Bully: Scholarship Edition -- Bully on Bully's Structure.

I have completed fifty percent of Bully: Scholarship Edition, for the game's status tells me so. I've actually just arrived into chapter three of five. It's Christmas time at Bullworth Academy. The decorations twinkle brightly in the night and snow is on the ground. I've been mostly achievement hunting in the game. I've been avoiding advancing the story wherever possible and have made sure to attend all available classes while working towards whatever achievement in my spare time. And I've enjoyed myself doing so. The initial impression I had of Grand Theft Auto sandbox lite was pretty much dead on. Although Bully has a far more structured feeling because of the time constraints employed within. Jimmy Hopkins has from 8 AM to 2 AM to get things done. And attending classes will take a big chunk out of that time. Everything you do in the game advances time. One you've passed each class you no longer have to attend it and you'll begin to get more and more time throughout the day to do whatever you need to do. The classes in the game are clever minigames that are actually fun to play. And you'll be rewarded with some sort of bonus for each level completed in each class. There are five levels per class. And the classes are English, math, gym, chemistry, geography, music, biology, and shop. The rewards for chemistry for example will grant you a chemistry set in your room that allows you to produce your tools of the trade. Items like firecrackers and itching powder and the like. As you go through the levels of chemistry you'll gain the ability to produce more items at once and to use the chemistry set more than once a day. It's the same thing as getting weapons outside your safe house in Grand Theft Auto. It actually pays to stay in school. Although you're free to skip class if you so wish. The story is advanced through missions just like in Grand Theft Auto. You're trying to win over each of the cliques in the game, often by any means necessary. The nerds, jocks, greasers, preppies, and townies all come into play. The missions work just as they would in Grand Theft Auto. They move you through the game and open new areas and introduce new characters. You'll tie up character arcs that add to the overall tale of Jimmy Hopkins' year at Bullworth. It's the sum of the parts approach of storytelling Rockstar has so successfully used in Grand Theft Auto applied to high school. The missions are just as varied as you'd find in Grand Theft Auto. From the obvious panty raid to getting revenge on a teacher to the less expected helping a homeless man build a transceiver for talking to aliens, it's all there with standard love it or leave it Rockstar humor. I'm getting to the point where I'm spending more of my time advancing the story than achievement hunting so a final opinion shouldn't be too far off.