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Bully Game Review

Bully is a 2006 action-adventure video game developed and published by Rockstar for various platforms. It’s one of the studio’s most underrated efforts.

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“What are you looking at, punk?“

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Bully was very well received critically and commercially back when it was released, but it sadly never spawned a franchise for some reason. Hopefully we will get a sequel some day. It’s a great game that I played on PC, the version that’s called Scholarship Edition, a visually enhanced and longer version of the game that was originally released on PlayStation 2. It’s excellent.

The game takes place in the fictitious town called Bullworth. You play as Jimmy Hopkins, who is sent to that town’s school where he has to assert dominance and fight for his place among numerous different cliques at school. He eventually rises through the ranks and becomes respected by his other peers. I was taken aback by how good the game’s narrative really is. It is one of those storylines that are more sophisticated than it seems initially, especially when you consider its individual sequences and parts instead of the overall plot. It fares best in those intimate character moments and intriguing plot points.

Jimmy Hopkins should be considered an iconic video game character – he is immensely believable and so well developed. He grows and becomes better as a person while still retaining his bullish qualities. The voice acting is uniformly phenomenal in this game and Gerry Rosenthal was specially superb. Jimmy’s sly remarks directed towards others never ceased to amuse me. The fact that he is also effectively bisexual as you have an option to kiss both girls and boys was quite groundbreaking for the time.

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Gary Smith and Pete Kowalski are the most important side characters, the latter being a bit more forgettable and the former being a genuinely memorable, cool villain of the entire story. His final fight with Jimmy was quite climactic. There are give cliques at school: bullies, preppies, greasers, nerds, jocks and townies. They were individually not particularly well developed, but overall the game got the most of its clique structure gameplay-wise. I am very much against cliques as an idea, so the game selling me on them speaks on its quality overall.

Zoe is Jimmy’s love interest and she is quite a lot of fun. Mr. Burton and Dr. Crabblesnitch are memorably villainous adults while Edna was just hilarious as this ugly cook obsessed with dating. They actually went out of their way to paint these adult figures in both a positive and negative light, developing some of them quite a bit, which was refreshing for what is basically a coming-of-age story. The humor is surprisingly strong and the game made me laugh quite a bit at times. It produced this cozy, even heartwarming tone that I really appreciated.

In terms of visuals, Bully is solid albeit far from great. I played the Scholarship Edition on PC and it looked more polished and enhanced, especially in the school environment, but some of the outdoors areas were more rough around the edges, particularly in unpolished backgrounds. The characters are well designed and many students and professors being physically unappealing or even grotesque fitted well with the game’s overall edgy and witty tone. So, graphically the game is very much of its time and it didn’t age especially well.

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But on the audio side of things, Bully fared much better. There is so much enjoyment to mine from its soundtrack that is highly modern, cool and hip, which was a perfect choice for a game that centers on teenagers. The sound is excellent, but it is the score that was especially superb. Various different genres, approaches and instruments are used with the highlight most definitely being that main theme played when you roam around the school. That theme was pleasingly modern and fun, benefitting from such a cool bass tempo to it.

I played the Steam version of Scholarship Edition and unfortunately it was plagued with bugs and rather frequent crashes. What also bothered me was the control scheme, which was definitely far from easy or intuitive in any way, shape or form. Playing the game on a joystick was especially difficult at times given that the weapon usage and camera required very precise movements. The camera wasn’t the best too, though this is to be expected from this period in gaming.

The customization is pretty good with a lot of clothes and items at your disposal. The menu system worked well with a solid map and a lot of important stats for players who want to complete the game to 100%. The length is quite impressive for its time. The main campaign is somewhat shorter, but completing the game fully will take a lot of time for sure. It took me exactly 70 hours to beat the game in its entirety, which is definitely a lot, but I loved playing this game and being in this world, so I didn’t mind this at all.

