Gameplay
None of these activities would be any fun if the controls and core of the game weren’t up to snuff. Luckily, they perform admirably. Riding a bike or a skateboard is easy and fun, although tapping the A button to go faster wears your thumb out after a while. Fighting controls include combos with the X button and grapples with the Y button. By the end of the game you have an impressive repertoire of moves at your disposal. You also have a number of weapons including a slingshot, bottle rockets, eggs, marbles, and more, and they are all easy to use by selecting them with the bumper buttons, locking onto your target with the left trigger, and using the weapon with the right trigger.For the most part, everything you do is pretty intuitive. There are some cases, though, where the controls kind of get in the way. Music class, as I mentioned above, is just mercilessly difficult. Shop class can also be difficult because you are asked to rotate the sticks but the game only registers if you start the stick in the up position and then rotate. If you aren’t prepared for it you’ll fail. Also, the camera has a bad habit of zooming in and getting stuck so you can’t see where you are going. This only happens in interiors, but it is still very annoying when it happens.
Achievements
One major issue with Bully on the Xbox 360 is that it has shipped with a few glitches. The game will freeze on you unexpectedly and achievements will pop up when they aren’t supposed to among other problems. Rockstar is working to fix these problems and should have a patch up soon. These problems are annoying, yes, especially if you don’t save often, but because Rockstar is committed to fixing them the score I am giving the game is not influenced by these issues. No sense in penalizing the game for problems that won’t even exist in a couple weeks, right?
Graphics
Bully is a port of a PS2 game, and it shows. But it also actually looks better than some of the previews have conditioned us to expect, so prepare to be surprised when you boot up the game and it looks pretty decent. Jimmy’s model nice, and the school looks very very nice, but the rest of the game has a definite blocky, last-gen look.
Sound
The sound in Bully is pretty good all around. The voice acting is fairly good for the main characters, and everyone does a fairly believable job. The real star of the audio here, though, is the music. Every activity you do has its own theme, and they are all catchy and stick in your head.
Bottom Line
