The main character is Billy Hopkins who gets dumped at the Bullworth Academy by his mother. The story follows Billy in his attempts to conquer a place in the social life at school. Rockstar uses a similar formula as from the GTA-series where here you don't have real gangs but instead groups of kids. The cops are replaced by teachers and so on. Not that Bully is a GTA-clone in another jacket, on the contrary, Rockstar manages to come with an original setting and ideas that get mixed with a number of elements that made the GTA-series addictive and attractive (even the controversial parts are present). Only too bad that the finishing isn't what it should be. The game has a number of bugs and glitches but let's talk about the concept first.

The groups (nerds, bullies, sport jocks, etc) always have chars that you can do in exchange for money or rewards. Depending on who you help, and possibly oppose, such missions will get you looking better or worse with certain groups. Some missions also progress the storyline and it could even be that an individual student comes up to you asking for a favour in exchange for money. There's a large amount of missions so the amount of playing time is surely not something to worry about and there's also plenty of variation to keep things interesting.

Often fights will occur at Bullworth Academy and if you're not good with one of the groups it could be that they choose to kick your ass. It then comes down to being able to defend yourself as good as possible and next to his bare fists Billy has nice toys like a catapult, stinky bombs and marbles in his pockets. There's different way to get new weapons or learn new fighting techniques like for instance performing well in the gym class.

So following lessons has its advantages. If you do the minigames of which the lessons exist well you'll not only pass that teaching part but also get a new advantage (like the previously mentioned improved fighting skills) or a new object (if Billy succeeds for chemistry for instance he'll be able to make stinky bombs). Cutting class is pretty simple as long as you don't get spotted by a patrolling teacher and the same goes for all the other rules like for instance the curfew. These rules aren't all obvious from the start but this is part of the fun.

When breaking a rule the teachers that see Billy will go after him so you'll need to escape and manage to hide until a certain meter becomes empty again in order to avoid being sent to the principal. To move faster you can use (often received or earned) vehicles like a skateboard or a bicycle.

The fact that Bully was first created for consoles can easily be noticed. The controls with mouse and keyboard are quite disappointing. It's so clumsy that the frustration levels completely spoil the fun. Also it took quite some time before the PC version was finished and you can clearly see this due to the dated graphcs. Unfortunately this brings down the level of the cut-scenes which keep the story going.