Take Grand Theft Auto and try aim it at kids and you get Rockstar's take on GTA in, well, a school. Literally. Bully follows the actions of young Jimmy Hopkins, a somewhat troubled youth who seems to get kicked out off every school he gets sent to. Now he's at Bullworth Academy, a private school with a set of weird characters. Let me just clarify, this game isn't quite meant to be for kids, it has a BBFC rating of 15+, which would be the equivalent to a Teen rating in the USA.

Prior to release, Bully was subjected to a lot of negative media, which as it turns out was misdirected and unnecessary. Certain critics seemed to think Bully was a game aimed to encourage bullying in schools and violence to the younger generations. While Bully has its moments of violence, it certainly does not encourage them and rather tells the story of Jimmy having to deal with a bunch of situations at Bullworth Academy. The vague theme is to stand up to bullies, although at some stages that can be questionable depending on what you get up to.

Once Jimmy has been dumped at Bullworth Academy, which is a boarding school, he must work his way through the various social cliques and gain reputation with them in order to survive and effectively take over the school. Very early on, you meet a boy called Gary. You quickly learn Gary is a jerk. Gary has some plan to take over the school, and to take him down, so to speak, you need to gain the respect of the various cliques and work your way up.

There are the Nerds, Greasers,

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Prepies and Jocks within the school, as well as the Townies outside of the school once you gain access to the rest of the town. This plays similarly to GTA games, where you earn respect with different gangs and depending on your reputation with them, they will behave accordingly. If a certain clique hates you, then whenever they see you they will try to beat you up. If you have members of a clique that like you, they can join into the fight and give you some back up, making for some interesting scenarios before a prefect would come to break it up.

Bully plays very similarly to a GTA game, in the sense that it is open world and is a sandbox game. However, the environment and atmosphere is very different from a standard GTA game. For starters, it takes place in a school, and Rockstar has done a great job at capturing that feeling that you're actually attending school. Everyday, you must even attend classes, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. If you do not attend these classes, the prefects around the school will be looking for you for truancy, similar to how police would be on the lookout for you in GTA.

The classes in Bully are a mixed bag. There are four additional classes (Biology, Maths, Geography and Music) in the Scholarship Edition than the original, which was released on the PlayStation 2. The new classes aren't that great, and stuff like Biology and Geography are clearly geared towards the Nintendo Wii version of Bully due to the controls. Otherwise, completing classes gives certain bonuses and perks. For example, there is a

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Shop class, which would be something like Design and Technology in British schools. In here you work on a bike and must press the correct sequence of buttons to complete each class successfully. As you progress through each class, you'd get access to a better bike that you can ride around.

There are five classes for each subject, after which it isn't compulsory to attend and the prefects will stop looking for you if you don't decide to attend. The classes add a dimension of realism to Bully and really make it feel like you are in a school. Besides that, they are nice mini games and provide something different, such as Photography class you will be asked to take certain pictures of stuff around town.

The game plays very much like a GTA game. You are free to do what you wish, and can choose when to do the missions. You get a range of weapons, and these fit in perfectly to a school. You can use stuff like a bag of marbles to throw on the ground, and whoever walks over it will fall over. The most useful weapon through the game was the slingshot, which has unlimited ammo and a fully charged shot can deal some serious damage, which comes in very useful later in the game.

The story contains some twists and turns, but it is pretty much predictable and you can anticipate what's going to happen from pretty early on. Playing through the game however is a huge amount of fun, since the missions are usually humorous and ask you to do some interesting stuff. The missions also do a good job of not being

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repetitive, they always put stuff in different contexts and to do different things.

The world of Bullworth is very well structured and interesting the whole way. It is clearly split into sections, but still is very interesting to explore since there's a lot of detail, as is typical of a GTA style game. The game however felt shorter than a typical GTA game, and the world is smaller as well. Neither of these points detract from the enjoyment you would get out of this game however, since it really is very well crafted and a lot of thought has been put into this game. Rather than making a GTA game in a school environment, Rockstar have gone and taken core gameplay elements from GTA and fit them into this well thought out environment.

There are some glitches however in the Scholarship Edition. At one point, halfway through a mission, the screen went black while the HUD was still visible and the sounds of the game were still coming. There was no apparent reason for this to happen, and this was after the patch was installed on the 360 version. I have heard of several other glitches and bugs too, including crashes. This may detract people from playing the Scholarship Edition, however on my play through I only encountered the black screen once.

The game overall is a bag of fun. The story is enough to keep it going through the game, however the characters of the game is what really makes it so enjoyable. By now, Bully should be available for quite a cheap price, so it's definitely worth picking it up or getting a second hand version.