though. It doesn’t help that he’s betrayed by his friends and has to fight for the slightest bit of respect from all the school’s cliques either. And to top it all off the teachers are on his case all the time, especially the very patronising head, and with an army of prefects to keep an eye on him he’s got his work cut out.

GTA Junior

For those of you who missed the media circus surrounding the games original release on the PS2, under the infinitely less snappy title of Canis Canem Edit, or worse still who caught the media hype and believed it, the game is not about being a bully. Your part in the game is of a hard done by kid. He may be a bit handy with his fists, have a healthy resentment for authority, and a bit of an attitude, but he’s generally a good kid.

The school where he’s dumped by his uncaring mother, Bullworth Academy, is presented as a free roaming sandbox environment where you can do whatever you like, go to the classes, or bunk off and see what else there is to do. It is very much like Rockstar games other title, Grand Theft Auto, but on a smaller scale, yet there are some minor differences. To start with you are limited to the school’s grounds. There are still plenty of opportunities to get up to mischief; to start with you make friends with Gary, as nobody else really wants to know you. He’s a bit of a nutter though and by the end of the games first chapter you have a major falling out and he becomes your enemy, making things more complicated from here on in.

Out on the town

Things really open up once the school gates are drawn back giving you access to the surrounding town, and you have to start dealing with the schools cliques. This involves various missions, all pretty standard stuff for a game of this genre, collect items, deliver items, destroy stuff, or beat up people, that kind of thing. You’ll be doing missions for the school staff too, there’s as much infighting between them as there is with the pupils. You can, of course, ditch class to do these missions, but it’s a good idea to attend a few here and there as the mini games that make up the classes reward you with increased abilities. The abilities you acquire will be associated with the class you pass, gym, for example will increase your physical abilities, but some classes will just reward you with extra clothing for your wardrobe.

There’s plenty of other stuff to do besides the classes and missions too, there are several sets of items that need collecting, and once you get off school grounds you’ll find other activities to both make you money and to spend it on. Jobs such as paper rounds and lawn mowing become available to you, and whilst the paper route makes for a nice 3D version of the arcade game Paperboy, the lawn mowing is extremely tedious.

Follow the rules

Lawn Mowing is not just a way of making money in the game though, it’s also a punishment for when you get dragged in front of the Headmaster for breaking the rules. And this happens a fair amount of the time. It’s all too easy to get in trouble on campus, even if you’re minding our own business; there are plenty of other students looking for trouble to trip you up. There’s also plenty of opportunities to make mischief of your own too though, you can always rob a fellow students locker, or spray some graffiti on a nearby wall, or just beat up the other kids if it takes your fancy. You can also be picked up for skipping class, or breaking curfew, but these are less serious offences and just end up with you being escorted to class, or your dorm room.

It’s not just the prefects you have to watch out for either, police around town are also on the look out for naughty boys and will happily take you back to school, or lock you in their cells, depending on your indiscretion. But no matter what, there’s no game over, you can get busted by the prefects, beaten up, collapse from exhaustion, even get expelled from school, there’s no end you just carry on, even when the games story is over.

Nobody’s perfect

It’s all very standard fare for the genre, no surprise really as it’s made by the same people who created it, but despite the high production values and attention to detail, not to mention Rockstar’s usual tongue in cheek sense of humour, the game still has its faults. Most obvious of these are the games graphics, despite the blurb on the box boasting enhanced graphics from the PS2 game it still looks very much a last generation game. I suppose they wanted to get the game on the shelves as quickly as possible and didn’t have time to really polish the game up much, but they could have put a bit more effort in to it.

There are still some bugs in the game too; you’d have thought they’d have ironed out any faults from the original release, but unfortunately not. It was very frustrating for me to have played for a while without saving and then encounter one of these glitches and have to reset the game, it didn’t happen much, only twice whilst playing through the game’s entire story, but was still annoying. Then there’s the multiplayer mode, which is a severe let down. If you’re expecting some sort of multiplayer of the main game then you’ll be really let down. The multiplayer mode is just the game’s mini games playable with two players. It just feels tacked on, and although the mini games are a minor distraction making them in to a multiplayer mode feels pretty pointless.

Seen it all before

There’s a good game here, with at least twenty hours of gameplay to keep you occupied, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before, even if this wasn’t essentially just a re-release with a few added extras. If you’re a fan of the genre this will entertain for a while, maybe even tide you over till GTA4's release, but if you’ve played the original game on the PS2, there really isn’t enough added here to make it worth a purchase.