Review: Bully: Scholarship Edition

Grade: B+
Time Spent Playing: 30 hours

Bully is essentially a GTA game without all of the annoying bits. By keeping the world smaller and more focused, it's more detailed and subsequently feels more real than any of the GTA 3 iterations. Unlike the denizens of a GTA world, you actually recognize your classmates as they wander about, becoming familiar over time. Yeah, you can't massacre scores of nameless, purposeless people, but you do get to pinch girls' bottoms and bombard teachers with stink bombs.

Instead of gunplay, most of the combat is hand-to-hand. The combat engine, while not particularly deep, is fun and effective; plus, it evolves over time. It also has the welcome benefit of not having to load into a seperate game engine, unlike a certain other open world beat 'em up. Supplementing your melee attacks are items like marbles, firecrackers, and a spud gun.

Of special interest to me is the soundtrack, provided by the talented Shawn Lee. It spans a multitude of genres and some of the tunes are clearly inspired by classics like Michael Jackson's Billie Jean. It's all really catchy and actually warrants a listening outside of the game.

When I played Bully on the PS2, I probably would have given it an A+. It's only diminished now because of its PS2 roots and as it's a brand new release for a current gen console, I have to judge it on that basis.

The constant load times are my biggest problem; every time the game loads a cut scene or you enter or exit a building it goes to a loading screen. I recognize fixing that probably would have meant rebuilding the game from the ground up on the 360, but when the nearly-two-years-old Saint's Row offers seamless transitions, I expect it as a gamer.

The 360 version does sport "updated" graphics and while the cleaner textures are nice for the environments, they have the unfortunate effect of making many of the character models look uglier.

The multi-player offering is laughable, simply allowing you to compete offline against a friend in one of nine mini-games. Again, I point to another GTA clone, Crackdown, which allowed two players--online--to have fun playing in the sandbox.

Another disappointment, though related entirely to it being a 360 game, is the achievements. Where a sandbox game should be ideal for fun, imaginative achievements, a la Dead Rising, most of what's here feels like busy work. For example, instead of an achievement that rewards you for finding all of the different boys and girls you can lock lips with, you simply just need to do it a certain number of times. So find a dude or chick to kiss and just keep pressing the A button for five minutes and you get an achievement. Extremely lame are ones that have you giving 50 wedgies, kicking 100 soccer balls, or doing 200 wheelies. A couple did actually inspire me to think of ways to complete them faster. For example, one achievement required I trip 25 people with marbles, so I set them up by the dorm exit and pulled the fire alarm.

I hope Rockstar gets a lot more imaginative with the GTA 4 achievements.

As a final note, I didn't have the same problems other people seemed to have had with the game running like ass. It did occasionally crash, but I'd estimate it was about three times out of a 30 hour game. So, if you have an older 360, you may want to wait for the promised patch before firing the game up, because I understand it's almost game ruining for many people.