I'm sure we all know that Bully was dubbed something similar to a colombine simulator by Jack Thompson. If he says that about the game, then I'm really interested in checking it out I thought. I've spent the past two weeks on and off playing this game and after finally finishing it last night, I have no idea how a site like IGN can rate it an 8.9.
It's an interesting concept, take a troubled teen by the name of Jimmy and place him in a school that's 'designed' to try and correct students like Jimmy from being such a troublemaker. On it's own it sounds rather bland, but then the game throws you the curve ball by having making the school full with many of the stereotypes of high school mixed in. For example, Jimmy's mother is being married yet again (5th time?) and Jimmy has no tolerance/respect for his stepfather(s) anymore. The second you get control you're confronted by some bullies who wish to 'pound the new meat'. Every clique is the most extreme of their stereotype. Bullies are beat-em up guys, Jocks are stupid sportsmen, Greasers are your Fonz knockoffs, nerds are frail and logical thinkers, and preps are inbread and stuck-up bastards. Oh, not to mention the teachers and the entire town have their own weird problems as well.
At first these extreme stereotypes are humurous and the acting suits each one, but the acting felt like an ear sore through the entire game. As humurous as the lines are since they fit the stereotypes, sitting through cut-scenes was gruesome and made me want to stay away. Luckily, thanks to 'I'm a hardass' Jimmy, you could beat the crap out of all the cliques without much of a penalty, save for getting caught by a prefect or cop. Even then, you could escape a prefect or a cop unless they grab you when you hurt an adult or a girl so all you have to do is escape their grasp and run the hell away and you can get away scott free after a minute or two.
Another interesting point about this game are the classes. While there is no penalty for skipping except for police or prefects chasing you if you let them see you while you're skipping, going to class is an interesting feature because you can increase your skills while playing a little mini-game. Face it, maxing out your chemistry abilities or being able to kiss a girl without any kind of gift is darn nice for when you want to load up on weapons and max your health for a mission. In the end, they were a nice little distraction from the blandness of the game.
The weapons are pretty creative, but nothing beats the bottlerocket 'gun' or the potato gun with their massive amount of damage. In fact, I kind of felt like a sadist while fighting because after I beat the crap out of a group of people, I'd go over to their pain ridden boddies and start kicking the crap out of their faces and crotches. How dare they mess with me? This will bring me to my next topic of the actual missions (tasks) you have to perform to beat the storyline of the game as you'll be fighting practically all the time so packing some tools of pain will be a good way to... defend... yourself.
The overall story on this game felt very weak to me and when the finale came around, I was happy that I can finally send this damn thing back to Gamefly rather than be excited to see the ending. Most of the story wasn't too bad (it just wasn't very interesting), but near the end I think it started to fall on it's face. Like I was saying about the finale, the stuff leading up to the final fight was, in my opinion, very terrible and made me question whether all of that effort was even worth my time. I finished the game with around 65-66% complete, but I don't think any of that extra stuff is really worth doing unless I owned the game and was bored out of my mind one day.
When it comes to the audio, the dialog (like I was saying) was pretty humurous, but it becomes annoying the more time I spent with it. I didn't really care for the music in the game and the random dialog while running around was humurous but was repeted a lot.
The biggest flaws with this game were the frame rate which was fairly choppy, but not unplayable throughout my time with the game. However, the most annoying thing were the showstopping problems where I had to restart my PS3 and lost all the progress I had just made. I've had a gamestopping bug where I was fighting the head of the prep faction at the boxing place and I hit him as he was jumping over a bar counter. Amazingly enough, he clipped through the bar counter as well as the floor and completely disapeared from the level and since I had to block off the room to stop him from calling in reinforcements, I was now totally stuck without a way out. Also, I had two or three times where the entire game just froze right when I triggered an event from an NPC during a task. Lastly, while it wasn't gamebreaking, there would be a delay and the characters would freeze for a while if I was running and activated an NPC every once in a while.
With my time with it, I believe I can only rate this a 7/10. In my opinion, it had lots of humor and things to do, but it grew stale as time went on and was only worth a rental.
