Get sent to private school against your will while your parents go on vacation.
Be the oddball of the group? Decide to stand up for yourself? Find a few girlfriends? Find a few boyfriends????? In Rockstar Games updated release of bully, the options seem endless.
Is this worth getting over the current released version? Best49erfan has the review.
Review score: 8.0/10
Title
Bully: Scholarship Edition
Publisher
Rockstar Games
Developer
Rockstar Vancouver
Rating (ERSB and PEGI)
Teen (Animated blood, crude humor, language, sexual themes, use of alcohol and tobacco, violence)
Genre
Action
Xbox live
None
Number of players (SP)
1
Availability
Available Now
Introductions
Little Jimmy gets dumped by his mother and new, but rich stepfather at Bullworth Academy to become a man. Little did we know that all you had to do to become a man is give girls flowers and beat up all the jocks? Occasionally it helps to help a nerd reach the bathroom. While this is the common denominator of Bully, it really is much more within itself. It provides a GTA style world without the cops and guns, and in its place, a school to which you can choose to attend or not to.
Gameplay & Controls
Controls are very simple. The player is moved by the left stick and the right stick is the camera. The A button is mainly used for actions along with the B button. The Y button is your jump, and the X is used for attacks. The downfall of the controls is the camera. It is designed to let the player look around while moving, but it does not let you change directions while changing the camera perspective. This was quite annoying to deal with. When this game was reviewed, the patch was already out and was applied, so the frame rate issues either did not exist, or were not encountered. At least Rockstar was kind enough to resolve the issue in a timely manner. Another small downfall of the controls is the fight controls. Sometimes while locking on to a character to fight, Jimmy would turn around and fight another character that did not show having a locked. Several times this resulted in punching a girl, which immediately alerts the teachers.
The game play of Bully is very simple, but done in a fine manner. The basics of bully are to prevent Jimmy from being the target of all the bullies. In doing so, you get several missions to do along with classes in a vast world with a great story. Like many current games, it is possible to do the bare minimum and finish the game, or do the side quest with are given throughout the missions. The best part of bully is the classes which are nothing but mini games. Nothing beats frog dissection and mini-rock band type games! Even being as simple as they are, it is more fun to play the class games than to constantly run around and fight.
Bully excels with the GTA-ish exploring and freedom to do what you want and what you are not supposed to do. Of course, the punishment for doing so involves seeing the player caught by a teacher and made to go to class or to see the headmaster. Also another great feature is all the outfits you can get and mix/match them. The AI controlled characters also respond differently depending on what you are wearing.
Multiplayer
Multiplayer in Bully exists only in a form of taking the class room games, the sumo-like game, and the go cart/bmx races and takes them into a two player tournament.
Graphics and Presentation
This game at first seems like a port from the PS2. It turns out that Rockstar redid the whole game with an updated engine. This made a lot of improvements on the look and feel of Bully. The animation in the game was also done very well and adds to the depth of the graphics. The voice acting along with the sync of characters was amazing in this game. It was done nearly as well as Mass Effect.
Sound
The sound does not stand out from any other game, but does not detract from it either. Where the sound does stand out, is the great voice acting and the humor that it adds to the game.
Floor (The Straight Dope)
With another patch to fix some of the small issues, Bully is worth playing at least once through. The mini games alone could be packaged together and released as an Xbox Live Arcade title!