Bully: Scholarship Edition for Wii Reviews by Gamers

Bully attempts to be constructive by offering a view of teenage life through the lens of a GTA-style dog-eat-dog world, and while I applaud that concept, there’s so much lacking in execution that it’s hard to defend the game outright.

The opportunity is ripe to create a bustling system of alliances and betrayals, where each action causes a ripple effect of consequences throughout the system. Bully takes you partway there, offering a “respect” system similar to GTA: San Andreas (help a nerd and the jocks will be more likely to attack you on sight), but it doesn’t get any deeper than superficial aggression.

This failure is further compounded by the game’s physical world. There’s a school, and beyond its borders is a town, but rather than treat life outside Bullworth like a forbidden hideaway, you’re basically thrown out there to find new adventures the minute you get situated.

All of this comes at the expense of fleshing out the academy itself. There’s no organized recess and no lunchtime to fool around in. You have a schedule — two classes a day and bedtime before 1 a.m. — but there are no long-term consequences for refusing to follow it. You can court females, but unlike real life, the rest of the student body doesn’t seem to take interest. Instead of keeping the game concentrated on the microcosms of the schoolyard, the developers watered it down.

The result is a game that plays more like Grand Theft Auto, for worse. In GTA, the world is static; your actions have limited weight on the world at large, but that’s OK, because like any big city, most people don’t matter. In school, everything happens under a microscope.

Because Bully seems so fixated on mapping itself onto GTA’s existing construct, I can’t help but think the developers phoned this one in. It appears that Rockstar took whatever they built with the GTA series and tried to apply it as best they could to a high school drama. It should have been the other way around.

I am a lover of simulation games and role playing games; often avoiding first person games along the lines of Bully. But I was interested in the concept, and having never got a chance to play it on Playstation, thought I'd try it out on the Wii.

As there seems to be no real POINT to the game - it has the same ending no matter waht you do - I see it more of a matter of becoming obsessed with little things in the game you love to do. I have become attached to making it to classes on time and passing. The missions serve more as just a way to MAKE you progress in the game to unlock more mini stuff to do. I see myself getting bored soon of ths game, because all of the missions you help nerds, which makes it so you get chased constantly by bullies everywhere you go.

Don't play it with the assumption that I did at first - that there is some grand idea or moral crisis you have to resolve. Nope. Just trash stuff and stay alive.