"Ah, Dodgeball! How I love the sound of boys crying in the morning!"

Bully is an action-adventure game developed by Rockstar Vancouver and published by Rockstar Games. (With Scholarship Edition developed by Rockstar New England.)

Story
Bully takes place in fictional town of Bullworth set in the New England region of the United States. You play as 15 year old James "Jimmy" Hopkins who after being expelled from previous schools is sent to private boarding school - Bullworth Academy. Jimmy quickly decides on his goal: Rise through the ranks of the school system by eliminating various cliques!

Gameplay
One might call it a "Rockstar classic" as Bully is played from third person perspective and provides an open world where you explore Bullworth, complete missions and engage in various side activities.

Missions themselfs come with linear structure where you complete a variety of simple goals to pass them, granting you story progress, money, different items and increase/decrease respect of certain groups. Respect is the name of the game in the Academy as more of it you have, better your relationship is with groups- less attacks and more friendly options to help you out- while opposite happens when you are disrespected, obviously.

Outside of missions you can free roam Bullworth and Academy! To some extend. Game does unlock districts by story progress, so at first area you can navigate is...limited, but there is still something to do. Races, fights, minigames, stores where you can change appearance of Jimmy, few side tasks focused on you earning extra bucks and collectibles spread across the map waiting to be found. To travel around you can use vehicles such as bikes or go-karts while bus stops will let you quickly travel back to school. Don't forget to visit and unlock safehouses all over the city to restock on supplies and save your game! Plus a place to bunk the night is very useful.
During the game you can interact with NPC's in various ways including taunting, flirting, or the most obvious one- pranking! Game has a wide arsenal of items you can use to ruin someones day, throw marbles or firecrackers, take a shot with a slingshot, or simply let the fists do the talking if you want to go from a prank to pure bullying. Attack, block, kick and learn new powerful moves to come out of any skirmish as a winner. If you get hit, you can replenish your health by kissing or drinking soda, run out of health to be send to a nearest medical centre.

Game won't make you forget that you are also a student at the end of the day. You have classes to attend which come in form of various minigames where completing them grants you several rewards. There are also some rules you have to follow, not attending a class you didn't complete yet counts as truancy, breaking in or beating people up is also a no-no surprisingly! Trouble meter on the hud will inform you about these things, and if there any prefects or police officers nearby who would like to have a word with you about your behaviour, it can lead to a chase.

Playtime and replayability
It takes from 10 to 20 hours to complete the game depending on the amount of exploration and side tasks you complete, with roughly extra 5 to 100% it making a grand total of solid 25 hours you can squeeze out of Bully. Because there is an option to roam the map post-story and majority of missions is fairly simple, I would say this is a "one and done" type of a title.

Impressions
What can I say, Bully is pretty good.

As per usual, Rockstar nails the caricature of, in this case, school system and social groups surrounding it with great humour, well written characters and good mission design following along. While ending and pacing overall are just okay in my book, it is a very fun and nicely put story that had my interest from start to finish. Loved interacting with NPC's in many different ways and bully the bullies in between any activities with surprisingly interesting items/weapons to use. Combat itself is fun with plenty of different moves on top of previously mentioned variable arsenal.
Fantastic voice acting and animations make up for average visuals. (It's a game from era where saturation didn't exist apparently so every colour is toned down and washed.) Majority of classes and side tasks is fun to do even though I wish for a bit more when it comes to sheer numbers of them.

Bullworth itself is what I would count as a rather average aspect of Bully. Almost instantly I felt bored with exploration as it doesn't have that many activities to do, especially with game unlocking map bit by bit, world feels empty and collectibles were just a way to pad some playtime. Considering the small size of the map, I am not sure if locking districts by story progress was a good move. Big positive here goes towards season changes which help make city feel less dull.

For the problems I have to mention constant crashing that took place across my whole playtime, which together mashed perfectly with lack of autosaving in the game. Losing progress every once in a while if I didn't manage to get to the area where I could save fast enough, goes without saying, was annoying. This PC port in general has performance issues but none of them were as brutal as crashing/no autosave combo.

At the end of the day, I recommend Bully. It won't be my favourite Rockstar game because utlimately the entire school setting was just not my thing in comparision to their other titles but it's still something worth playing.

Final words and conclusion
Scholarship Edition brings improved graphics and more content than original had: extra clothes, additional characters, new school classes and missions!

Bully passes the class with solid B. Fun characters, decent combat and interesting story unfortunately suffer from constant crashes and mediocre open world.

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