Imagine one of the recent Grand Theft Auto games, only set in a hell hole of a private school and instead of playing a thuggish criminal trying to survive the streets you play a thuggish problem child trying to survive the hallways. There. That’s pretty much Bully.
Like the GTA games, Bully is an open world or “sandbox” game where you guide little Jimmy Hopkins (the reluctant and foul tempered hero of this story) around doing the kinds of things high school kids do: attending classes, playing pranks, stealing kisses, and beating the ever living crap out of anyone who crosses you. Jimmy may have a heart of gold, but it won’t stop him from pragmatically shooting you in the crotch with a potato launcher if you get in the way of his uniting all of the school’s cliques and becoming their benevolent dictator. He’s actually a good guy who has a thing against bullies, but his goodnesss is not, shall we say, evenly distributed.
Like with the GTA games, the gameplay in Bully is tightly compartamentalized. You’ve got your errand quests, your driving challenges, your combat sorties, your shooting galleries, and your fetch assignments. It’s rarely mixed up, and once you’ve done one type of activity there’s little that’s novel about subsequent missions built from the same template. You’ll be doing a lot of stuff over and over again.
But you know, that’s okay. Because Bully’s strength is its presentation and its charm as seen in the dialog, the character design, and the shenanigans it launches you into. The tone of the game is just close enough to serious but still staying on this side of satire and absurdity to be fun. It seems like Rockstar is having a blast filling in the same GTA outline but with a different set of colors that give the whole thing a more subversive and comical tone that stays pretty darn consistent. The one-liners, throwaway comments from other students, character design, quest objectives, and scripting are all fueled by the same sense of dark humor. It’s a great world that I hope we see more of, with some new content and game play mechanics.
It’s also worth mentioning that Rockstar needs to STAND BACK and TAKE NOTE that Bully is the perfect size for a game in this genre. The world was big enough to be interesting and diverse, but not so sprawling that getting around it was a pain. Also unlike any other GTA game I’ve played, the length of the game Bully felt just right to me, since I was just starting to get my fill of it when it wrapped itself up. Any more would have been overstaying its welcome, and any less would have been leaving some fun on the table.
Official Bully homepage for screenshots, movies, etc. And if you’ve played the game already, some of the RebelFM guys did a series of podcasts about it, starting here.
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