THIS GAME SCREAMS ORIGINALITY!
The bad: Passing out at 2am can be annoying, the teachers and prefects are unbeatable and the camera can be slightly annoying when moving.
This game is a true original, i never thought i would see a game of being a kid in a high school and getting to beat up everybody in it!...including the teachers!!.
You start off as the new kid after your mum and your step dad go off to their honey moon. You start with $50 and at the lowest position in the school, you then meet a guy called Gary who you do missions with and get to know the school. I wont say anymore or ill end up spoiling the storyline. What basically happens is that you go around and take other each "click", which are; the nerds, the preps (snobs), the greasers and the jocks.
Everytime you start on a new click you open a different part of the island/town. The town is a perfect size...not to big, and not to small. The map you get with the game makes it look huge but its not. In the towns there are food shops, clothes shops, barbers and bike shops. there is also special challenges in each town you can do to earn special save locations, all these are ver fun to do except for the nerd challenge that i found a little time consuming and repetative. The missions are great and have a wide range of variety, from taking on the schools bullies to sneaking in and busting out patients of the near by mental assylum. Almost all the cutscenes to each mission had me laughing at either what was said or the general characters themselves. Through the whole game there is only 2 types of missions that are repeated, these are sneaking into the mental assylum and shooting at kids with your catapult. The length of the storyline is also pretty good, and when you have complete it you can just do all the side missions in the game.
Whilst you are going through the game you get girl friends, starting with an over weight girl to the schools lead cheer-leader. Everytime you kiss a girl it adds another health bar which kind of acts like armor.
The game also adds alot of side missions which are alot more entertaining than other games, from smashing up cars to go-kart racing at the carnival. My favourite side mission is Dodgeball, this is great fun and is worth buying the game generally for this side mission. The game also adds an element like the Sims, whereas if your not in bed by 2am you basically drop where you stand and sleep there, tis can be annoying when you are half way through a mission.
The choice of weapons is also surpringly good, you get the choice of the catapult , firecracker launcher, spud gun, bag of marbles, stink bombs, itching powder and the list go's on. Although you get all these weapons the hand to hand combat in the game generally remains the best thing to use, by unlocking moves from the wrestling clases and the crazy ex-soilder hobo you start to become unbeatable.
the classes are fun, but can be quite challenging, especially the english class, in this class you have to make at least 56% of the words available from the letters you have, sounds easy? think again, its alot harder than it sounds. The good thing about classes however is that they are optional, if you dont feel like shop, then simply dont do it, but you will be chased on sight by prefects for truancy.
The graphics are very good for a PS2 and the detail in the character faces is very good. the sound is also very good with each voice being different and well thought out for each character.
Finallyy is the choice of veichles, this has its good sides and its bad, on the good side, by doing shop your bmx will be upgraded and becomes incredible, on the bad side, there is noly the skate board, bikes and scooter to choose from, not a bad choice, but its a shame you cant hijack the cars in the game abd do a bit of joy riding.
To wrap up, this game is highly entertaining and i would recomend it to anyone that enjoyed the GTA series or anybody else for that matter. IF your not into these sorts of games i would still recomend you rent it because it may change your mind on this genre.