"Bully is all about the details. At least, that's our impression after playing through the entire first chapter of the finished version. Headed for stores in just under three weeks, Rockstar's teenage opus is pretty much what we had hoped and expected it to be -- a downsized version of Grand Theft Auto sans the language and violence. But what does that mean exactly? Well, it means that the game is exceedingly big, exceptionally funny, and so far, extraordinarily entertaining.
We've already detailed how Bully works in an earlier preview written last month, so if you want to know more about its general concepts and mechanics, you can go back and learn about them there. This time, however, we felt it prudent to talk more about the details mentioned above; those "little things" that make Bully what it is.
Take, for example, the fact that you don't have to run around the school looking for missions to undertake every five seconds. If you happen to find a Frisbee or a football (or some other outdoorsy sports item), you may as well use it; just target another student, wait and see if they signal to acknowledge you, and if they do, you can start playing catch with them. But that's not all, users can also start impromptu games of one-on-one dodgeball, pick flowers to give to girls in exchange for kisses, or just scour the campus looking for collectibles that unlock cool bonuses (re: rubber bands and trading cards).
If taking that sort of open-ended approach isn't your thing, and you prefer a more structured layout to your daily activities, structure is definitely there. Young Jimmy Hopkins is required to go to class once in the morning and once in the afternoon, which keeps him on a pretty tight leash if he doesn't want to be tardy or get left behind with his abilities. Missing class is an important thing to consider too, as some of the boss battles you'll undertake are damn near impossible to win if you don't upgrade your fighting chops (via gym), while learning the apology skills necessary to avoid getting busted by prefects (via English) is certainly valuable (especially since you'll be punished if you're sent to the principal too often).
But going from point A to point B and learning a few handy abilities isn't what's going to get you through the school year. Just like a real high school, Bullworth Academy's students react to how you're dressed and what you do. Walking around the campus in nothing but your underwear means that you'll become an immediate laughing stock. Suit up like a preppie and expect that group to react more favorably to you when approaching them; stroll up to a girl dressed like a slovenly pig and it won't help your cause... if you want her to kiss you, make sure that you're well-kept.
Speaking of being well-kept, there are literally hundreds of different clothing items that players can find, purchase, or unlock. A good portion of these goodies are available at the student store located on the first floor of the main educational building, while others can only be uncovered by rifling through lockers or accomplishing specific goals (we nabbed a sweet "Red Ninja" outfit for finishing a special "one time only" mission. Badass!). Eventually, once other areas have been unlocked (namely, the town and beyond), players can travel out into the wild to get new haircuts and other non-scholastic items to adorn their bodies.
But the town is in the future and chapter one is the present. Your primary goal here is to learn how everything works, and as such, the only area available is the school campus itself. Structured like a tutorial, chapter one is roughly 6-8 hours long (we probably missed stuff, but that was how long it took us to complete) and even that only accounts for about 10-13% of the entire game (we told you it was big). While we had seen or played most of these missions before in other demos, small selections of them were brand new. Our personal favorite was "Halloween Night," which comes across just as fun as it sounds.
Set near the end of first chapter (which kicks off at the start of the school year and ends near the beginning of November), "Halloween Night" is all about playing pranks. To succeed, Jimmy and his friends Gary and Pete are asked to walk around the school (free of adults) and pull pranks on their fellow students. Placing "kick me" signs on the backs of other kids, lighting firecrackers, egging folks, and dropping stink bombs are all a part of the fun. Running around smashing tombstones and jack o' lanterns can help pass the time too, and almost every student in the school has a unique and original costume that shows off their personality.
What makes this segment cool is that completing a certain number of pranks unlocks a special bonus story called (what else?), "The Big Prank." For this little doozie, Jimmy and Gary have to feed a dog rotten meat, bag the resulting mess into a brown paper holder, and move it over to the teacher's lounge for "ye old fiery classic." This whole event is great to play, and watching the school grounds transform from a stuffy private academy to a festive and detailed Halloween-themed land of chaos is pretty cool. Rockstar has done a terrific job of squeezing the power out of the PlayStation 2 in regards to its graphics -- visually it leaves Grand Theft Auto in the dust (though you can expect the framerate to stutter in the larger areas).
One piece of news that we really found refreshing is that the development team has fixed the controls since we last toyed with them. Though the mapping is still the same as it was, the camera and running reactions are much more fluid and the game doesn't feel sluggish or robotic as it did before. Granted, there are still a few moments where we found ourselves caught on an invisible wall or two (primarily while traveling through the broken-down school bus entrance), but for the most part, the collision detection works just fine.
We've also learned quite a bit more about how factions work and what influences your relationship with them. Fighting with nerds, jocks, preppies, or greasers just for the heck of it won't ruin your standing if it's good, so don't worry about that -- the only element that actually does affect your relationships are the missions themselves. In one challenge, we used a super slingshot (complete with sniper scope) to take out pranksters who were trying to ruin one nerd's presidential election speech. Once finished, our standing with the library crew rose considerably after helping them out despite the fact that we threw two or three of their brethren in lockers and trash cans immediately beforehand.
Based on how the game is structured, though, it doesn't appear that players will have to worry about pleasing every group all the time. Chapter One focuses primarily on the Nerd and Bully factions themselves, and now that we've started Chapter Two it's clear that we've turned our attention towards the preps. If the first leg of the story is anything to go by, however, then things will only continue to get better from here -- as we've already taken part in a very cool pit fight boss battle that ended chapter one and the betrayal by one of your friends that set it up was a solid touch.
Of course, we'll be back in three weeks to tell you how it all turns out, but the outlook thus far is definitely a good one. Our only real fear is that, like other games of this size and nature, it has the potential to devolve into a repetitive fetch quest. But given Rockstar's history with the genre and the fun we've had with the game so far, it would be a big surprise if that actually happened. We'll keep you posted."
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Im overly excited about this game. Im happy to hear that you can stuff somebody in a trash can, and yet they will still like you. lol
