Bully: Hands-On Preview

Extensive playtest of Rockstar's latest, as we question the controversy and get to the bottom of what this promising school adventure is all about. New videos, too.

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Fittingly, violence is not particularly encouraged. It's a school, there are rules, and there are punishments. If you decided to play the game running around battering everyone you saw, you're going to spending a lot of time on that tractor, mowing school grounds as punishment. And it doesn't fit Jimmy's character either; it is a free-roaming game, so fighting's a part of it: "You've got to have the chance to hit anyone you like [for it to be free-roaming], but to try and discourage from spending half the time doing it, we put in slightly repetitive mini games if you do it too many times."

L1 locks your attention onto a particular person, and you get a context dependant, social interaction menu at the bottom right of the screen, with icons corresponding to d-pad directions. Thumbs up or down - be nice or be nasty, taunt, apologise, humiliate or pay off... but there are situations when a tap of the down button can be used to offer a girl flowers or give her a kiss.

When you first step into the game world, the immersive feeling of a San Andreas or a Yokosuka is immediate. There's an ongoing game-time to bear in mind as well; you need to be inside lessons when they start in bed at the on-site Dorm room by 2am, otherwise you'll just fall asleep on the spot. At times you might finds yourself 'waiting around' for an event to start which Shenmue was criticised for, but there's never a shortage of things to do or plug away at, something any GTA fan will appreciate.

It's an impressively interactive place that has a lot going on and 100 characters with a different name, backstory, different chatter and namecalling, and many forming a part of different cliques - nerds, bullies, jocks, and so on. You're tasked with joining or avoiding them, playing people off against each other, avoiding the wrath of the prefects (Bullworth's equivalent of the GTA's cops) and ultimately, the principal's office - Bully's equivalent of jail! And Principal Crabblesnitch is the one guy you can't answer back to. Often it just means mission is failed and you need to start again, but the time of day, as in real school, is an ever-present thing to be aware of.

In the first chapter of the game we've played through, you're confined to the school grounds, but a look at the world map will show that the academy is only about a quarter of the entire game, and as you may have seen in the trailers and screenshots, there's a lot more outside of the school setting. There are 50 essential story missions in total, and 25 optional story missions that tell you more about the characters, along with 30 class-related or task-based minigames.

The class missions are particularly interesting at times, ranging from a DDR-style rhythm action test that represents the right chemicals to mix in your chemistry lesson, a challenging anagram test in English class which will almost certainly require you to cheat by pausing the game to beat the ludicrous two-minute time limit, or art class which is simply a variation of that mobile phone game where you have to steal chunks of the screen without being intercepted by a moving thing, just this time with a piece of artwork as the background... we're not too sure about that last one, but it's all good fun as far as minigames go.

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