Rockstar as a company are no stranger to controversy – whether its killing hookers or hidden sex-games, we're talking about a team who had to release a table tennis game to find an outlet that wouldn't get them in trouble! Bully, also known as Canis Canem Edit ("dog eat dog"), certainly didn't escape the Rockstar controversy-magnet either. Teachers and parents and the media screamed bloody murder about this tale of a teenage boy's experience at an elite private school, yet there isn't a concealed handgun or dead student in sight. Because despite all the sensational hype surrounding the game, Bully is set in a world seen through the eyes and experiences of a teenager, filled with impish pranks and simplistic childhood fantasies, and it's all the better for it.

Bully tells the tale of Jimmy Hopkins, a pugnacious young fellow who, having been expelled from seven other schools, has been sent by his disinterested mother to the famed Bullworth Academy to set him straight. Bullworth is a school sharply divided into all the usual cliché cliques – bullies, nerds, jocks, rich-kids, as well as car-obsessed greasers and the high-school drop-out townies. Possessing about as much charm as a death-adder, Jimmy isn't exactly quick to make friends, until the equally nasty Gary Smith takes him under his wing. The terrible two make plans to rule the school and smack the other kids into line, but the inevitable falling out sets up the game proper.

Surrounded on all sides by enemies, it will be your job to help Jimmy bully the bullies and unite the school...yes, the intention here ironically is to stop all the violence by solving it with...more violence! And many, many pranks, of course! And errands, and bike races, and mini-games, and after-school jobs...and you'll have to get it all done without missing classes and before bedtime! In fact, despite its sandbox nature and the obvious comparisons to Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto series, Bully is actually a highly regimented affair at first, just like being in school for real. You get up at 8am, your morning classes go from 9am to 11:30am, then after lunch resume at 1pm and go `til 3:30pm. Curfew commences at 11pm, and Jimmy's youthful exuberance is no match for the march of time, and he'll pass out at 2am whether he's in bed or not.

For those of you playing at home, that gives Jimmy a maximum 18-hour day, with school consuming five of those hours and another 3 being after curfew. In a lot of ways, the early stages of Bully is a game of time-management: Jimmy can skip class, but will be busted by prefects if caught around campus, or the cops if nabbed around town. So at first you'll be trying to balance class-time with a quick mission during lunch or after school, and this sense of single-mindedness with school-as-obstacle-to-fun really conjures up memories of being at school...at least for this wayward reviewer!

In fact, everything about Bully is designed to hearken back to those dear old golden school days, and you'd be hard pressed to find someone in the Western world who cannot relate to at least something going on in this game. There's nasty bullies, painfully dorky kids, awkwardly blossoming teen love, practical jokes, menacing authority figures and after-school adventures with friends. Actually, if you can ignore the fact that Jimmy knocks at least a few hundred kids unconscious, mentally and verbally terrorises people and generally acts like an antisocial lout, Bully is a surprisingly non-violent game. Nobody dies, there's no blood and guts being shed, and the strict rules of the school and society means that violence towards girls or younger kids or authority figures is swiftly and harshly dealt with.

Best of all, the combat and pranks all work really well – they're simple and satisfying to pull off, and once your foes are nearly defeated, Jimmy can humiliate them just like you'd expect he would...think wedgies and dead-arms and you've got the idea! Pulling the left-trigger locks you on to your target, which makes aiming weapons or punches pretty straightforward. Combat is a largely one-button affair: press X to punch, press it a lot to do combos. Jimmy can also grapple with Y which opens up some new combos, as well as some throwdowns that unleash the best move in the game: knee-to-the-balls! Guaranteed to elicit hilarious dialogue from the recipient...the rich kids cry of "my legacy!" is particularly satisfying.

Of course it isn't just about random acts of violence at recess; Jimmy actually has a lot of schoolwork to do, as well as earn enough pocket money to keep him going. The classes at Bullworth are really one of the highlights of the game, essentially boiling down to themed mini-games that always reward you for success. English class gives you a five-letter jumble and challenges you to make as many words as you can in a fixed time-limit, for example...and if you get it done, Jimmy's ability to interact will increase, either by allowing you to apologise for minor misdemeanours or to unleash better taunts. Others are just simple button-pressing activities, but the best classes always offer a bit more, and will actually provide you with a bit of a challenge.

