Bully Scholarship Edition review (PC)

Bully was the source of plenty of controversy when it was first released on the PS2 in 2006. Of course Rockstar is no stranger to controversial games what with the Grand Theft Auto series. Riding high on the recent next gen console success of GTA 4, Rockstar has chosen this time to release a PC conversion of Bully to no new controversy. The PC version includes all of the early 2008 upgrades for the Scholarship Edition but has Bully already run its course, or is there more life in this game yet?

A gentleman and a scholar

Bully places you in the shoes of troubled student Jimmy Hopkins, sent to boarding school whilst his mother and new stepfather go on a round-the-world cruise for their honeymoon. Abandoned at the new boarding school, Jimmy must rise to the top of the school pecking order. The missions will be familiar to anyone who's played another version and they see you going from the unpopular new kid to the king of the school to a sudden expulsion from which he has to clear his name to get back into school. The style for the game and the missions borrows heavily from Grand Theft Auto with a large sandbox style school to explore. Jimmy can opt to go to classes or not and to explore the school and the surrounding town as the game unfolds. The graphics in Bully look very similar to GTA with the third person perspective and detailed character models. All of the non-player characters have a unique look making the environment look realistic and fully populated.

Get your uniform on

Before you even get the game home you might start to notice problems. The minimum spec for the game lists an Xbox 360 controller. This seems a bit odd for a PC game but especially for one based on a third person perspective. Once you get the game installed it seems a bit odd that there's nowhere to configure the graphics and sound settings. You won't be able to turn off any effects if your graphics card isn't up to the task. Of course, once you get into the game itself you might realise that there's not really any need for changing the graphics settings because the graphics don't seem to have been updated since the PS2 version. It's a real shame because the graphics look OK but they show their age. With the graphics that GTA 4 has prepared us for it would be nice to have seen Rockstar using an updated engine for Bully. The characters are reasonably detailed and so are the environments but you just wonder when you look at it whether this game was really only released in October this year.

Detention for you

It doesn't take long before problems with the game start to become apparent. The game has a tendency to crash quite a lot and sometimes fails to get past the loading screen after the initial cut-scene. Once you get into the game more problems come up. There are problems with textures that are missing and that load late. There are issues with framerate as well. So the graphics could really do with a spruce-up. There also seem to be issues with memory leak which cause the program to crash roughly every hour. It's not a big problem you just have to remember to save often and restart from time to time. Rockstar is aware of these issues and is planning to have a patch available soon for the crashing and never-ending loading bugs. It's a shame that given this game has been around for 2 years that Rockstar couldn't get these glitches sorted before releasing.

School's out

Once you manage to get past the initial loading problems you're into the game proper. Forget using a keyboard and mouse because the mouse isn't accurate and the keyboard needs to be completely re-configured to be even slightly usable. Rockstar really want you to use an Xbox controller and it certainly worked a lot better for me that way. The controls work pretty well, with the left stick moving Jimmy and the right stick controlling the camera. The face buttons control the rest of the action from opening doors and running to combat. Fighting obviously plays a reasonable part in a game about bullying and it's fairly straightforward but fits in with the feel of the game. You basically tap X to hit, Y to grab and throw and the left trigger to target your opponent. It works because you don't need to remember too much to string your combos together.

Let me show you around

The game breaks you in gently with your friend Gary shows you around the school. This gives you a couple of simple missions to complete to get to grips with the controls. You come to learn that Jimmy is a tough kid who can give as good as he gets. Although the game initially tries to present Bullworth as a school for difficult children but it quickly changes its mind and becomes a caricature of a high-school. You're introduced to the jocks, the nerds, the rich kids and the greasers. Throughout the game you have to interact with each of the groups to progress. Sometimes it's helping them out, sometimes it's confronting them but they'll all come into your story somehow. It's not just bullying and fighting, there's some romance as well. There's plenty of missions that you run for different girls in the game. Successfully completing the mission earns you a kiss. Some of the mini games allow you to get a kiss as well. There are some missions where you'll be romancing and kissing other boys as well so romance in this game is for everyone. Alongside the main missions are a series a minigames. If you choose to go to class you take part in a minigame depending on the class you attend. Biology involves dissecting animals and Chemistry involves a button timing game to safely mix your chemicals for instance. These provide a distraction and something different to do. The Scholarship edition adds 4 new mini games for Maths, Biology, Music and Geography to the mix from the original title.

Too little, too late

Let's face it, Bully is a game that's several years old. I would guess that most people who would be interested in this title will have played it on one of the many consoles that it's appeared on. The market for a PC conversion must be fairly small. It seems that Rockstar were just going through the motions with the conversion because the graphics look dated, the normal PC controls have been eschewed in favour of a console controller and even the normal PC settings for graphics quality have been ignored. It just seems that Rockstar know that there's a small market for this game so they haven't gone to too much trouble with it. That said, this is the same Bully Scholarship Edition that has been well received before. If you haven't picked it up on a console then the same things that made the game popular are all here to be enjoyed. Likewise if you played the original and haven't tried the Scholarship edition then why not give it a go on the PC. There are issues with crashing and loading but no-doubt Rockstar will sort these out before too long. The Scholarship edition adds a few new missions and characters as well as some more classes. It's worth having a look at if you haven't played it before. There's nothing new to see here and given the effort that Rockstar seems to have put into this title it seems that it knows it.