The world building is very strong. Clearly this is a much smaller world than say Rockstar’s other famous franchise – GTA. But in the context of the school narrative it’s a surprisingly big world. Bullworth consists of four districts and all are interesting in their own way: Bullworth Town is too commercial but important, Old Bullworth Vale has a cool beach and an amusing funfair, Blue Skies Industrial park is, as the name suggests, quite industrial and unique in that way, and my favorite is New Coventry, which is this run-down area where poor folk live – this is where the town’s shadiest and most interesting personalities reside.

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Let’s finally talk about the gameplay, which is crucially the best aspect of this game. It seems like a GTA clone, but it’s so uniquely plotted and set that it ended up being very much its own thing. Bully is an action-adventure game set in an open world environment and played from a third-person perspective. You play as Jimmy Hopkins as he rises through the ranks of the school system. The missions are linear with clearly set goals and scenarios. The main campaign is, as I’ve said above, not too lengthy, but it’s so engaging that I loved every second of it. It’s one of those games that begins in the hardest mode and becomes easier as you progress. This is because you gain respect from others and acquire more weapons and abilities as the game goes along, making for an interesting RPG wrinkle to what is in essence an action-adventure.

Optional side missions is where I had the most fun playing. It was very entertaining helping out Bullworth’s colorful cast of characters and doing crazy feats and scenarios with weaponry and, well, bullying. The game is actually very much anti-bullying while clearly using the bullying tactics throughout, which was the best choice for the narrative as far as the messaging and realism are concerned.

The mini-games are terrific too, especially the classes. When you successfully finish them, you gain new abilities and items. There are ten classes in total and they range from very easy to downright infuriating. They are simple, but well imagined mini-games that fit their corresponding subjects very well. Biology has you dissect animals and it requires very quick reflexes and precise movements to do properly. Chemistry and Music both are tapping games that require quick reflexes. Same goes for Shop. These can sometimes be difficult given the unintuitive gamepad controls. Art is one of those complete the picture games that are fun and easy. Gym has you play boxing and dodgeball and both are a lot of fun, though a bit on the easier side. Photography has you take photos of other students, which is also a necessary task for completing the game fully. Math is, well, math. But it’s not too hard. Geography and English are, though. The former is quite difficult if you don’t know the positions of the countries extensively while the latter can be quite difficult in the harder levels. Finding all of the words in a very small amount of time was very hard, even for an English major such as myself.

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You can use various weapons that are childish but fitting the age of the characters. The slingshot was by far my favorite and most useful weapon while others I mostly used for fun at times, including stink bombs and spud guns. The combat is pretty simple and not particularly advanced, but it worked in the context of the story. You can run and jump. You can also climb and you can even swim in the town lake. There are various vehicles at your disposal. You can’t drive cars, but can attach to their backs to drive you around. The skateboard was most useful to me, but the bike was by far the fastest vehicle in the game.

There are bus stops that act as quick travel points from one suburb to another. There are also save points, five of them in total. The game is extremely realistic for better and for worse. If you lose health, you will end up in the hospital. If you get caught by the prefects or policemen while doing bad things or staying up too late, you will have to do detention. If you pass out after 2 AM, you will wake up in the morning robbed. Needless to say, while I respected these grounded elements that made the world feel so real (there is day and night cycle and you have a 24-hour clock), I still found navigating those obligations somewhat frustrating at times.

Bully has a plethora of side activities to do if you want to get that elusive 100%. There is so much that you can do here that the vastness of these missions and objectives was impressive for a 2006 game. There are 50 errands that you need to complete. The characters in school and around the town ask you to do something and these can be simple or more difficult, but most are quite entertaining, especially killing the rats or fighting with other cliques. There are 75 rubber bands to collect, 40 cards, 25 garden gnomes to smash and 6 transistors. After you collect one transistor, you learn an additional fighting move.

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The bike races and go-kart races were a whole lot of fun and wonderfully designed to go through entire parts of the town. I just wished that they were a bit harder. Bully overall is a bit on the easier side of things, though some missions can be quite demanding and it took me a while to finish them, but most of it was not too difficult. Delivering newspapers and lawn mowing are jobs that give you money after you complete them. Both are quite nice. The game even includes a couple of surprisingly hard arcade games that depend on high scores and a carnival that has a number of interesting rides and games that range from easy to pretty demanding.