Bonuses from education are nice, they won't keep Jimmy in fancy threads or feed his cola addiction; for that, you'll need cold hard cash, and lots of it. Completing missions usually nets you some, and people will often approach you on the street or around campus with a basic errand to run that can make you some moolah. But like every kid whose parents weren't rich, Jimmy is going to need an after-school job if he wants consistent income, and in Bully this means mowing lawns or delivering papers.

While this all may sound a little onerous on paper, in practice Rockstar have somehow managed to make going to school and going to work fun. And if for any reason it isn't, there's never a shortage of other things to do: bike races, go-karting, a carnival to visit, collectibles to find...you'll never be short on activities in Bully. And exploring the school and the surrounding community is a real pleasure thanks to the huge cast of funny characters and interesting locations on offer. Visually, the game is leaps and bounds ahead of its Playstation 2 predecessor, but even so it still doesn't really stack up technically compared to games designed from the ground up for Xbox 360.

Still, Rockstar's games have always been more about art design than technical prowess, and the world of Bully is no exception. The cliques are all distinct, each of the 40 or so students is unique and identifiable, and the school and its surrounds have a personality of their own too – a bike ride from the manicured lawns of Old Bullworth Vale through town and across to the rusty industrial park on the wrong side of the tracks is a powerful illustration of the haves and have-nots. The attention to detail is wonderful, and watching the seasons change as the game progresses really helps the sensation of the school year racing by. But don't race by too fast – the game sometimes struggles to stream the world to you, with pop-in and framerate dips a bit of a problem from time to time.

All the fantastic art design in the world won't help a game like Bully though unless it manages to get the sound right as well, and as is always the case, Rockstar have slam-dunked this important aspect of the experience. Featuring a cast of at least a hundred, it's no easy task to create unique characters whose voices you'll recognise before you spot them on the screen. Yet Bully does exactly that, from the whiny bed-wetter Algie to the "HULK SMASH!" stylings of the giant bully Russell, everyone in Bullworth sports their own sound. The entirely original soundtrack is perfect too, ranging from orchestral to garage-rock...the only complaint being that some of the pieces are a little too short and repeat a bit too often.

There's a few other problems here that can mar your experience with Bully, starting with the occasional camera and control problems. These were present on PS2 so it's a shame to see they didn't get ironed out, and likewise the usual glitches you'd expect from sandbox games like people or objects getting stuck in walls/scenery or quests breaking so you have to restart. These things? Minor nuisance really, especially compared to the game-breaking crashes and lockups that are plaguing some users of the game. The problems appear to occur more frequently on older hardware, but during the course of my 20-hour playthrough on my `07 repaired launch console, I had six or seven lockups that required a hard restart. Others have had it worse, and they tend to also suffer from jerky framerate and audio hiccups galore, which is a real disappointment.

Providing you and your console can tough it out though, beating the stuffing out of the main storyline in Bully won't really take that long, maybe 6-8 hours tops. But like GTA before it, it's almost impossible to play this game without getting distracted, the planned half-hour session turning into a 3-hour marathon where you bought some novelty clothes, played dodge-ball and went around egging cars. The game's Achievements are a great blend of core-story accomplishment and general sandbox shenanigans like giving 50 wedgies or getting high-scores on the arcade games at the carnival.

If you get sucked in to the world of Bully, it's not at all unreasonable to see that modest 6-8 hour game blossom into a 20-30 hour experience that is never boring. The Scholarship Edition boasts the addition of a few 2-player mini-games, which while fun for awhile with a mate, don't really add much meat to the experience. But really, there's more than enough material here to keep even the most Ritalin-deprived ADD suffer busy and enthralled for many, many hours. So beat up a few kids for their lunch money if you have to, but grab a copy of Bully: Scholarship Edition...and threaten to
egg Rockstar's cars if they don't speed along a patch!